{film} – Page 10 – { feuilleton }

Stanisław Lem, 1996

The Polish writer has been in my thoughts for the past week, now that I’ve finally got round to reading Solaris while also having watched The Congress, Ari Folman’s adaptation of Lem’s The Futurological Congress. Reading Solaris was an interesting experience when the story is so familiar from the Tarkovsky adaptation, which I’ve watched numerous times, and the Soderbergh adaptation, which has risen in my estimation in recent years. The novel was fascinating for all the detail about the mysterious planet which the films omit, while also being somewhat old-fashioned considering it was published in 1961. Lem was apparently dismissive of Anglophone science fiction but by the 1950s the treatment of futuristic technology by British and American writers was increasingly sophisticated, even if the psychology and characterisation in their stories still lagged behind literature in general. Lem’s future timeline is like something out of the 1940s, where humanity can travel to distant star systems yet the spacecraft are the cigar-shaped rockets familiar from the covers of pulp magazines. In the station orbiting Solaris the trio of scientists have endless scientific discussions, the video screens are small and monochrome, and there’s even a mention of something being powered by valves.

Solaris may be Lem’s most popular novel but it doesn’t warrant much discussion in this Polish TV documentary after Lem has mentioned his exasperated arguments with Andrei Tarkovsky when the film was being planned. Tomasz Kaminski’s profile runs through Lem’s life mostly via its subject’s reminiscences, although there is occasional comment from Lem’s friends and colleagues in the Polish literary world. The film doesn’t offer a great deal of context either but it does provide a portrait of a prickly character who I’ve never seen speaking at length before. I found it useful to rewatch the Quay Brothers’ biographical film after this one, a shorter piece which fills in a few gaps in Lem’s history while also showing the degree to which his early life was dictated by the upheavals of the Nazi occupation and the Communist era.

There are currently two versions of Kaminski’s film at YouTube, only one of which has English subtitles, and very crude ones at that. Better subtitles may be found at Opensubs but to use those you’ll have to download the video first. 4k Video Downloader Plus is my tool of choice.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• 11 Preliminary Orbits Around Planet Lem by the Brothers Quay
• Maska: Stanisław Lem and the Brothers Quay
• Ikarie XB 1
• Golem, 2012

Tuning Instruments, a film by Jerzy Kucia

Back in February I posted a link to Jerzy Kucia’s first animated short, The Return. Since then I’ve been watching more Kucia films on Essential Polish Animation, a newly-released two-disc set that presents restored versions of 27 short films in high-definition. Tuning Instruments (2000) is a later addition to the Kucia oeuvre that isn’t on the Radiance collection. It’s also quite different to all the other films I’ve seen by this director, Kucia being one of those animators who tended to vary his stylistic and technical approaches from one film to the next.

The film does at least share a mood with some of Kucia’s later animations, a dream-like quality where the play of successive images is more important than any kind of structured narrative. Animation is an ideal medium for representing the shifting terrain of dreams yet the opportunity to do so remains under-explored. Quotes from Kucia in a biographical article at Culture.pl suggest that, for this director at least, the subjectivity of memory is more of a concern than the elusiveness of dreams. Tuning Instruments begins with a man doing exercises in a room. This sequence is followed by a motorcycle journey presented as a scrolling view of traffic and windows, after which the initial protagonist is forgotten in favour of a continually changing parallax landscape that leads us to a crow-filled wood in a misty countryside. I’ve no idea how Kucia and his assistants achieved many of their effects. The Culture.pl article says he mostly used drawings on paper yet the images are often overlaid or multiplied in a way that disguises their origin. Best to immerse yourself in the flow of imagery than wonder how it was achieved or what it all means

Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Return, a film by Jercy Kucia

Weekend links 788

The Witches’ Flight (1798) by Francisco Goya.

• At Wormwoodiana: Mark Valentine reviews the latest book from Tartarus, a biography of T. Lobsang Rampa by R.B. Russell. You don’t hear much about Rampa today but, as Mark says, old copies of his books have for many years been common sights on the Spiritualism/Occult shelves of British bookshops. Rampa wasn’t a Tibetan monk as he claimed in his first book, The Third Eye, but a very non-Tibetan Englishman, Cyril Henry Hoskin, whose stories about his early years evolved following press investigations into a claim of being possessed by the spirit of a Tibetan doctor named Tuesday Lobsang Rampa. Hoskin maintained the Rampa persona for the rest of his life, writing many more books about the mystic East, as well as accounts of his contact with the planet Venus and his psychic connection with his Siamese cat. The Rampa books were very popular in the 1960s—my mother had three or four of them—despite continual accusations that their author was a fraud.

