In the New Polish Cinema section of the CiakPolska Film Festival, on Wednesday 19 November, Polish director Kuba Mikurda presented his mid-length film of 2023 Solaris Mon Amour, winner of the best short film award at UnArchive Found Footage Fest 2024. We met Mikurda just before the screening.
Born in 1981, Mikurda intertwines philosophy, psychology and cinema, as a scholar and professional. He is passionate about images as a child, when he was fantasizing by browsing a volume on the lexicon of science fiction films of the 1970s. Losing in the frames of the films tried to imagine the rest. Solaris Mon Amour is his third job, preceded by Love Express: The Disappearence of Walerian Borowczyk (2018) and Escape to the Silver Globe (2021). Two elements that share this short film are Poland, through its history and its characters, and the documentary genre. Although the latter seems to be close to him: “I wasn’t a big fan of documentaries and I don’t know if I am now. In Poland the most famous ones are of observation: you find a character and follow it with the room. I think I’m too shy about that. I am more interested in this subtle line between documentary and fiction and how it is possible to graft fiction elements in the documentary“. In Love Espress tells of the erotic and irreverent filmmaker Walerian Borowczyk, and in Escape to the Silver Globe of the complex genesis of the filming of On the Silver Globe of the always Polish Żu:awski: the philology and the interview are the main tools of Mikurda. “When Solaris Mon Amour arrived, I didn’t know through what kind I was telling the story. On the one hand there is the documentary because I use archive material, because he tells about Lem and some facts of his biography, and also of my own experience. At the same time the narrative is pure fiction. I think it’s a very adventurous way not to take a choice, mix genres and see what happens.”.
Despite what could be easily imagined, the Solaris mentioned by Mikurda is not the 1972 film of Russian Tarkovsky, but the 1961 book by Polish writer Stanis.aw Lem. Poliedrico as Mikurda, Lem, celeberrimo in Poland, less in the rest of Europe, is a man of the twentieth century (in the most traumatic sense of the term) and passes from the study of medicine to do the mechanic, until he becomes passionate about astronauts. He becomes a prolific and compulsive writer, especially of science fiction works. A science fiction that, in particular at the cinema, is evidently dominated by the American imagination. “Lem’s view is special. It is a ‘cold and hard’ science fiction. As a doctor, Lem seems to have this kind of attitude to communicate with a scientific method, drawing the future in a meticulous way with a scientific and technological construction“. The plot of the transposition of Tarkovsky is not far from that literary one of Lem: Solaris is a planet still unknown to humans but devoted to them in a macabre and illusory way. The protagonist psychologist Kelvin reaches the planet to see in person what is wrong and that drives the astronauts mad, and finds the dead wife suicidal years earlier. If at first he gets scared, then he wonders whether this is not the world in which they can finally come back to love.
“Solaris for me is a kind of sacred text, in a philosophical sense. It is a book about the unknown, about what the human being does not know, about the limits of our understanding. When I started working on Solaris Mon Amour I left the novel. I didn’t revisit Tarkovsky’s transposition and I didn’t want to do it because I thought if that was the goal, maybe it would become too much inspiration. I really wanted to go inside and deeply into the novel“. What affects Mikurda is the memory and its removed and how somehow a trauma, of any kind, if it is not expressed it can re-emerge. This is why he always emphasizes that perhaps it is not a case, from a historical point of view, that in 1959, when Lem began to compose the novel, Hiroshima Mon Amour of Resnais, in which it is possible to identify similar themes. At this point the skin of Mikurda’s film can only be the archive material, which because maybe forgotten between the shelves and the databases is precisely why it is removed. Mikurda addressed images of the Sixties, chronologically faithful to the period in which Lem devoted himself to the novel. There are spaceships, buttons, departures; there is Harey, the “replicant” wife of Kelvin, grieved to be only the fruit of Solaris. There is also Solaris, who in the words of Lem is inafferable, aqueous – so much so that it is also called Ocean. The other instrument, equally removed, is the first radiodrama from the novel, which gives the word to the images.
The existential science fiction of Lem, according to Mikurda, is an obvious pretext to talk about the impossibility of the human being to accept the senselessness that permeates life. Death, violence, war, from a personal mourning to the history of a people, of a country, Poland. The memory “is in everyone and you have to find a way to deal with it or it could be a problem. Sometimes people are sensitive, fragile and this knowledge, this story is really difficult to deal with. This is one of the reasons for the film. People try to keep their memories in mind, some are painful and involuntary so they don’t remember what they want and can’t get rid of them when they want. They appear and persecute them against their will and this is the definition of post-traumatic memory, which is involuntary. You don’t want these memoirs, you don’t want them back, but they come back. It is an interesting aspect to reflect on. How can we be persecuted by our past, which is painful, and return as before?”.
L’articolo CiakPolska 2025: meeting with Kuba Mikurda proviene da SentieriSelvaggi.
