In 1972, Russian composer and electronic music groundbreaker Eduard Artemiev contributed the score to the left-field science fiction classic Solaris, a film by one of the most critically esteemed and formally rigorous of all directors, Andrei Tarkovsky. Due to the soundtrack’s general unavailability as a standalone object since the film’s release, Artemiev’s achievement has in some respects been shrouded behind Tarkovsky’s considerable reputation. But with Superior Viaduct’s new vinyl issue of the Solaris Original Soundtrack, a truly admirable effort presented with three different handmade covers, the singularity of Artemiev’s success is fully apparent.
Even though he died in 1986 at age 54, the Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky remains one of the greatest of all filmmakers, and one whose stature has steadily risen since his passing. Last year, Sight & Sound, the magazine of the British Film Institute, conducted their once in a decade poll of critics and directors asking for their top ten greatest films, and in the resulting list of 250 movies three Tarkovsky selections, The Mirror, Andrei Rublev, and Stalker, made the top 50.
And amongst great directors, Tarkovsky was also one of the most uncompromising, a quality reflected in the relatively slight number of feature-length works he completed in his lifetime. Beginning with Ivan’s Childhood in 1962 and ending with The Sacrifice in ’86, Tarkovsky finished only seven (though to be fair, it should be noted that he also made three short films and a documentary in addition to writing screenplays, directing for radio and the stage, and even authoring two books, one of them an autobiography.)
But Tarkovsky’s tenacious dedication to his artistic vision is most evident in the actual work, a body of films with a cumulative impact unique from that of any other director. Indeed, he is in many ways an immediate validation (and therefore a cornerstone) of the auteur theory, though his movies are strikingly different from the commercial and mostly Hollywood derived cinema on which the original auteurist writers based their scholarship.
Instead, Tarkovsky remains one of the most challenging and elusive (some would say impenetrable) movie makers to be found in the ranks of that rather vague and in some ways archaic classification known as the “art-film.” Both conventional multiplex fare and the vast majority of so-called indies employ a visual language, specifically an editing structure of quick cuts, that viewers have long taken as a comfortable norm, and against this standard Tarkovsky’s use of long takes, and even more so his avoidance of familiar dramatic tools in service of driving narrative, can result in highly divided reactions.
Some find Tarkovsky’s films, especially those made post Andrei Rublev, to be slow, maddeningly self-indulgent, and utterly lacking in the stuff of traditional cinematic pleasure. And he is for some of these viewers, to coin an unfortunate and somewhat annoying term of recent origin, a “cultural vegetable,” i.e. his movies exist not to be enjoyed but instead to be watched, if they are actually engaged with at all, because they are deemed by some hazy intellectual elite as being “good for you.”
I say the term is unfortunate because I consider Andrei Tarkovsky to be not only one of my favorite filmmakers but also the source of one of my most cherished movie experiences, namely watching his ’79 masterpiece Stalker in a packed house at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC on a Saturday afternoon in September of 2007.
Obviously not everyone in attendance had as transcendent an experience as I did. But nobody walked out of the free screening, the movie clocking in at over two and a half hours, and as the celluloid wound through the projector much laughter was evident, a response triggered by Tarkovsky’s too seldom discussed sense of humor. Afterwards, it was clear I wasn’t the only one who found the event both enriching and yes, purely pleasurable.
So I call the term “cultural vegetables” onto the carpet as annoying because of the downright spuriousness of its analogy; I don’t know anybody, well, any actual grown-ups anyway, that don’t like vegetables. No, not all vegetables are equally popular, but all healthy adults consume them in a variety of forms. And if in the filmmaker as vegetation universe David Fincher (for one random example, feel free to insert your own) is a well-tossed salad of crisp, fresh ingredients, then Tarkovsky is kinda like okra. Lots of people disdain him for the strange texture and unusual flavor of his films, but for those of us who love him, the reasons are legitimate.
All this might seem a smidge (or a lot) off-topic, since the objet d’art under consideration here isn’t Tarkovsky’s ’72 film Solaris, a slow-craw brain-squeeze sci-fi flick based on a novel by noted Polish author Stanislaw Lem, but the movie’s soundtrack. And while I’ll cop to dwelling a bit outside the main point thus far, I’ll also insist that the above is also very relevant, since it serves to illustrate how deeply I’ve come to consider the films of Andrei Tarkovsky as being the end result of one exceptionally creative entity.
But this also needs some clarification, since as a dyed-in-the-wool auteurist I’ve long realized that in the making of a great film many talented creators strive and cohere in service to one overriding artistic vision (the director’s.) But more germane to the matter at hand, I’ve also known for years that Eduard Artemiev was the composer of the scores for all three of Tarkovsky’s ‘70s works (Solaris, The Mirror and Stalker, the rewards of the filmmaker’s most productive decade in terms of features.)
Up to this point, I’d basically absorbed Artemiev’s achievement as one part of Tarkovsky’s visionary aesthetic. On one hand this might seem something like success, since a composed movie score is made to serve the images that inspire it. And yet the work of a film composer can often take on a life of its own. Think Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, or Angelo Badalamenti.
In the case of Artemiev’s soundtracks, a general scarcity can shoulder some of the blame for my dearth of proper appreciation. After far too long, this is the first official release of the Solaris OST. Yes, there was a previously issued re-recording of the music (in a non-word, meh), but outside of rumored bootlegs or momentarily available file-shares, this is the debut of Artemiev’s inaugural work with Tarkovsky, some forty-one years after it was completed.
However, lack of recordings is only part of the issue. A much bigger element stems from the nature of the work, the majority of which is non-songic in execution, eschewing melody and rhythm for the realms of abstraction and often ambiance. This is by design, since the electronic sounds Artemiev created weren’t intended by Tarkovsky to be recognized as music. Originally, the director wanted the film to feature no music at all.
This is where Artemiev’s influence on the shaping of the film comes into sharp focus. The finished work, in addition to including the composer’s soundscapes, also features variations on Bach’s “Chorale Prelude in F-Minor” played on solo organ, and the idea for integrating orchestral music into the film stemmed directly from the composer. And this is no surprise given Artemiev’s background.
Eduard Nikolaevich Artemiev was born in 1937 and studied at the Moscow Conservatory under Yuri Shaporin. Graduating in 1960, he quickly made the acquaintance of Eugene Murzin, the creator of one the first synthesizers, with their meeting coinciding with Artemiev’s growing restlessness over the compositional strictures of the avant-garde. Soon the composer began executing works on Murzin’s ANS synthesizer (named after Russian occultist Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin.) After Artemiev made drawings onto glass plates, this formidable and now obsolete machine translated them into sound.
From behind the Iron Curtain, Artemiev became one of the trailblazers of electronic music. Amongst the most noted of his early pieces are ‘67’s “Mosaic” and ‘69’s “Twelve Glimpses in the World of Sound.” By the early ‘70s he was working at the Moscow Electronic Studio, a setting that fostered give-and-take between avant-garde artists from a variety of disciplines. Shortly thereafter, Artemiev began his association with Tarkovsky.
The Solaris OST consists of seventeen Movements of varying length. Side one holds the first seven and the flip contains the rest. Instead of beginning in the abstractly electronic zone, Movement One is pure Bach. This is fitting since in the film the orchestral music serves as our planet’s theme, and that’s where the movie begins. The synthesizer passages are the “theme music” of the planet Solaris.
Bach’s piece is emotionally solemn but quite beautiful to the ear, and if it seems odd that an avant-garde schooled electronic music pioneer advocated for the use of centuries-old music in providing the theme for Earth in a film set in a future of ambiguous distance, please consider that many classically trained musicians regard Bach in a manner similar to the way whole heaps of writers hold Shakespeare. To be succinct, way up high on a pedestal.
Come to think of it, the appearance in the film of paintings by Brueghel as well as shots directly inspired by Rembrandt show that Tarkovsky was also in the thrall of a few old masters. And this relationship between the classic and the modern is a huge part of why Solaris endures as a major film, with this circumstance extending, and without the slightest diminishment, to Artemiev’s soundtrack.
That’s not to say that Movements Two through Seven aren’t entirely different in shape than the opening prelude. But what’s also immediately plain is how these six tracks are completely functional in creating an otherworldly theme, and without Tarkovsky’s images lending assistance. While I hold Solaris in very high regard as a film, I’ll confess that it’s been a few years since I watched it.
While a few moments still managed to conjure recollections of images from my last viewing, the tense alien atmosphere is in the end very much Artemiev’s own. And if based upon abstraction rather than melodic motifs, the oft foreboding mood it creates isn’t substantially different from the effects achieved by more traditional film scores. It’s also important to note how devoid of datedness these soundscapes are.
While Solaris is one of the most unusual science fiction films to ever hit screens, it was also something of a stylistic retreat for Tarkovsky. But based on Artemiev’s score, you’d have no idea. Instead of falling victim to off-balance ideas of what the future might sound like, attempts that almost always end up sounding immediately stilted, the composer wisely choose to continue exploring the aural nether regions of his present. In doing so, the music easily avoids becoming a period piece, though it’s also not easily comparable to anything contemporary (then or now.)
The recurring use of Bach throughout the soundtrack is somewhat remindful of the employment of classical music in Stanley Kubrick’s two future set films, 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, but the similarity is only one of surface. Movement Twelve is especially noteworthy for how it combines the strains of Bach (with exquisite vibe playing only increasing its already gorgeous qualities) and Artemiev’s sound creation together into a brief and very intriguing whole.
And Movement Sixteen is even more fascinating. It begins with resurfacing of the Bach, and after a detour into a short, bizarre snippet of an extremely shaky male voice the ear is treated to a gradual surge of Modernist Classical grandeur that’s downright astounding, the piece culminating with intensity worthy of the great Iannis Xenakis.
So, I must say that I’m very happy I resisted the urge to watch Solaris again in preparation for this write-up, for a close viewing would have inevitably channeled the record’s success into my longstanding high regard for Tarkovsky’s work. Obviously some association is unavoidable, but hearing it with at least some distance allowed Artemiev’s brilliance to really shine through. It’s also important to note that Eduard Artemiev’s career post-Tarkovsky found him investigating some very interesting ideas.
For one thing, he began integrating progressive rock into his later compositions. This openness to new possibilities is in evidence in his most prominent work, a piece commissioned by the Olympic committee for the opening ceremony of the 1980 Moscow Games. “Ode to the Herald of Good” has been described as full-on electronic prog featuring three choirs, a rock group (Artemiev’s own outfit Boomerang), the Melodiya Jazz Band, and Russia’s State Orchestra of Cinematography. It’s most definitely on my list for future listening.
The Solaris OST will clearly be of interest to a select audience, but like the films of Andrei Tarkovsky it’s far from any kind of “cultural vegetable.” It surely requires attention to fully absorb, but it’s not severe, and with time spent its humanity shines through. These creations of Artemiev have cut through four decades of relative obscurity from under the deserved rep of a major filmmaker, and having them available now in a legitimate, if understandably limited, edition is one of the musical treats of 2013.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
A
