The Stanley Kubrick movie that Andrei Tarkovsky called “phoney”
Back in the late 20th century, two directors were vying for filmmaking supremacy. No, I’m not talking about Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader or Brian De Palma and Steven Spielberg. Instead, two visionary directors from world cinema were battling it out, with America’s Stanley Kubrick going head-to-head with Andrei Tarkovsky of Russia.
Whilst Kubrick is better known across the world of mainstream cinema, thanks to such classic movies as 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining and A Clockwork Orange, arguably, Tarkovsky is better appreciated in the arthouse sphere. An experimental filmmaker who pioneered many innovative techniques, the Russian filmmaker is best known for such sci-fi efforts as Stalker and Solaris.
On an artistic level, Kubrick was pretty respectful of Tarkovsky, even calling 1972’s Solaris and 1986’s The Sacrifice classics of modern cinema, yet the feelings were not mutual. Amid the political rivalries between Russia and America in the mid-late 20th century, it seemed as though Tarkovsky saw Kubrick as something of an artistic competitor, hating his 1968 sci-fi hit 2001: A Space Odyssey.
“For some reason, in all the science-fiction films I’ve seen, the filmmakers force the viewer to examine the details of the material structure of the future,” Tarkovsky told Naum Abramov, a Russian journalist, in 1970. Making specific reference to Kubrick’s flick, he adds: “More than that, sometimes, like Kubrick, they call their own films premonitions. It’s unbelievable! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is phoney on many points, even for specialists. For a true work of art, the fake must be eliminated.”
Continuing, he further explained about Kubrick’s movie: “Everything would be as it should. That means to create psychologically, not an exotic but a real, everyday environment that would be conveyed to the viewer through the perception of the film’s characters. That’s why a detailed ‘examination’ of the technological processes of the future transforms the emotional foundation of a film, as a work of art, into a lifeless schema with only pretensions to truth.”
Indeed, many consider Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris to be an answer to Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, released four years earlier. Just like Kubrick’s film, Solaris discusses existential questions about the mortality of humankind whilst querying one’s own place in the wider universe using an unrivalled approach to cinematography.
Take a look at the trailer for Solaris below and see for yourself the similarities between the movie and Kubrick’s classic.
