Solaris (1972) d: Andrei Tarkovsky

I finally watched Solaris this afternoon, two decades after being put off it by the loudness of a red-bearded science fiction fan who discovered me in my college's graduate common room watching Doctor Who - specifically Terror of the Zygons - on UK Gold at midnight. As realised, it's a finely-engineered story of the limits of human knowledge of worlds within and without individual consciousness and conscience - there is some curious interchangeability of those words between the dubbed English soundtrack and the English subtitles which is consistent with the theme - the barriers of communication between genders and between practitioners of different disciplines, of the painful inevitability of interconnection (not for nothing is one of the scientists on Solaris station a cyberneticist) and of repeated patterns in life and whether or not humanity can act on new knowledge. There is some oddly discontinuous editing independent of Tarkovsky's disconcerting trickery with the camera to change narrative view, but he's not the only director of the period to demand that viewers exert themselvs to keep up.