2001 A Space Odyssey

The paper looks at how Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Andre Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) make art cinema out of the popular genre of science fiction. Further, it focuses on the specific ways the two directors deploy to construct extraterrestrial space to explore key concerns of science fiction, including the relation of humans to technology, human to the alien or non-human, as well as the relationship of the present to the future. The specific constructions of those films shape a unique experience of extraterrestrial space for characters and audiences. In the process, each director offered a critical engagement with science fictional aspirations at a time when space travel was exciting and new.

Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 tells
the story of an ape-men become human by inventing the tool and human becomes immortal by destroying the tool while transforming into the star-child. Its vision of man relating to extraterrestrial space is dominated by technology; in a way that what takes control of one of the spaceship is an artificial intelligence named ‘HAL.’ Like 2001, Andre Tarkovsky’s Solaris also tells the story of outer space. Unlike Kubrick, his vision of man’s relationship to outer space is dominated by human unconscious controls over space and the spacecraft.
Because of an anti-human aspect of 2001 Tarkovsky calls it “cold and sterile,” although Kubrick shows interest in Solaris. To compare those aspects, we describe the two used common architectural elements of nature and corridor, which play a central role in both films, assigning them as “nature as exterior” and “corridor as interior.”

Nature as Exterior

Both films open with images of nature, linked to the depiction of humanity and what it means to be human. Kubrick’s 2001 opens with a scene of primeval nature, the pre-history of man that nevertheless emphasises “the roots of human technological ingenuity” (Rasmussen 2005: 33), the first use of a bone tool linked to human violence—the killing of animals for food, of other early humans for territory—and then to the future of space travel when a femur tossed into the air dissolves into the image of a revolving space station. Solaris, by contrast, depicts nature in the present, a scene of family life that associates humanity with memory and emotion. Further, nature as the images of water foreshadow the sentient ocean of planet Solaris, accesses human memory to create “the visitors,” who appear in the guise of loved ones and are as a consequence both real and not real, familiar and strange. Nature and imagination, earth and outer space, appear in Solaris not as opposites, but correlated pairs.” The experience of alienation happens at a narrative and dialog level in the interaction between the human and apparently human in Solaris rather than in the interaction between human and technology as in 2001.

From the architectural point of view, the films start with the element of “wild nature.” Both follow the same painting system of Renaissance period for their framing, coloring, visual symmetry, deep focus perspective, and layering.
However, these films’ scene of wild nature has a different significance in each. The wild nature of primeval man in 2001 is strikingly artificial; a painted background merges into the foreground’s set with a specific lens and a deep focus. By contrast, Tarkovsky’s representation of the protagonist Chris Kelvin‘s childhood house appears more naturalistic, yet recalls Renaissance painting with its use of symmetry and colour, an aesthetic effect that is directly linked to memory and nostalgia and man’s emotional relationship to the past. The camera lyrically travels over paintings later in the film to represent Chris’s relationship to the past. In this way, nature is both exterior, a framing device for films about technology and the future, but also interior, in the way that they are linked to what each film defines as essential humanity: the primate who hungers, fights, and learns to use tools in 2001, the man who remembers, struggles with nostalgia, and is thus easily manipulated by the sentient nature in
Solaris.

Corridor as Interior
The two films are quite different in their depiction of space itself. 2001 opens with an image of the sunset over far away mountains. Some of its best-known images are spectacular ones of ships and space stations in flight, a Strauss waltz heightening our sense of them as spectacle. However, when it comes to the built environments of the films, the spaceship and space station, there are some noticeable similarities.

The interiors of both spaceships have a circular shape, which stimulates the feeling of zero gravity or weightlessness showing how a circular walk might lay out linearly without disturbance. In 2001, the spaceship Discovery is a centrifuge with the spherical shape. However, in Solaris rather than circular in volume the space ship has a circular plan. In this way, a corridor in Discovery is similar to a revolving wheel, while in Solaris it is flat. As a result, essentially, movements in the two spaceships are different. Although they use the same geometrical shape ‘circle,’ Tarkovsky and Kubrick advance different experiences of time, space and movement, related to Kubrick’s sense of man’s place in extraterrestrial space as an enclosed wheel and Tarkovsky’s as an earth-looking scientific office. Even though Cherchi Usai (1998: 129) describes the role of a corridor as one of the “superfluous architectural elements in terms of function,” noting that one never lives in a corridor or does any activities occur in there, corridors are key spaces in both films, important to making space alien—and to the alienation of characters. Usai argues that in 2001 the corridor symbolizes temporality, giving “time itself—otherwise ‘absent’—an uncertain objective connotation which is nevertheless preferred to the total absence of any system of reference.” In Solaris, as the narrative progresses we discover that the corridor is a space, littered with evidence of “the visitors” who die and resurrect multiple times is likewise marked by temporality, by the past of their visit to the space station but also by the past of memory that are the source of this alien life form.

Geometrical Space vs. Dream Space

Kubrick shows how he can technologize space with precise details, using the geometry of straight lines and employing a right angles camera, for instance in space ship Discovery where we see the character boxing around the space ship, the geometry of the scene evokes estrangement in regard to movement.
At first, within a tracking shot audiences have the impression that the astronaut is going around the circle in zero gravity. However, in the second shot while the camera mounted before the astronaut audiences realize that the spaceship is turning around. Robert O’Meara reveals how the set and cameras work in this
scene:

Two types of camera set-ups were used for the sequences in the centrifuge. One was mounted stationary to the set so that it rotated in a 360-degree arc along with the centrifuge. Such a set-up gives the appearance on the screen that the camera is standing still while the astronaut walks away from it, up the wall, around the top, and down the other side. The second set-up was a mobile camera mounted on a small dolly which stayed with the astronaut at the bottom while the whole set moved past him. (1969: 108)

Thus, the astronaut is like a hamster in a wheel. He is still and space is moving around him. Audiences are asked to puzzle how the space works. So, the protagonist and audiences share an alienation effect, as the depiction of space does not make sense, is difficult to map and it resistant to understand except as metaphor.

By contrast, the mental mapping of Tarkovsky’s Solaris is not resisting. Solaris interior space is more overtly psychologised, the camera is anthropomorphized, associated with the characters. Yet here too, space is alienating, not because of the relationship of characters to technologised set, but because of the way that the sentient ocean of Solaris populates the space station with living memories of the past in the embodiment of “the visitors.” Kelvin’s dead wife (Hari) visits him with a similar appearance of her past life. In this level, characters and audiences experience the same feeling when they see their beloved in a dream with the precise details that the reality of a dream shatters their consciousness to question whether they are awake or still dreaming.

To conclude, while Kubrick constructs the space ship for the specific act and story, in Solaris, characters shape space through their psyche and respond to it, struggling with their own emotions and relationship to the past, the effects of this struggle populating the space with both technological rubbish and evocative pieces of art and nature. Tarkovsky makes space for humans, but thanks to the widespread and ongoing effects of Solaris, that space is troubling and ultimately deadly, as humans plunged into their own past, into a space where past and present are confused, sicken and take their own lives.