Solaris

It had been a while since I had seen Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 masterpiece
Tarkovsky has his famous long, long takes, often with long shots, though there is no single schema; much is also shot in portrait framings. This mixture is down to the (nearly always stately) pan and scan technique, with a great willingness to rack focus and zoom, never ostenatiously, but with a kinf of quiet majesty. The colour pallette used is reduced, often going into black and white.
Tarkovsky is, as he tells us, sculpting in time, and the rythm here is indeed increibly observed. Always proceeding from the content, there are the long meditative takes on a face, the incredible swirling surface of the Solaris. There is also the slightly more jerky uses, when that is appropriate, and indeed some relatively jarring cuts, to create usually the image of the mind of Chris Kelvin, but equally the general atmosphere of the spaceship. This is helped by the sound; more of a natural silence than the airlessness of '2001', with music rare (though powerful, not dominating, when it comes).
The settings are evoked with a light simplicity that is not out to confuse you. The mixture of pale messiness, and the darker tunnel, of the spaceship, compares to the interiors of the library and the homestead, not overdone, but projecting an image quite different from the outside.
What must be said about Tarkovsky first; he is not trying to complicate. The subject may be beyond what we can say; but the film itself is not opaque. Indeed, there is pretty mcu ni mucking about. It could even be said to move rather quickly, and it certainly does in a straight line, following, with no digressions, the central idea.
The film is of the uniqueness of memory, its return. How neither cold science, or the slightly staid humanism, can encompass this kind of communion with a transcendence Tarkovsky is after. This is a transcendence in naturel this is key. To my mind Tarkovsky's finest moments come with his evocations of nature. Tarkovsky's meditation is on nature, the process of how nature changes. The moistness of it, the wrenching tragedy of it, the feel of it. One can taste and smell the green plants slowly changing, even in the station, trying to escape, the body does so (blood, burns, sweat). This is time passing; from the dacha and first nature, to the human, the body, passing of the station. How does this remain? In the memory. Tarkovsky is a high metaphysician, but this isn't some abstract 'Being'; it is the history of nature.
The end is remarkable; as mentioned, Tarkovsky is not trying to confuse, but the idea of the memory of nature, of its passing, the deliberate ambiguity, creates an astounding image. In what is, indeed, an astounding picture.