Unforgotten: the sci-fi classic Solaris

In the 1961 novel by the Polish author Stanisław Lem, which was turned into a film eleven years later by Soviet director Andrei Tarkovsky, researchers on a bleakly remote space station find themselves confronted by a superior and unfathomable intelligence: the ocean surrounding the planet Solaris. It uses memories and feelings of guilt to create ghostly apparitions that force the inhabitants of the space station to gaze into the deepest chasms of their souls. Both Lem and Tarkovsky were fellows of the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in the first half of the 1980s, giving them the chance to live and work for a time in West Berlin. “Solaris” didn’t for the most part reflect the then prevailing craze for technology. Even if official Soviet cultural policy took a sceptical view of Tarkovsky’s work, films like this succeeded at the time in getting a wide audience in the West interested in the communist Eastern Bloc. —