Painting in Time: The Role of Painting in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris

Introduction

Using cinematography, cinema has created a wide range of artistic capabilities. Such capabilities may be mentioned as filming works of other arts such as painting, sculpture, and theater by the camera, and then showing them on the screen. This prominent subject is of utmost importance in the case of painting; for, basically in the process of capturing a painting via cinematic camera, cinema challenges the place of this art by weaving its specific time into the body of painting and separates it from the realm of non-temporal arts, and takes it to the realm of temporal arts. Unlike theater, visual arts, and literature, cinema has a particular place among all the arts since it deals directly with time, and, unlike music, which entirely relies on time, cinema utilizes space as well. ¹

From the very beginning of cinema, the minds of theorists were entangled with questions about the representation of the world as well as other works of art by the means of cinematic apparatus. The principal question could be framed like this: How should this representation be made to maintain the maximum authenticity of the artwork? Each thinker, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Andre Bazin, Rudolf Arnheim, and others, has focused on this question at some point in their cinematic theories and tried to address it. In the first step, this article attempts to present and review such theories briefly. Following Andrei Bazin’s two famous essays, “the Ontology of the Photographic Image” and “Painting and Cinema,” in his book, What is Cinema? (2005), we will discuss his preferable cinematographic technique in filming paintings. Then, drawing on Deleuze and Currey’s cinematic theories, we will address the relationship between Bazin’s proposed method and the category of cinematic time. Then, in the last part of the article, we will explain the narrative role and the specific meaning of the painting The Hunters in the Snow, by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the Flemish painter of the Renaissance, in the formal system of the film Solaris (1972), by benefiting from the ideas raised as well as taking a glance at the views of the French philosopher, Henri Bergson.

Subjectivity/Objectivity in Cinema

What exactly are we seeing when looking at a painting through a cinematic lens in a film? First of all, it is obvious that cinema is a product of technology, and the most prominent characteristic of the technology of cameras is the very representation of the outside world. That is, precisely the same factor that caused the pioneers of theorizing about cinema to reject cinema as an art form skeptically. However, Arnheim comes to defends cinema and writes: ‘(…) even in the simplest photographic reproduction of a perfectly simple object, a feeling for its nature is required which is quite beyond any mechanical operation’ (Arnheim 2006, 8-11). Moreover, Arnheim suggests that the artist should benefit from the limitations specific to the medium of cinema through the camera to express his intentions and goals. In this context, Arnheim seems to move toward the ideas of Russian formalists who had introduced the concept of “Defamiliarization.” Aligned with this perspective, according to Juri Lotman, the task of art is to transform the images of the world into signs, the signs that would carry information. What is information in Lotman’s view?

Neither ‘The Volga flows into the Caspian Sea’ nor ‘a stone falls downward’ carries any information, since they are the only ones possible, and within the limits of our experience and common sense we cannot construct any alternatives (Lotman 1976, 13)

For the same reason, he claims that photography, ‘(…) although it greatly increased the accuracy of reproduction, sharply lowered the informativeness’ (ibid). It is possible to argue that, in Lotman’s view, these objective facts, like “a stone falls downward,” are exactly the ones that have no informative aspects. If we make such a claim, then we can suggest that by following the same path, the artist’s subjective view of the real world and the use of raw materials provided to him and his art medium by this world benefit from the feature of awareness insofar as they could be transformed into a work of art:

Art does not simply render the world with a lifeless automatism of a mirror. In transforming images of the world into signs, it saturates the world with meanings. Signs are unable not to have meaning or not to carry information. Therefore those properties of an object which result from their automatic ties with the material world become, in art, the result of free artistic choice and thus acquire the value of information (13-14)

