“What is Bres­son’s genre? He does­n’t have one. Bres­son is Bres­son,” wrote mas­ter film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky in his sem­i­nal book Sculpt­ing in Time. “The very con­cept of genre is as cold as the tomb.”

Nonethe­less, Tarkovsky made two of the most praised, best-regard­ed sci­ence fic­tion films in cin­e­ma. Stalk­er is a meta­phys­i­cal rid­dle wrapped in the trap­pings of a sci-fi thriller. In the ver­dant area called the Zone, ringed off by miles of barbed wire and armed sol­diers, pil­grims come to behold an uncan­ny land­scape ruled by a pow­er­ful, oth­er­world­ly intel­li­gence. The film seemed to pre­fig­ure the Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter that hap­pened years lat­er and proved to be the unlike­ly inspi­ra­tion for a video game.

Adapt­ed from a nov­el by Stanis­law Lem, Solaris is about a space sta­tion that orbits a sen­tient plan­et that caus­es hal­lu­ci­na­tions in the cos­mo­nauts. The hyper-ratio­nal pro­tag­o­nist, Kris Kelvin, is thrown for a loop when he is con­front­ed by a dop­pel­ganger of his dead wife who killed her­self years ear­li­er. The log­i­cal side of him knows that this is a hal­lu­ci­na­tion but he falls in love any­way, only to lose her again. Kelvin is caught in a hell of repeat­ing the mis­takes of his past.

Solaris was seen as a Cold War-era response to Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Both movies are mind-alter­ing deep-space epics that raise more ques­tions than they answer. Yet Tarkovsky hat­ed 2001’s osten­ta­tious use of cut­ting-edge spe­cial effects. “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,” he told Russ­ian film jour­nal­ist Naum Abramov in 1970. “More than that, some­times, like Kubrick, they call their own films pre­mo­ni­tions. It’s unbe­liev­able! Let alone that 2001: A Space Odyssey is pho­ny on many points, even for spe­cial­ists. For a true work of art, the fake must be elim­i­nat­ed.”

Indeed, Tarkovsky seemed to delib­er­ate­ly half-ass the gener­ic ele­ments of film. He used leisure­ly shots of tun­nels and high­ways of 1971 Tokyo to depict the city of the future. He devot­ed only a cou­ple min­utes of the film’s near­ly three hour run­ning time to things like space­ships. And you have to love the fact that the space sta­tion in Solaris has such dis­tinct­ly unfu­tur­is­tic design ele­ments as a chan­de­lier and a wood-pan­eled library.

Tarkovsky, of course, isn’t inter­est­ed in sci­ence. He’s inter­est­ed in art and its way to evoke the divine. And his pri­ma­ry way of doing this is with long takes; epic shots that res­onate pro­found­ly even if the mean­ing of those images remains elu­sive. Solaris opens with a shot of water flow­ing in a brook and then, lat­er in the scene, there is a sud­den down­pour. The cam­era press­es into a shot of a teacup fill­ing with rain. It’s a beau­ti­ful, mem­o­rable, evoca­tive shot. Maybe the image means some­thing. Maybe its beau­ty is, in and of itself, its mean­ing. Either way, Tarkovsky forces you to sur­ren­der to his delib­er­ate cin­e­mat­ic rhythm and his pan­the­is­tic view of the world.

In a piece called Tarkovsky Shot by Shot, video essay­ist Anto­nios Papan­to­niou dis­sects a few scenes from Solaris, break­ing down each accord­ing to cam­era angle, shot type and dura­tion while point­ing out recur­ring visu­al motifs. “Dia­met­ri­cal­ly dif­fer­ent from Hollywood’s extrav­a­gant moviemak­ing Tarkovsky’s Solaris is in a cin­e­mat­ic uni­verse of its own,” writes Papan­to­niou in one of the video’s copi­ous inter­ti­tles. “Sym­bol­ic images and meta­phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tions are cre­at­ed and expressed in a poet­ic way where every visu­al detail mat­ters.” Watch­ing Shot by Shot, you get a real sense of just how beau­ti­ful­ly his films unfold with those gor­geous­ly chore­o­graphed long takes. You can watch the full video above.

Note: This post orig­i­nal­ly appeared on our site in June, 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Mas­ter­ful Polaroid Pic­tures Tak­en by Film­mak­er Andrei Tarkovsky

Tarkovsky’s Advice to Young Film­mak­ers: Sac­ri­fice Your­self for Cin­e­ma

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mes­sage to Young Peo­ple: “Learn to Be Alone,” Enjoy Soli­tude

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

The Michael B. Jor­dan- and Jaime Foxx-star­ring Just Mer­cy had “the mis­for­tune of hit­ting the­aters at the same time as Clemen­cy, a more dar­ing and bet­ter film set on a prison’s Death Row,” wrote Odie Hen­der­son in a Decem­ber 2019 review at RogerEbert.com. Read­ing the state­ment now feels like look­ing through the wrong end of a tele­scope (“hit­ting the­aters?”). None of the movie’s mid­dling reviews could have pre­dict­ed the kinds of mis­for­tunes that lay just around the cor­ner.