• New music: The Hadronic Seeress And Other Wyrd Tales by The Wyrding Module; Master Builder by Xeeland; Resurrection Of The Foghorns by Everyday Dust.

• The twelfth installment of Smoky Man’s exploration of The Bumper Book of Magic has been posted (in Italian) at (quasi), and in English at Alan Moore World.

• Rivers of galaxies: Mark Neyrinck on the cosmic web and other metaphors that describe the largest structures in the Universe.

• “Curation becomes subservient to metrics.” Derek Walmsley on how Spotify distorts genre histories.

• At Spoon & Tamago: Erica Ward presents Tokyo as a living, breathing organism.

• At the BFI: Chloe Walker chooses 10 great films by one-time directors.

• At Unquiet Things: How Yuko Shimizu rewires ancient stories.

• Steven Heller’s font of the month is Jana Thork.

• RIP Ozzy Osbourne.

• Web Weaver (1974) by Hawkwind | The Web (1985) by Cabaret Voltaire | Web (1992) by Brian Eno

Weekend links 787

Noonday Heat (1903) by Henry Scott Tuke.

• It may still be summer but the Halloween film reissues are already being announced. This year Radiance Films is presenting two features by Belgian director Harry Kümel: the lesbian vampire drama Daughters of Darkness (UHD+BD | BD), and Malpertuis, Kümel’s adaptation of the Jean Ray fantasy novel. This week I’ve been watching Polish animated films on Radiance’s just-released Essential Polish Animation.

• At Colossal: Dennis Lehtonen documents a pair of immense icebergs paying a visit to a small Greenland village.

• Coming soon from Strange Attractor: ShoreZone, nine short stories by dramatist David Rudkin.

The problem is that the extraterrestrials that xenolinguists claim to seek are often beings imagined to have technologies, minds or languages similar to ours. They are projections of ourselves. This anthropomorphism risks blinding us to truly alien communicators, who are radically unlike us. If there are linguistic beings on planets such as TOI-700 d or Kepler-186f, or elsewhere in our galaxy, their modes of communication may be utterly incomprehensible to us. How, then, can xenolinguistics face its deficit of imagination?

Perhaps by re-engaging its speculative origins. Through the mode of thought characteristic of science fiction, the science of alien language might yet learn to open itself to every conceivable degree of otherness, even the possibility of beings that share nothing with us but the cosmos.

Eli K P William on problems in xenolinguistics

• DJ Food’s latest foray into pop psychedelia is a look at the psych influence on the teen romance comics of the late 1960s: part 1 | part 2 | part 3.

• Mixes of the week: DreamScenes – July 2025 at Ambientblog, and Bleep Mix #305 by Adam Wiltzie.

• “The hot tar splashed everywhere.” Dale Berning Sawa on Derek Jarman’s Black Paintings.

• At Unquiet Things: Meet your friendly neighbourhood art book author & book seller.

• Winners of the 2025 Big Picture natural world photography competition.

• At the BFI: Rory Doherty chooses 10 great heatwave films.

• The closest images ever taken of the Sun’s atmosphere.

• Kae Tempest’s favourite records.

• Heat (1983) by Soft Cell | Heatwave (1984) by The Blue Nile | Heatwave (1987) by Univers Zero

Weekend links 786

The Skylark (1850) by Samuel Palmer.

• The latest book from A Year In The Country is Other Worlds: “Searching for far off lands via witchcraft battles, spectral streets, faded visions of the future and the secrets of the stones”.

• At Colossal: The 16th-century artist who created the first compendium of insect drawings.

• New music: Triskaidekaphobia Extd. by Pentagrams Of Discordia; Atamon by Amina Hocine.

• Old music: Cantus Orbis Collection by Cantus Orbis; Resonance by Yumiko Morioka.

• Coming soon from Top Shelf Productions: More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey.

• At the BFI: Miriam Balanescu chooses 10 great British pastoral films.

• The ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 Shortlist.

• Mix of the week: A mix for The Wire by Ben LaMar Gay.

• Jack Barnett’s favourite music.

• Pastoral Symphony (1960) by Richard Maxfield | Pastoral (1975) by Mahavishnu Orchestra | Pastoral Vassant (2018) by Jon Hassell