Tarkovsky also has an opinion on the rejection of objectivism in cinema: ‘(…) objectivity have no place in art. Objectivity can only be the author’s, and therefore subjective’ (Tarkovsky 1989, 150). According to these quotes by Tarkovsky and Lotman, let us now come back to Arnheim. In fact, film art appears to be the dialectic between representing the world as it is and at the same time ‘defamiliarizing’ it. Therefore, a cinematic representation should be utilized in such a way that the object being filmed is deprived of its intrinsic features and turns into a cinematic object with a different characteristic and function. Thus, relying on Arnheim’s view, one can claim that the artistic object in cinema must also get out of the form of what it is. For example, a painting should not be brought into the cinema merely to show that it is a painting. A work of art such as a painting acquires a new existence in the process of turning into a cinematic object, and through this transition, all the components of the painting will serve as a mirror to reflect the filmmaker’s thoughts. Finally, Arnheim acknowledges that ‘Art begins where mechanical reproduction leaves off, where the conditions of representation serve in some way to mold the object’ (Arnheim 2006, 57). In the following and the section related to Bazin, we will see that showing a painting from a distance that would place the painting frame inside the cinematic frame will not be regarded as a proper method of its representation.

Painting and Cinema

Is there any relation between painting and cinema? ‘Sergey Eisenstein considers cinema as “the contemporary phase of painting,” stressing the fact that “cinema inherits certain problems from painting that in general concern what we call “visual representation”’ (Ivanycheva 2019). In his essay “Achievement” Eisenstein believes that cinema is not just a simple visual animation. It is in this essay that he defines specific cinematic features from the perspective of other arts and writes: ‘cinema is not only a solution for the problem of movement in pictorial images, but is also the achievement of a new and unprecedented form of graphic art, an art that is a free stream of changing, transforming, commingling forms, pictures, and compositions, hitherto possible only in music’ (Eisenstein 1977, 181-82). This movement and transformation of the filmic image can be compared with the dynamism of painting, which he describes in the essay “A Dialectic Approach to Film Form.” In this essay, in which Eisenstein develops his most important cinematic theory, he writes about the process of the formation of meaning in painting, which in his view, results from the collision of different visual impressions that occurs when one looks at different ‘elements in the painting’. (50). This suggests that the audience of a painting, or to put it more accurately, the human eye, does not look at the totality and entirety of the work in the first stage of understanding it; rather, the human eye, with its saccadic movements, quickly looks at certain points of the painting - that attract the most attention - and achieves the totality of the painting or any other image in general by putting these sub-images together.

What does a cinematic camera do, in Eisenstein’s opinion? In the essay “The Cinematographic Principle and the Ideogram,” he writes about two opposing directions and desires in today’s cinema:

One – the expiring method of artificial spatial organization of an event in front of the lens. From the “direction” of a sequence, to the erection of a Tower of Babel in front of the lens. The other – a “picking-out” by the camera: organization by means of the camera. Hewing out a piece of actuality with the ax of the lens (41).

We can draw an analogy between this statement and Gilles Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy and his concept of “image”. A possible but philosophical reading of the concept of image in Deleuze’s theoretical system is the image as the world reflector. In fact, every object in the real world is an image. Here, a misunderstanding concerning the word “Image” may occur since static photographic images may come to mind whenever we talk about images. To avoid this confusion of concepts, “Image” can be considered as its verb form. Every object or every being is a slice of the motion of the whole universe, even if it seems to be static, as nothing in this world is still. It is a scientific fact that at the atomic scale, there is always the motion and vibration of quantum fields; thus, the universe never stops moving and is always in motion. Everything is an image means that ‘“image of a thing” and the “thing” itself are inseparable. For Deleuze and Bergson, an “image” is a “thing’s” existence and appearance’ (Ashton 2006). Therefore, everything in this world is a slice of the whole universe; however, there are different ways to choose a section of the world. Thus, different types of slices and sections would appear. Based on our emphasis on any aspect of the world, like motion, time, perception, and action, these slices will embrace the same attribute and appear to us in the form of movement-image, time-image, perception-image, et cetera.

From a phenomenological perspective, cinema’s task seems to be putting the slices of this world or the images of this world in the foreground. It is like separating a piece from the universe that, meanwhile it is divided, is also a reflection of the whole; like a human being as a life-image who can receive and react to the world around him with a sensory-motor schema, but suffers from inherent limitations to do this task, ‘One could even say that what it “sees” is “framed.”’ (ibid). Thus, what Eisenstein means by “Hewing out a piece of actuality with the ax of the lens” is the process of imagining, cutting, exposing, and through this, understanding. And this important goal can only be realized by the pioneer of the arts, cinema, and its most important tool, a camera; as Eisenstein writes in the essay “Achievement”: ‘The full embrace of the whole inner world of man, of a whole reproduction of the outer world, cannot be achieved by [previous forms of arts]’ (Eisenstein, 184). The camera performs the actions of choosing and cutting a slice of the world. This is that kind of camera, which Bazin generally prefers in filming a painting.