If Just Mer­cy is your kind of dis­trac­tion, you can watch it free of charge through June. Hen­der­son­’s review gives me the impres­sion it may not be equal to the moment.

Since the days of ’50s-era mes­sage pic­tures, the major­i­ty of films about African-Amer­i­can suf­fer­ing have always been cal­i­brat­ed the way “Just Mer­cy” is, with an eye to not offend­ing White view­ers with any­thing remote­ly resem­bling Black anger. We can be beat­en, raped, enslaved, shot for no rea­son by police, vic­tim­ized by a jus­tice sys­tem rigged to dis­fa­vor us or any oth­er num­ber of real-world things that can befall us, yet God help us if a char­ac­ter is pissed off about this. Instead, we get to be noble, to hold on to His unchang­ing hand while that tire­less Black lady goes “hmmm-HMM­M­MM!” on the sound­track to sym­bol­ize our suf­fer­ing. There’s a lot of “hmmm-HMMMMM”-ing in this movie, so much so that I had to resist laugh­ing. 

Only one critic’s opin­ion, but if such pious, boil­er­plate films haven’t changed any­thing since the 50s they prob­a­bly aren’t about to now.

The Cri­te­ri­on Col­lec­tion offers a refresh­ing alter­na­tive for rep­re­sen­ta­tions of the black expe­ri­ence on film, as envi­sioned by black film­mak­ers, writ­ers, actors, pro­duc­ers, etc. “This has been a pow­er­ful­ly emo­tion­al time,” the Col­lec­tion writes, cit­ing a string of high-pro­file, well-doc­u­ment­ed racist threats and mur­ders that lead up to the break­ing point:

Black Lives Mat­ter. The anguish and fury unleashed all across the coun­try are root­ed in cen­turies of dehu­man­iza­tion and death. This pat­tern must stop. We sup­port the pro­test­ers who have tak­en to the streets to demand jus­tice, and we share their hopes. We are com­mit­ted to fight­ing sys­temic racism.

The Col­lec­tion has estab­lished an “employ­ee-guid­ed fund with a $25,000 ini­tial con­tri­bu­tion and an ongo­ing $5000 month­ly com­mit­ment to sup­port orga­ni­za­tions fight­ing racism in Amer­i­ca.”

More to the point of their cen­tral mis­sion, they’re allow­ing vis­i­tors to the Cri­te­ri­on Chan­nel to stream “works by ear­ly pio­neers of African Amer­i­can Cin­e­ma” as well as those by cur­rent film­mak­ers. These are films that can be dif­fi­cult to find out­side of art­house cin­e­mas and col­lege screen­ing rooms. “Titles stream­ing for free,” notes IndieWire, “include Julie Dash’s Daugh­ters of the Dust, Maya Angelou’s Down in the Delta, Shirley Clarke’s Por­trait of Jason, Agnès Varda’s Black Pan­thers, Kath­leen Collins’ Los­ing Ground, and many more.”

Also stream­ing free on the site is “con­tem­po­rary work by Kha­lik Allah and Leilah Wein­raub; and doc­u­men­tary por­traits of the black expe­ri­ence by white film­mak­ers Les Blank and Shier­ley Clarke,” Cri­te­ri­on writes, not­ing that they’ve “tak­en down the pay­wall on as many of these titles as we can.”

This announce­ment will have lit­tle effect on peo­ple com­mit­ted to a par­tic­u­lar­ly vicious way of see­ing things, but it offers a rare oppor­tu­ni­ty to watch a diverse col­lec­tion of enlight­en­ing, often brac­ing, often deeply mov­ing films, stretch­ing over a cen­tu­ry, for free. This body of work offers new per­spec­tives on the past and wider under­stand­ing of film his­to­ry. They may just be what you need to get through June. Check out the Cri­te­ri­on Chan­nel col­lec­tions here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:   

Watch the First-Ever Kiss on Film Between Two Black Actors, Just Hon­ored by the Library of Con­gress (1898)

Watch the Pio­neer­ing Films of Oscar Micheaux, America’s First Great African-Amer­i­can Film­mak­er

The Art of The Black Pan­thers: A Short Doc­u­men­tary on the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Artist Emory Dou­glas

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness