Kantian Themes in Tarkovsky’s Solaris

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Solaris also contains another theme discussed by Kant in his “Critique of Pure Reason” – the perception of time. As Kris grows more and more insane, losing his perception of space, he decides to abandon his mission and go back to earth. Before his departure, in another masterfully constructed dream sequence by Tarkovsky, Kris’s dead mother appears, but instead of being older than him, she is young, just like he remembers her from his childhood memories. She approaches Kris and washes his hand. This is a symbol showing that in Solaris the time does not flow in typical, linear fashion as our intuitive synthetic knowledge would suggest. Instead the time is fragmented just like our memories, and Solaris manages to bring past experiences into Kris’s present which further complicated his mental and emotional struggle. Ultimately, even according to Kant we cannot know if the space and time are real, but at least we know how they should interact with us. But in the vast, foreign space of Solaris, it is impossible to understand what can happen next, because as Kris was warned by one of the scientists at the beginning, “what you will see at Solaris, will completely depend on your mind and memories” suggesting that the space Kris is in, is constructed in “real-time” just like in Inception’s dream sequences and that the future will be built out of modified version of Kris’s past experiences and rendering time non-linear thus - irrelevant.

In the end, Kris’s tormented psychological and emotional situation forces him to abandon his mission and go back to earth. He goes ahead and travels back to his rural “Dacha” where we see familiar surroundings, his wooden house still standing amongst the green trees, his loyal dog still greets him while he walks towards the house. But even though everything seems normal at a first glance, we see that fire he built in his yard to burn his old photographs before departing to Solaris, is still on, and that the items he took to space station are at his house already. We also see him see his father, who is unchanged, and not surprised to see Kris even though Kris supposedly spend significant amount of time at the space station. At this point we begin to realize that irrationally small amount of time passed in meta-real world compared to time Kris spent at Solaris. This echoes Kant’s ideas that the perception of time exists in our subjective consciousness thus its existence or “mechanics” cannot be objectively analyzed. At the end of the film, there is a shot of Kris hugging his father while camera zooms out and we realize that Kris’s “Dacha” stands on an isolated island which floats around in cosmic ocean that is Solaris. This ending leaves it up to the viewer to make conclusions about its meaning but one thing is for sure, Tarkovsky definitely challenged the rational understandings of space and time in Solaris, and exploited Kant’s ideas of our knowledge about these a-priori intuitions.

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