Bazin believed that cinema ‘is a betrayal of the painting’ and that the film, due to the unfaithful reproduction of colors,² timeliness, and the spatiality of painting on the screen, ‘profoundly changes its nature’ ³ (Bazin 2005, 165). In his article, “Painting and Cinema,” Bazin distinguishes between two types of filming a painting. The first type includes films such as Rubens(1948) or From Renoir to Picasso(1951) by Paul Haesaerts, which merely pursue educational or critical purposes. The second type of films encompasses movies such as Van Gogh(1948) or Guernica(1950) by Alain Resnais, or Goya(1951) by Pierre Kast that Bazin further prefers since the freedom considered by the filmmaker for themselves not only does maintain the ambiguity and versatility that characterizes all truly creative works but also, this new creation is itself the best critic of the original works. ‘It is in pulling the work apart (…) in making an assault on its very essence that the film compels it to deliver up some of its hidden powers’ (169). The concept of “The hidden” or, in general, ambiguity, highly matters to Bazin; insofar as the statutory principle of the deep focus mise-en-scène, which forms the desired style of Bazin and is at the heart of his cinematic theory, relies on ambiguity. This ambiguity provides the viewer with such a democratic freedom to make sense of the film according to his or her understanding and perception. Another argument raised by Bazin in this article is about the painting frame and the screen frame. He writes:

The picture frame polarizes space inwards. On the contrary, what the screen shows us seems to be part of something prolonged indefinitely into the universe. A frame is centripetal, the screen centrifugal. Whence it follows that if we reverse the pictorial process and place the screen within the picture frame, that is if we show a section of a painting on a screen, the space of the painting loses its orientation and its limits and is presented to the imagination as without any boundaries. Without losing its other characteristics the painting thus takes on the spatial properties of cinema and becomes part of that “picturable” world that lies beyond it on all sides (166) (Image 1).

Tarkovsky’s techniques for filming a painting, especially in Andrei Rublev (1966), Solaris, and The Sacrifice (1986) is highly similar to art documentaries of filmmakers like Storck and Resnais.⁴ In these films, the camera explores the painting like the human eye. The camera assumes the role of the spectator and reflects on the details of the paintings with gentle horizontal and vertical movements. Most importantly, the painting frame is always out of the camera’s sight. In this way,

The space of the painting loses its orientation and it is presented as something borderless and hence as something that extends beyond the frame. (…) film presents a painting as part of the world (Jacobs 2011, 32).

By showing every part of the painting, moving the camera slowly and gently, and focusing on its details, Tarkovsky not only does not weaken the cinematic features of the film but also introduces the painting into the cinema and turns it into a part of the cinematic imaginable world. The climax of this kind of intertextuality between film and painting occurs in Solaris and especially in his last film, The Sacrifice, in which the structure and thematic features of the film are quite in accordance with Da Vinci’s Adoration of the Magi. By showing every bit of the painting and emphasizing its key elements, he opens the painting space (which is directed inward) to the cinematic space. Tarkovsky personally has commented on the style of filming of Andrei Rublev’s icons in a movie with the same name:

We enlarged some details because it is impossible to translate painting, with its own dynamic and static laws, into cinema. We thereby made the spectator see in short sentences that which he would have seen had he contemplated Andrei Roublev’s icons for hours on end (Skakov 2012, 70).

Can we not conclude that Tarkovsky’s camera uses the painting not for the sole purpose of showing it as an object to the audience in order for them to interpret it in their own way, but to manipulate its essence to reflect his own thoughts? Such an argument is not far-fetched because, as mentioned earlier, Tarkovsky strongly opposes objectivism in art. In such a subjective cinema, the movement of Tarkovsky’s camera intends to penetrate the realities of its surrounding environment. His camera can reveal the hidden meaning of the material world. And in this regard, Balázs says: ‘The camera may stress hidden meanings present in the object but cannot supply anything that is lacking in it’ (Balázs 1952, 114). Tarkovsky’s main purpose in using painting ‘is really to (…) activate a moment in our souls as we respond to images that are ancient, but also very alive, and that are borrowed from a visual tradition, but also deeply rooted in the way the world is’ (Dalle vacche 1996, 136).

