Sculpting in time . . .

Brueghel's art has been "a presence" in modern cinema, with Lars Von Trier and Andrei Tarkovsky, among others, translating Brueghel's approach to imagery in cinematic work. Cinema for Andrei Tarkovsky is Sculpting in Time and summarized in the statement, "The dominant, all-powerful factor of the film image is rhythm, expressing the course of time within the frame."

David Hanley writes about the "Levitation" scene in Andrei Tarkovsky's film Solaris, in his essay on The Natural and Modern Worlds in Solaris:

It is in the levitation sequence that the interaction between Hari, the replica of a human, the replications of human experience (which is a possible view of painting, music and film) and Kris, the human, reaches a climax.

LINK > The "Levitation" scene from Solaris on YouTube

There are a series of cuts between Kris watching Hari, Hari staring at Breughel’s “Hunters in the Snow,” . . .

. . . camera pans of close-up details of that painting and flashbacks of the home movie of Kris as a child in a snowy landscape that they watched earlier.

Suddenly, the period of weightlessness begins.

First candles begin to float, then the chandelier ripples with sound, and Kris and Hari begin to float as the Bach Prelude heard at the beginning of the film and during the showing of the home movie returns, an evocative work of art “associated with Earth and its values – nature, art, love” .

As they levitate, the camera cuts twice more to “Hunters in the Snow” as Hari also begins to take in the other Breughel paintings. It seems to be a moment of transcendence, even exaltation, in a way reminiscent of the balloon flight at the beginning of Andrei Rublev (1966). And when it is done, they relax on the ground with Kris’ head on Hari’s lap, and it is almost as if they have just had sex. There is then a shot of the swirling Solaris ocean as electronic noises rise and overpower the Bach. This is followed by the sound of a crash and a sudden cut to the smoking vial, as Hari has just tried to commit suicide.

A way of reading this scene is that through the evocative power of Breughel’s snowscape, Hari is able to relate it to the home movie of young Kris in the snow, and she is able to understand what being human means and to fully love Kris. As Hyman writes, “when she turns to Kris, we realize through Breughel she has been able to apprehend what it is to be a human being on earth”. The shot of the Solaris ocean in tumultuous activity which follows reinforces this, as if the synapses of a giant brain are popping frantically as it assimilates information. That Hari’s understanding of what it is to be human is followed immediately by a suicide attempt is not a contradiction. Johnson and Petrie see it as an act of love, that the “new Hari’s sacrifice is a redemptive one from which Kris is able to learn and benefit, rather than a gesture of despair,” which the original Hari’s suicide had been. Dillon has a different interpretation. Relating it to his reading of Solaris as a reflexive meditation on cinema, with the relationship of Kris and Hari analogous to that between audience and film, he suggests the “levitation is beautiful but temporary. Their time together is really one manner of disorientation after another . . . This scene does not imply the “naturalness” and “timeliness” of art, but instead the ghostly artifice of art”. He goes on to write that “the next sequence begins with the revelation that Hari has drunk liquid oxygen, further eroding any idealistic reading of the levitation”. This is a problematic reading because it ignores what is expressed in so many of Tarkovsky’s films, that for love, “the meaning . . . is in sacrifice”. Hari’s ability to make the ultimate sacrifice is a sign of hope because it proves that even on the space station, and therefore in the soulless contemporary society, it is possible to act as a human, and that this gaining of humanity is possible through interaction with art. That it requires a non-human (Hari) to instruct a human (Kris) on being human adds a layer of irony to the situation. Tarkovsky’s intention seems similar to how he describes a transcendent moment from Cries and Whispers (1973, Ingmar Bergman) where Bach is also used, that “even this illusory flight gives the audience the possibility of catharsis, of that spiritual cleaning and liberation which is attained through art”.

Director Lars von Trier also uses Brueghel's paintings in his film Melancholia (2011). This was used as a reference to Tarkovsky's Solaris, a movie with related themes.