Human amidst the inhuman

The final shot of Tarkovsky's Solaris shows that what we might have thought of the protagonist Kris's return to Earth – despite disconcerting signs such as the pond being frozen, the small metal box he had taken with him into space sitting already on the dacha's window sill, and the father inside the house being sprinkled and splashed with hot rain from the ceiling – is really evidence that he has remained on Solaris. The camera zooms out and we see that the little patch of what we may have taken to be Earth is in reality a small island in the mysterious brain-ocean of Solaris.

One of the themes of the film is for the various characters to find a way to be human in the inhuman environment of Solaris and space exploration. But is not the real Earth also just such a small island in the midst of the vast inhuman and possibly numinous ocean of space? And isn't our challenge how still to be human in a reality which Darwin, quantum physics and cosmology has already revealed to be mysterious, vast, random, and not at all centered around this happenstance speck of a species.

Tarkovsky later uses this same device of zooming out to reveal a framing context at the very end of the film Nostalghia. Throughout the film there have been a few dimly lit shots of a Russian rural landscape, like a memory or recurring dream of a place from childhood ...

I have written about these colour-drained shots elsewhere. At the end of the film we see the protagonist and a dog in front of what seems to be this childhood house, lying on the ground looking into a pond. He is the grown man of the present, but the posture – lying idly with a dog and gazing into a pond – is a childhood posture. There is again the telescoping of time that ended The Mirror where the aged mother, after her middle-aged son's death, is seen (still aged as in the present) leading her two small children through the rural landscape around their childhood home (which I have also written about here),

The pond carries a strange reflection which is only explained when the camera zooms out to reveal that the entire remembered landscape is mysteriously contained within the walls of a great cathedral.

In Solaris we zoomed out to show that the context of our limited bound human life is a mysterious alien and conscious ocean. In Nostalghia we see that the entire scope of our lives exist incomprehensibly within the frame and constructed order of a spiritual realm.