The “Time-Image” and Time in Image

Let us go back to Deleuzian film-philosophy to address an important question in this context. Historically speaking, Deleuze divides cinematic images into two general categories of movement-image and time-image. Here, the concept of time-image appears to be more important. Basically, time-image has nothing to do with the linear trend of the time. Rather,

What we call temporal structure, or direct time-image, clearly goes beyond the purely empirical succession of time – past-present-future. It is, for example, a coexistence of distinct durations, or of levels of duration; a single event can belong to several levels: the sheets of past coexist in a non-chronological order (Deleuze 2013, xi).

In fact, time-image is the very image in which time is woven. A time-image is created only when ‘an “actual image” enters “into relation with its own virtual image”, thereby constituting an image that is “double-sided, mutual, both actual and virtual”’ (Colman 2011, 143). In Bergson’s philosophy, the past is the virtual, and the present is the actual.⁵ Therefore, in a time-image, the virtual and the actual, i.e., the past and the present are intertwined. ‘The actual or “actualization” of things (…) in Deleuzian terms, is an act or process of “genuine creation”’ (135) and also ‘as Deleuze argues, the actualization of time is the subject of cinema’ (143). We claim that Bazin’s idea in filming a painting accomplishes this task by entwisting time into the painting, and by doing so in Solaris, ‘The “past in general” is here in the present on screen, or, rather, we are directly in the presence of the past on screen’ (Colman 2009, 187). We will discuss the importance of the past in the next section.

On the subject of temporality in art, Gregory Currie lists three kinds of temporality: ‘temporal properties of the work, (…) temporal properties of the observer’s experiences of the work [and] temporal properties of what the work represents’ (Currie 1995, 92). After that, he distinguishes two types of time concerning the temporal properties of the work itself: unfolding and aging. ‘Characteristic of unfolding is the presence of temporal relations between constitutive elements of the work’ (93). Thus, arts such as cinema, theater, and music, in which some sort of time logic prevails between their components (images, performances, and notes), i.e., there must be a definite chronological order to understand them, are temporal. Then, he concludes by examining two other types of temporality: ‘we have three senses in which cinema is a temporal art’ (96). However, it seems to be a little different in the case of painting. In the first type, i.e., the temporal characteristics of the work itself, there is no temporal relationship between the static and still elements of the painting. In his own words,

With the painting that ages (rather than unfolds) over time, there are temporal relations between constitutive features (…) and other features (…). But there are no temporal relations, except, trivially, the relation of co-occurrence, between constitutive elements themselves (93).

Arnheim holds the same view, ‘Painting and sculpture are static arts: they can seize upon the characteristic theme of an action and record it, but they cannot show its temporal unfolding’ (Arnheim, 161-62).

But Bazin’s acceptable technique used by Tarkovsky in filming a painting, takes it out of a state of stillness and its non-temporal nature since it creates a kind of visual sequence for different parts of the painting in such a way that the filmmaker’s now subjective camera establishes temporal relations between the painting elements to create the desired narrative using the cinematic process, i.e., displaying the instances of this new narrative one after the other in time. Since the painting itself represents the temporal, and now, representation of its components takes place in time thanks to the cinematic process; therefore, it generally acquires the feature of a cinematic image. Another important point is left in this discussion: What kind of time is woven into the painting? We claim that this time is not linear. In Deleuze’s words, it means that this image is not a movement-image but a time-image. The past is not before the present, nor the future is after it; rather, all are present simultaneously. We should undoubtedly need to go back to Bergson in this regard. The concept innovated by Bergson to describe time can be referred to as “Duration”, which is ‘the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances’; it means that ‘the past in its entirety is prolonged into the present and abides there actual and acting’ (Durant 1933, 490) and also It looks to the future as well. Thus, there has been no such thing as a pure past or a pure present or a pure future; rather, they are all intertwined at every moment. On the other hand, the past constantly exists in the present, affects it, and this important aspect may be evident through the concept of memory. Bergson writes: ‘The primary function of memory is to evoke all those past perceptions which are analogous to the present perception, to recall to us what preceded and what followed them, and so to suggest to us that decision which is the most useful’ (491). Hence, our self-consciousness as a human being, and our difference from the animals, are defined in the sense of duration (continuity) and memory. ‘For Deleuze (…) “time-images are nothing to do with before and after, with succession. . . . Time-images are not things happening in time, but new forms of coexistence, ordering, transformation”’ (Herzogenrath 2017, 165). To put it briefly, time-images are a direct manifestation of duration.

In the regime of movement-images (…) the past is “behind” us and the future “ahead.” Time-images, on the other hand, disclose qualities of durée, the Deleuzian/Bergsonian notion of memory, and the originary form of time (Ashton 2006).

This is the very time woven into the image of the painting in the film. The time that has gathered the past, present, and future together into one image provides an opportunity for recollection. According to this saying of Tarkovsky, who believes: ‘During shooting, (…), I concentrate on the course of time in the frame, in order to reproduce it and record it’ (Tarkovsky 1989, 114), we can now move to the next topic which is about making the painting a completely temporal phenomenon, as Tarkovsky himself indirectly speaks to us about the weaving of time in the images of the painting.

Solaris

Without considering Tarkovsky’s student film, The Steamroller and the Violin (1961), Solaris is his third feature film released in 1972. The film is an adaptation of a science-fiction novel by Polish author Stanislaw Lem. The film’s main plot, which is very different from the novel version, is as follows: Psychologist Kris Kelvin has recently lost his wife and struggles with the debilitating grief of this loss and the still-remaining torment of his conscience. In the world of the movie, a group of scientist does research on a strange distant planet called Solaris and encounter extraordinary cases in their work. An accident appears to have occurred for all residents of the space station in Solaris’s orbit, and the residents of the station have failed to resolve the problem and have fallen into depression and madness. A research team commissions kelvin to go to Solaris to uncover the planet’s secret. Kris spends a few days on the space station until a day that he suddenly faces his wife alive there. He tries to get rid of her the first time, but then Hari reappears to him. Kelvin eventually realizes that Solaris is not an ordinary planet, but it is alive and self-aware. Solaris can respond to the deepest subconscious desires of human beings and bring them to life. The main theme of solaris is about memory and recollection, which makes it an interesting case study for this article. The past and memories are the central themes of Solaris, both of which are temporal categories. Time is the most important aspect of Tarkovsky’s cinema and the motif of his works. In all his works, traces of aging, past, and nostalgia appear both in the themes of his works and in his filmmaking style.⁶

There are three key scenes that form the film’s subtext: The opening scene, the scene displaying a video of Kris’s childhood, and the climax of the movie in the library scene. Solaris begins with a view of the purest and most immediate images of nature and terrestrial life: The film’s opening scene shows the underwater grasses of the lake with a wavy motion. The camera then pans to the left. In the next shot, the grass along the lake is framed, and the camera catches Kris in the frame by gently moving first to the left and then up, while he is standing among the manifestations of nature and has stared at the outside of the frame. At the most, the whole opening scene is a tribute to the beauty of terrestrial nature, and in general, to the earth that seems to belong to previous and forgotten eras. As the story advances and in the middle of the film, Kris shows Hari his videotape, which includes images of his past and childhood. The family video encompasses some pictures of Hari’s mother in a fur coat in the snow, then standing by the lake, a photo of Kris’s father, and ultimately an image of Hari; Hari waves her hand toward the camera in a Dacha. In this video, Kris is about five years old boy, and some pictures of his adolescence are also shown. The predominant landscape in this video includes snowy landscapes with some elements in the foreground with a darker color palette, which has a strong visual likeness with the “The Hunters in the Snow” painting. In the library scene, which is one of the last scenes of the film, the event of encountering Brueghel’s painting and its display happens. The location of the library is highly important.

The library in Solaris is a capsule of Earth history and culture: it is painted in earth colours (green walls, green carpet, lots of wood); there are books, pictures (such as the series of Pieter Brueghels, including Brueghel’s famous Months series and The Tower of Babel [1563]), photographs, busts, china, a death mask, ‘ethnic’ masks, telescopes, stained glass windows, candles, brass scientific instruments, musical instruments, globes, mirrors, guns and a Venus de Milo statue. (Robinson, 385)

As if this place is a synecdoche of all human beings’ existence on this planet, and all the memories of human beings are frozen in one place. In this section, we believe that showing Brueghel’s painting in Solaris has two narrative functions.

On the one hand, By analogizing the painting to Kris’s childhood video (or better to say, by comparing Kris’s childhood video to Brueghel’s painting), Tarkovsky ‘suggests that any piece of art, whether it is a painting or film, relies on memory as a fundamental principal of creation’ (Ivanycheva 2019), And since cinema can compress time, it is thus able to record and preserve memories. In this regard, he writes:

For the first time in the history of the arts, in the history of culture, man found the means to take an impression of time. And simultaneously the possibility of reproducing that time on screen as often as he wanted, to repeat it and go back to it. He acquired a matrix for actual time (Tarkovsky 1989, 62, emphasis in the original).

This view of him again supports Bazin’s idea of the ontological nature of the image. According to Bazin, the primary reason for the history of the visual arts was the ‘mummy complex (…) for death is but the victory of time’ (Bazin, 9). By portraying someone or making a statue of them, it seemed as if, like the Pharaohs, they were mummifying, making them immortalized in this way. But photography ‘does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption’ (14) and subsequently, ‘the cinema is objectivity in time (…) Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change mummified as it were’ (14-15). Tarkovsky’s interest in embalming time aimed at overcoming death has led him to “compress” time in each scene of his films with his cinematic techniques especially long takes, which seems as if the movement of time is slowed down, and somehow postponed. Tarkovsky writes:

I think that what a person normally goes to the cinema for is time: for time lost or spent or not yet had. He goes there for living experience; for cinema, like no other art, widens, enhances and concentrates a person’s experience – and not only enhances it but makes it longer, significantly longer
(Tarkovsky 1989, 63).

Although he himself believes in his films that death does not exist, however, the fear of death always appears in his written memoirs. In one of his diaries, he writes: ‘How scared I am of funerals. Even when my grandmother was being buried it was frightening’ (Tarkovsky 1994, 20). This is the fear of passing linear time and leading him toward death that causes him to move toward the past, memory, and compressing the time to the point of complete stillness so profoundly in his works, or maybe we can argue that he firstly transform the actual or the real time which is the passing time of events, humans, and objects to a kind of ‘moral time’ in order to free himself from the apprehension of thinking about linear time which ultimately propels humankind toward death, and instead, he develops the ‘circular time’ to be able to record the material reality of humans and the world.

Regarding the film’s form, there is so much emphasis on circular shapes that makes Solaris a unique film in Tarkovsky’s entire oeuvre. The space station has a circular shape, corridors, windows, even the surface of the planet Solaris is circular and has a rotational (circular) motion. The culmination of this initiative is seen in the very important scene of the library. Not only is the shape of the library room circular; rather, objects such as the globe, chandelier, and table are all spherical in shape. And most importantly, the place that Brueghel’s collection of The Months paintings is located is in the semicircular corner of the room. It is in this room and in this painting that the climax of Tarkovsky’s emphasis on memory and the past can be seen. The cyclic time emphasizes some kind of return, returning to the origin and source, as in Solaris, and at the end of the film, Kris returns to his parental home during a “formal development” (Bordwell and Thompson 2013, 67-69). But this time on the surface of Solaris, as if the intelligent planet Solaris has granted and realized the deepest desire of Kris, which is to return to earth, to nature, to the “primal father”, and to “home.” This is an ambiguous and equivocal ending, but Kris has returned home in either case. Be it literally, or only by having an irresistible urge to return. Tarkovsky himself acknowledges this fact: ‘For me the finale is Kelvin’s return to the cradle, to his source, which cannot ever be forgotten’ (Tarkovsky 1994, 364).

