From: wildman@athena.mit.edu (Timothy Worsley)
Subject: Re: Lem film
Reply-To: eprice@sql.sybase.com
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Date: Thu, 23 Jul 1992 09:48:26 GMT

In article <1992Jul17.044833.23975@athena.mit.edu> I wrote:
>In article <91180@bu.edu> shimkevi@buchmf.bu.edu (Sergey Shimkevich) writes:
>>In article <1992Jul16.072106.23045@athena.mit.edu> eprice@sql.sybase.com
>>writes:
>>
>>>I seem to remember reading somewhere that a German film was produced
>>>of _The Invincible_.  If no-one can come up with anything more
>>>definite I'll try to locate this reference...
>>
>>Please do.
>
>I'm working on it...

OK, I think I've got it.  Turns out I was confused (it's been a few
years since I was really into Lem).  I was thinking of the following:

According to Jerzy Jarzebski (_Science-Fiction Studies_ vol. 4 (1977),
p. 100), on Lem's novel THE ASTRONAUTS "was based the script for THE
SILENT STAR, a movie that posed difficult technical problems for the
joint industries of Poland and East Germany."

Jarzebski also refers to Lem's "excellent pure nonsense script for the
movie ROLY POLY." (p. 121)

From "An Interview with Stanislaw Lem" [originally printed in _Entropy
Negative_ no. 6 (1973)], by Daniel Say, _The Alien Critic_ 3, no. 10
(August 1974), p. 9:

 Q: How have the visual productions of your SF been (such as ASTRONAUCI
 and others).  Is there any western SF movie that you have seen that
 you could compare it with for our understanding?
 
 A: All films made from my works were very bad indeed.  The single
 exception was ROLY POLY done by Andrzej Wajda (it was a short film for
 TV).
    The character of this badness?  B-pictures clumsily done.  I am now
 on guard and it is not a simple thing to persuade me to seel film
 rights.

So, two more `Lem films', but still no INVINCIBLE...  Would the person
who originally posted that there was such a film be able to remember
in which book they saw mention of it?

I also wrote:

>Someone (maybe Lem maybe someone else) also summed up the difference
>by saying that Tarkovsky had taken an intellectual drama (the book)
>and produced a moral drama (the film) -- a moral drama par excellence,
>but still shifting the focus of the Lem's novel entirely.  Lem has
>written many times that he is not really interested in the problems of
>individual psychology, but rather in larger cultural concerns.
>
>So, Lem couldn't care less about Tarkovsky's themes, and Tarkovsky
>couldn't care less about Lem's themes.

I've come up with some sources (more excerpts from interviews) for
this too.  Be warned that what follows is almost certainly "more than
you could possibly want to know about Lem and SOLARIS".  I've arranged
all this in chronological order.

From "The Future without a Future: An Interview with Stanislaw Lem",
by Zoran Zivikovic, translated by Irene Mirkovic, _Pacific Quarterly
Moana_ 4 (1979), pp. 258-259:

 Q: Among all the interpretations of SOLARIS, the one which probably
 caused the greatest uproar was put forward by the Soviet director
 Tarkovski when he made a film based on your book.  What is your
 assessment of this film?
 
 A: The problem is that I am not familiar with the film which Tarkovski
 made.  I didn't see it.  Although I did have a chance to read the
 screenplay, I still don't know if the final version was filmed to it.
 My remarks, therefore, are not aimed at any particulars but rather
 toward the discussions and consultations with Tarkovski, about certain
 matters of principle and the new protagonist which Tarkovski wanted to
 introduce into the film.  Tarkovski and I had the most serious
 difference of opinion concerning the issue on the whole, the footing
 on which the major idea was based.  For me, SOLARIS is basically a
 tragic gap between the act of cognizance as an endless and insatiable
 curiosity which conditions behavior and action, on the one hand, and
 the unconscious subjects--the heroes themselves--intellectually tiny
 and immature beings who strive uselessly to overcome their own
 anthropomorphic limitations, on the other.  In a word, this is a
 gnosseological drama whose focal point is the tragedy of man's
 imperfect machinery for gaining knowledge.  Tarkovski, however, was
 intent on completely different things; as far as I could see, this
 central problem, the problem of cognizance, was not important to him
 and for this reason he placed the emphasis on the moral situation, on
 presenting the cosmos as a place which rejects Man, and the Earth as
 Man's real sanctuary, a place not to be abandoned.  This stand is
 completely different from my own...

