Sculpting time

I watched Solaris (1972, Tarkovsky) the same day I had listened to Mahler’s 9th. Apart from feeling as snob as a natural-wine purist or a the-sound-is-richer-in-vinyl-kind of person, both works moved me incredibly. Spoiler’s below.

Bernstein said in his Norton lectures that the fourth movement of the symphony, in particular, the coda, signals at the same time Mahler’s death, the death of tonality, and the death of Faustian culture, whatever that actually means. Solaris, on the other hand, is not a movie about death, or is it? I would argue that the way Tarkovsky essentially stops the action to force a reflection upon the viewer, most remarkably zooming into Brueghel’s paintings after the scene in the library, is a similar resource as the slow-down at the end of the coda. The end unfolds from that point as a dream, but all the pieces had already been set in motion, there was nothing else to do. Hari was dead, is dying, and will die. Is slowing-down the passage of time a passage way into strong emotional reaction? Or is it just the only way we can understand death, while being alive?