Tarkovsky not only argues that ‘Time and memory merge into each other; (…) It is obvious enough that without Time, memory cannot exist either’ (Tarkovsky 1989, 57) but also gives memory an ethical dimension: ‘Memory is a spiritual concept! (…) The time in which a person lives gives him the opportunity of knowing himself as a moral being, engaged in the search for the truth’ (57-58). He is so fascinated by categories such as time, the past, memory, and nostalgia that, before making Solaris he once said ‘that what attracted him to Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 book was the story of a man who cannot escape his past, who regrets what he’s done, and wants to relive his life in order to make amends for it’ (Robinson 369). Therefore, returning to the memory is the miracle that now enables man to recognize himself as a human being, just as Hari gets assured in the library that she is a human being, although, by nature, she is nothing more than a matrix. Finally, We are going to conclude in this section as follows: in Solaris, Brueghel’s The Hunters in the Snow is the metaphysical expression of the space station. This painting, alongside the sound effects that Tarkovsky added to the film, is a recollection of a world that is left behind and lost. What is more, it is like that the thinking ocean is this painting itself, it is the invoker of memories and gives different things their material presence. Hari is a matrix with no memory and recollection. Without memory and a way to access it, human realization and perception never go beyond its first stage, i.e., the perception of the sensation. Thus, we only face sensory moments in this state, moments that will pass one after the other without provoking thinking. Therefore, Hari owns only “Instants” at the beginning of her appearance until she gains memory by paintings and associations with the past, and from that time she becomes able to think, becomes independent, and a human being. a memory-less state, ‘Metaphorically, (…) can be thought of as one still frame only, a world completely devoid of motion or movement’ (Ashton 2006), like a still painting, while now the painting is in motion. By eliminating the frame of the painting and with sound effects accompanying the images, Tarkovsky brings life and dynamism to the still figures of the painting.

On the other hand, the human landscape and the nature of Brueghel’s painting, which is one of the liveliest and most tangible works of art in history, remind the audience of the earth’s living nature that is so emphasized at the beginning of the film. In fact,

The Earth scenes were meant to be beautiful and mysterious, to represent what Kelvin is leaving behind (and revealing his homesickness). For Akira Kurosawa, the early scenes on Earth haunted the rest of the film with their beauty: ‘they almost torture the soul of the viewer like a kind of irresistible nostalgia toward mother earth nature, which resembles homesickness (Robinson, 377).

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: ‘I contemplate face and suddenly notice its likeness to another. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’’ (Salvestroni 1987, 298, emphasis in the original). This process seems valid in both the previous section and this section. In the previous section, the undeniable resemblance of the painting to Kris’s childhood video leads us to know another aspect of the painting in the film, and in this part, the similarity of the original images of the film from the earth, the house, and nature. ‘(Hari) isolates certain of its properties, associates them with other images, and at the same time synthetizes their shared details so that they clarify and illuminate one another’ (299).

Utilizing the same gentle movements of the camera in showing both phenomena (nature and painting) emphasizes the formal similarity between these two scenes, and consequently, their thematic similarity. Here, Tarkovsky’s audience is not Hari. In fact, he has nothing to do with her. Hari is a representative of us as the film audience who needs to recognize the connection between the painting and the nature of our planet. ‘The two images are connected by the idea of “home”, a central theme that informs all Tarkovsky’s works’ (Kozin 2009, 111). In the end, the planet Solaris does the same thing to the inhabitants of the space station as the movie Solaris does with us: to review memories, nostalgia for nature and the earth before the age of technology and modernity, the age characterized by its inhumanity, and at the same time, arousing our desire to return to the past, to overcome the hostility of time, to immortality. And this is how Tarkovsky seeks refuge in the subtlety and vivification of art and its manifestations against the hardship, coldness, and inflexibility of the age of technology and modernity.

Conclusion

In this article, first of all, we tried to describe the relationship between cinema and painting as two different mediums by drawing on the views of various theorists throughout the history of cinema. Then, relying on the views of Andre Bazin concerning the preferred form of filming a painting with a camera aimed at making the most of the capabilities of cinema in the evolution of other arts, we tried to examine how this important task is done in Tarkovsky’s cinema with a focus on the film Solaris. Drawing on Gregory Currie’s theories, we claimed that the painting has taken out of a state of stillness in Bazin’s proposed method since a kind of visual sequence is created for the different parts of the painting by consecutively showing the images of this new narrative one after the other in time; since the painting itself represents a temporal phenomenon in nature, and at the same time, the representation of its components happens in time with the help of the cinematic process, therefore, it totally acquires the features of a cinematic image. Following Deleuze’s film philosophy, we claimed that this time is non-linear, implying that the painting image will be of the time-image type, in which the virtual and the actual, the past and the present are intertwined. Afterward, we examined the narrative function of such a preparation in the last part of the article. In this section, the narrative role of Brueghel the Elder’s famous painting, The Hunters in the Snow, was explored according to Henri Bergson’s and Tarkovsky’s own ideas about time and memory. By giving life to this painting (i.e., by weaving cinematic time into it), Tarkovsky brings an emphasis on memories, and since, in Bergson’s belief, memories are the distinguishing feature of the conscious human being, Hari’s character acquires human traits by looking at this painting and reviewing memories. In this way, Tarkovsky puts the viewer in her place by creating a subjective point of view of Hari to successfully awaken nostalgia for the lost time in the spectators.

Final Notes

¹‘(…) every art is a time art. But in some way, the cinema is very distinctively an art of time (…). What is distinctively temporal about film is not its portrayal of time, but the manner of its portrayal: its portrayal of time by means of time’ (Currie 1995, 92, 96).

²To prove this point, we refer to Gregory Currie and his book, Image and Mind (1995). In the first chapter of this book, Currie considers color to have an extrinsic characteristic and claims that the colors of the painting are the same colors that are seen by the audience in the general context of their understanding and perception. But in cinema, factors such as the location and angle of the projector relative to the screen and the lack of ambient light must be involved so that the cinema screen can have the same color pattern, and therefore concludes: ‘the colours on the screen are extrinsic to a greater degree than are the colours on the canvas’ (33).

³In order to describe the differences between painting and cinematic images, Currie writes ‘Cinematic images are unlike those of, say, painting; they are temporary, response dependent and extrinsic in ways the images of painting are not’ (Currie, 47).

⁴Here, we see it essential to mention the early works of Mohammad Reza Aslani, the Iranian filmmaker. In the documentary Hassanlou Chalice (1964) and in order to create an avant-garde and experimental work, a historical/artistic object is treated similarly to the paintings shown in Rene and Storck’s films. With a curios camera that moves on the details of the object exploring, associated with non-diegetic sound, the documentary turns into a work beyond just a simple documentary about a work of art. This tendency, however, is rooted in the very early works of René, Storck, Kast, and others: ‘By focusing on painting, Emmer, Storck and Resnais presented the genre of the art documentary as a means to investigate the boundaries of film by juxtaposing movement versus stasis, narrative versus iconic images, and cinematic space versus pictorial surface’ (Jacobs 2011, 31).

⁵In this regard, it should be noted that the past and memories highly matter to Bergson. He writes: ‘To live only in the present, to respond to a stimulus by the immediate reaction which prolongs it, is the mark of the lower animals: the man who proceeds in this way is a man of impulse’ (Bergson 2005, 153).

⁶Tarkovsky has basically called the cinematic process “the shaping of time.” He writes: ‘time becomes the very foundation of cinema: as sound is in music, colour in painting, character in drama’ (Tarkovsky 1989, 119).

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Filmography

Andrey Rublev. (1966)., Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky., USSR: Mosfilm. DVD.

From Renoir to Picasso. (1951)., Directed by Paul Haesaerts., France: Art et Cinéma. DVD.

Goya. (1951)., Directed by Pierre Kast., France: Argos-Films. DVD.

Guernica. (1950)., Directed by Alain Resnais., France: Panthéon Productions. DVD.

Hassanlou Chalice. (1964)., Directed by Mohammad Reza Aslani, Iran:, DVD.

Rubens. (1948)., Directed by Paul Haesaerts., Belgium: Belgian Ministries of Education & Communication. DVD.

Solaris. (1972)., Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky., USSR: Mosfilm. Blu-Ray.

The Sacrifice. (1986)., Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky., Sweden, United Kingdom, France: Svenska Filminstitutet. Blu-Ray.

The Steamroller and the Violin. (1961)., Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky., USSR: Mosfilm. DVD.

Van Gogh. (1948)., Directed by Alain Resnais., France: Argos-Films. DVD.