Revisiting Solaris
Revisiting Solaris
Along with Donatas Banionis, Deimantas Narcevicius sought and found the actor who
played Kelvin, the main character in Tarkovsky’s famous 1972 filming of Solaris
based on the novel by Stanislaw Lem. Banionis now lives near Vilnius in Lithuania,
the home town of Narcevicius. In numerous conversations between the two, the idea
arose to re-film the quintessence of this legendary science-fiction film in a modern
form and, most importantly, with Deimantas Narcevicius stylistic language. The
result is a kind of film collage. Narcevicius shows, between black and white
landscape photography shot in the 19th century in the area around Anapa on the Krim,
documentary sequences of a former Russian television station that seem, on their
part, surreal in their pure architecture.
(The building has, in the meantime, been
demolished.) The old figure of the silent actor, Donatas Banionis, is at the centre
of the sparse action, where Deimantas Narcevicius himself appears as a character.
Revisit
ing Solaris thus seems to present a film visit to surreal places on a different
planet that is nevertheless thoroughly realistic.
Deimantas Narcevicius was born in Lithuania in 1964 and works in Vilnius. Since the
1990s his films and videos have received international recognition. In 2003 he
represented Lithuania at the Venice Biennale. He participated in the exhibition
Utopia Station in the Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2004. In 2006, his work could be
seen at a solo exhibition in the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst in
Leipzig and in conjunction with the DAAD at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin.
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