

Cryptic consciousness - quoderat
http://www.consciousentities.com/?p=132

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FlorinAndrei
The being with the fully-cryptic (or almost fully cryptic) consciousness is
described in the novel "Solaris" by Stanislav Lem - two movies were made after
it, one by Andrei Tarkowski, the other by Steven Soderbergh.

It's a great book anyway, regardless of your interest in the issue of
consciousness.

~~~
FlorinAndrei
Oh, BTW, the movies are good too.

The one by Tarkowski is a classic and has an almost cult following (almost
impossible to criticize it in certain circles). It is a remarkable movie, but
I've found it a bit bombastic at times.

The other one, by Soderbergh, is the movie that opened my eyes to the art of
cinema - or rather, to telling stories with the image, framing, and camera
motion. It's hard to explain, it was like a revelation. I used to be very much
focused on music, sound and words, and was almost blind to visual arts. Seeing
Soderbergh's "Solaris" was a turning point to me, along with other major
changes in my life at that point. I guess I was just getting ready and seeing
the movie was probably the catalyst. Now I can actually take pictures in a
conscious way and am able to "say" something by just framing the image in a
certain way.

I read the book decades ago, when I was a high-school kid. It had a major
impact on my thinking. It's a lot more philosophical than what you would
expect from a sci-fi novel. Reminding of Borges in a way.

~~~
frig
Solaris by Tarkovsky is not uncriticizable, in the sense that "yes, it could
have done what it tried to do better".

But a lot of what makes Tarkovsky's film sometimes bombastic is also what
makes it work.

Solaris is ultimately about encountering something that you don't understand.
The ppl studying it have theories, and draw conclusions, but its nature is
ultimately a mystery that resists investigation.

Edit: so much so that essentially it's just a mirror (as mentioned)...the
theories people have expose much about their own thoughts and preferences but
don't seem to be getting any closer to understanding it...

The film is pretty obviously constructed to make you really appreciate the
experience of interacting with the incomprehensible, by being deliberately
obtuse and devoid of explanation.

Watching the film is as close as most of us might come to being stuck alone on
a spacestation dealing with a high mystery; it's long, uncomfortable,
wearying, and ultimately unsatisfying, as you don't come away from it with
anything resembling a sense of closure...you end up knowing perhaps less than
you came in with.

On the one hand, this makes it a crap movie in some ways: you never find out
what 'the answer' is (what is solaris? why is it doing this?) or even a
comfortable sense of the end (what happens to kris?). On the other hand, if
the point of the film was not so much to tell a story as to communicate an
experience, then many of the drawbacks and flaws can be seen as working
towards that goal.

Contrast with say the monoliths from 2001: there's some kind of 'mystery' in
the sense of 'who built them, how do they work', etc., but that's a very
shallow mystery; it's understood / hinted at / explained (in the books, at
least) almost exactly that they're artifacts that look for conscious life or
the possibility of it, and then give it 'forward nudges' as needed.

So there's still a small mystery: 'who, exactly, built these things? how,
exactly, do they work?' but for supposedly incomprehensibly advanced artifacts
constructed by incomprehensibly advanced beings the reader walks away
comprehending almost everything...

You have to decide upfront: is a film something that tells a story, or is it
something that provides an experience...assessment will vary depending your
choice there.

~~~
FlorinAndrei
Good points. That is also the theme of the book - the mystery beyond
comprehension. The echoes of Borges (the staggering fictional encyclopedism)
serve the purpose of suggesting the titanic struggle of the mind to grasp the
unknowable anyway.

Soderbergh's version avoids dealing with the mystery (well, it's pushed in the
background) and focuses instead on psychological exploration. The scope is
much more narrow, and it's a very simple movie - in a way. But it does what it
set out to do very well, it's very focused on its goal and taut. And the
images and the camera work are mesmerizing - I was "tripping" mouth agape all
the way to the end.

~~~
frig
Yeah, keep in mind Soderburgh had a budget; Tarkovsky did his on a shoestring
budget, and some of the wtfs (like the driving sequence) result from budgetary
issues.

Soderburgh certainly improved a lot on the cinematography, no argument.

For people with a lot vested in their critical opinions I'm sure criticism of
solaris is a no-go; for a lot of others, though, it's one of those films where
you can see how it could be so much better if remade with less budgetary
constraints (we don't need a cgi planet, really, but just a second-draft to
get it right)...and Soderburgh being Soderburgh he got his chance.

One thing that's worth remembering is just how narrow Tarkovsky cut the book:
the book goes on at great length, but Tarkovsky cut everything down to the
core human drama:

\- you're sent to investigate the mental health of people out on this space
station investigating this incomprehensible object, b/c they've basically
stopped communicating

\- you get there and instead of anything you expect to find, you find your
long-dead wife

\- that's a pretty incomprehensible thing, no? It's something Lem included as
a pretty smart move, but you could -- literally -- write a whole novel or make
a whole film just trying to work through the psychological reactions that'd
produce

By restricting that attention it humanizes the encounter with the
incomprehensible:

\- you get to 'cheat'; a cgi orange planet is obviously a cgi orange planet,
and thus not really 'mysterious'; using interpersonal relationships for your
mystery lets you tap into very primal emotional hooks

\- but at the end it's still left deliberately opaque enough to remain an
encounter with the incomprehensible

If you have read more by Lem you'll see his pet peeve is comprehensible
mysteries -- just about every story he's written can be interpreted in some
way as a kind of parable of how even 'explorers' are mostly uninterested in or
incapable of encountering or appreciating anything they didn't already know or
understand.

Fiasco fits the bill, as does 'Return from the Stars' (though it's harder to
pick out, there). Lem was pretty prolific.

