Solaris
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Despite being one of Andrei Tarkovsky's most successful films, Solaris (1972) was the one he most disliked. This dismissal of his most generically marked film has often been accepted by those quick to embrace the image of Tarkovsky as a transcendent artist rising above the politics of the Soviet film industry and the trappings of genre to produce personal works of art.
Going against such currents, Mark Bould instead treats Solaris as the product of a genre as well as the work of a skilled film-maker. He teases out Tarkovsky's fascination with Stanislaw Lem, on whose novel the film was based, and also considers Steven Soderbergh's 2002 adaptation.
Lively and revealing, Bould's examination situates Solaris within the Russian and global cultures of the fantastic, to which Tarkovsky contributed three major science fiction films.
This special edition features original cover artwork by Matthew Shlian.
Mark Bould
Mark Bould is a Reader in Film and Literature at UWE Bristol. He is the author of four books of film theory, and has been awarded both the Science Fiction Research Association's Pilgrim Lifetime Achievement Award for Critical Contributions to the Study of Science Fiction and Fantasy (2016) and the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts Distinguished Scholarship Award (2019). He has written for Big Echo, Boston Review, Electric Sheep, Fabrikzeitung, Film International, Los Angeles Review of Books, Mithila Review, Salvage and Vector. He is a former editor of Science Fiction Film and Television, a journal he founded, and of Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory. He co-founded and co-edits the Studies in Global Science Fiction monograph series for Palgrave/Macmillan. He also serve on the advisory/associate boards of fourteen journals and monograph series.He regularly gives keynotes, research presentations and public lectures at academic and public venues around the world.
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