From "The Profession of Science Fiction: XV: Answers to a
Questionnaire", translated by Maxim and Dolores Jakubowski,
_Foundation_, no. 15 (1979), pp. 45-46:

 Q: Mosfilms Studios made a version of your novel SOLARIS directed by the
 great Soviet director, Andrei Tarkovsky; this film, while it certainly
 makes the sort of departures from the printed script necessitated by
 translation from one medium to another, is probably the finest
 expression so far of science fiction cinema.  Yet we hear you refused
 to see the film.  Is this so?  If so, what reason do you offer for
 such curiously incurious behavior?
 
 A: First of all, I did acquaint myself with the script of SOLARIS
 written by Tarvkosky with another Russian scriptwriter (whose name I
 don't recall [Friedrich Gorenstein (MJ)]).  This script proved a
 rather unpleasant surprise to me.  In the long prologue that takes
 place on Earth, it introduces Kelvin's family and undue importance is
 given to his old mother.  The mother's character symbolizes his family
 ties, but also the Motherland, Mother Earth, and this has very strong
 connotations in Russian folklore; as far as I was concerned, Kelvin's
 family connections were of little interest and should not have been
 bothered with in SOLARIS.  After lengthy discussions, I managed to get
 rid of most of Kelvin's family in the script.  But by then I knew for
 certain that Tarkovsky's film vision of SOLARIS and mine were quite
 different.  I was expecting a visualization of the "Drama of
 Cognizance", seen as a contrast between the images of "home, sweet
 Earth" and the "Cold Cosmos", a drama in which the characters
 affecting the men in the Station originate from the ocean and
 symbolize the antagonism between the vast open spaces of the planet
 and the small enclosed Station.  Unfortunately Tarkovsky took sides
 and favoured "home, sweet Earth" against the "Cold Cosmos".  For a
 drama of cognizance in which people, the envoys from Earth, keep on
 struggling with the enigma that cannot be solved by the human mind,
 Tarkovsky substituted a moral drama *par excellence*, which in no way
 relates to the problem of cognizance and its extremes.  For Tarkovsky,
 the most important facet was Kelvin's problem of "guilt and
 punishment", just as in a Dostoyevsky book.  I later saw fragments of
 the first part of the film when it was shown on television in Poland
 and what I saw confirmed my negative opinion of the adaptation.  What
 was important for Tarkovsky in the film left me quite indifferent, and
 vice-versa.  At any rate, there were many discussions about the film
 in Russia and this difference between our respective points of view
 was well summarized by the cosmonaut Feoktistov.

From "An Interview with Stanislaw Lem" [done in May 1981], by Raymond
Federman, _Science-Fiction Studies_ vol. 10, no. 1 (1983), pp. 9-10:

 Q: What is your feeling about the way the cinema deals with SF, the
 way it presents the unknown in the universe?
 
 A: Oh, it's bad... horrible.  I used to be interested in such films,
 but then I stopped watching them.  I am, of course, always ready to
 change my opinion if something good comes along.  But so far nothing
 like that has happened, and I do not see any signs that it is going to
 change.  The general rule seems to be that things that are of the
 least intellectual and artistic value are the most likely to be made
 into a movie.  The situation in the Western cinema is that the film
 industry, the film producers, regard the public as a huge mass of
 fools who should not be disturbed, discouraged, surprised, frightened
 by any really new, original, unconventional depiction of the future,
 or of anything.  This is not only true of cinema, but of most SF.

As usual Lem pulls no punches...  But really, I can't think of any
film that is to cinematic SF what the novel SOLARIS is to literary SF.

From "An Interview with Stanislaw Lem", by Peter Engel with John
Sigda, _The Missouri Review_ vol. XII no. 2 (1984), p. 225:

 Q: I was wondering what you thought of the film version of SOLARIS?
 
 A: In '65, in Moscow, Tarkovsky and I had a conflict of a serious
 nature because I did not agree to his screenplay for SOLARIS.  I
 didn't even want to see the picture.  I only saw it four years later,
 on TV.  It's a controversial story.  In general, I was scared off from
 the film business, and ever since I have been rather unwilling to seel
 any film rights because as an author you lose all control.  Between
 the author and the director there must be a spiritual harmony, a
 similar approach to film and literature.  There must be no pressure
 and no interference on the part of the producer.  In my opinion most
 science-fiction films--STAR WARS, for example--are very poor, sort of
 a cocktail made from several leitmotifs.  And there's not only the
 director and the producer but also others, and at best you can only
 withdraw your name.  So I'd rather stay away from this type of
 business.  Life is too short.

Is anyone still reading this?  (If so, send me some mail, you must be
a real fanatic...)

Ed Price              (not Tim Worsely)
eprice@sql.sybase.com (not wildman@...)