A guest lecture by Professor Tony Anemone (The New School, New York)
In this talk, I reconsider the relationship between Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey, whose fiftieth anniversary was celebrated in 2018 (Solaris is often seen as the Russian director’s response to Space Odyssey). After briefly noting the numerous similarities between two great cinematic epics of “First Contact,” I look closely at a number of key images from each film and consider the meaning, significance, and construction of different types of obscurity in two famously obscure films. By analyzing each director’s most enigmatic images (e.g., black obelisk, Star Child, living planet), I try to elucidate the complex and paradoxical relationship between visual surfaces and philosophical depths in each film. The larger question implied in the talk is how a viewer (or reader) moves from the surface of a film (painting, photograph, or literary text) to the figurative meaning of the work.