Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by avsBuddy (A) on September 27, 2011 at 07:37:50

In Reply to: RE: Solaris is a foreign film on more than just trivial level posted by Victor Khomenko on September 26, 2011 at 12:28:58

I have the Criterion edition of this movie on DVD and the picture quality is nothing but breathtaking! I don't know how they did it. It's ironic that it took American studio to remaster a Russian movie, while a lot of Russian movies get poor remastering jobs by the very studios that made them.

Anyhow. I loved Solaris ever since seeing it as a child. On the matter of Space Odyssey 2001, it's not on exact same subject - it's not talking about some grand scheme, while doing it in the abstract form. It is more literal and concentrates on the human nature, and on the main protagonist specifically. There was a poor US remake with Cloony.

On the Criterion DVD, someone said that Tarkovski saw Space Odyssey before shooting Solaris and he disliked all the attention to special affects, rather then the characters themselves. It didn't help that he was limited by the tight movie budget available to Soviet filmmakers. For example, Tarkovski didn't have enough color film to shoot with! So he had to resort to shooting specific scenes in black and white and the rest in color, resulting in a very atmospheric cinematic experience. When I saw Solaris, I instantly recalled Matrix, where scenes in the "Matrix" have green overtones, while scenes in the "real world" have natural color gamma.