The Golden Era of Angst SF Cinema
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw some “pure” examples of Angst Science Fiction on the big screen. Some of these films are outstanding and have even attained the status of legendary. These examples have become even more noteworthy and valuable when one is aware of even a fraction of the virtual sea of lower-grade films of the genre during that era and earlier which cannot match these following films for intelligence, quality, and nuanced themes.
This statement remains true even though these much more limited cinematic efforts often contain many of the same elements as the pure Angst SF films. These common themes include the following: Science that ranges from bad to virtually non-existent, messages focused on the threat of nuclear war, the dangers of artificially induced radiation, and how we all need to better understand each other and get along.
I am going to focus on what I consider to be four “pure” examples of Angst SF as I have defined it in this essay from that time. They are, in order of their cinematic release dates:
- Planet of the Apes (1968) – with 2001: A Space Odyssey as its opening act.
- Silent Running (1972)
- Solaris (1972)
- Dark Star (1974)
Not only do these films deserve their own recognition, but they are also the epitomes of how Angst SF serves as far more than just mere forms of entertainment.
2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes
The year 1968 was a dynamic one for humanity, to put it mildly. In addition to all the political turmoil that took place in that singular span of a solar orbit, our species also made its first in-person movement away from Earth: The three-man crew of Apollo 8 became the first human beings to reach the vicinity of our Moon, circling it ten times in late December before returning home.
Nineteen sixty-eight was also a landmark for some of the greatest science fiction films ever made. Considered the best of the genre to this day, 2001: A Space Odyssey changed how people thought of science fiction by throwing a curve ball at nearly every expected trope of the genre.
Although its depiction of science and space technology was well-researched and top notch, with just a few deliberate exceptions for dramatic purposes – such as keeping the pre-Apollo artistic “tradition” of a craggy and rough lunar landscape – 2001 also contains prime examples of Angst SF: A long space mission that no one comes back from (although one astronaut does return to Earth, just not in his original human form), an AI that is considered at least neurotic if not insane and tries to take over the ship and its mission (however, it can be argued that HAL 9000 was only utilizing extreme machine logic; see here: http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0095.html), and mysterious alien devices and motives that have been manipulating human evolution since the beginning of our existence as primitive hominids in Africa over four million year ago.
COMMENT: Although the characters who ventured into the void in 2001: A Space Odyssey did not display the kind of existential terror continually witnessed in Aniara – with the very notable exception of USS Discovery astronaut Dave Bowman, but only when he plunged into the Stargate via the second much larger Monolith orbiting Jupiter – the “cosmic abyss” was certainly ever present and evident in Kubrick’s masterpiece, as this video delves into:
Released in the same year as 2001 was another American film which would also go on to have a lasting effect on human culture and society: Planet of the Apes, the first of the four pure Angst SF films of the golden era I referred to earlier.
Like any member in good standing of this subgenre, Planet of the Apes and its subsequent franchise films and television series utilized space science and technology only as a means to its end, which was pointed social commentary.
The relativistic starship that got our human astronauts to what they first think is an exoplanet circling a star in the constellation of Orion the Hunter some 320 light years from Earth left from Cape Kennedy in Florida in the distant future year of… 1972!
We are never told about the propulsion method of the vessel, nor does it really matter in this context: The ship just had to look plausible enough from certain vantage points to get our protagonists where they needed to be to move the plot along. In fact, we never even see the entire vessel throughout its screen time in the early parts of the film: In particular, the engine section at the ship’s stern.
At the beginning of the Planet of the Apes, as mission commander George Taylor (played by actor Charlton Heston, 1923-2008) is preparing to join his fellow explorers in suspended animation before their long journey in both space and time, has these existential comments to add into the official mission logs he is recording…
COMMENT: This next dialog is from the shooting script draft dated May 5, 1967, rather than the final released version. It contains more details, along with two examples of someone not caring (or realizing?) enough to do just a little astronomical homework.
“One final thought – nothing scientific, purely personal. Seen from up here, everything looks different… Time bends and space is boundless. It squashes a man’s ego. He begins to feel like no more than a mote in the eye of eternity. And he is nagged by a question: What if anything, will greet us on the end of man’s first journey to a star?
“Are we to believe that throughout these thousands [!] of galaxies, these millions [!] of stars, only one, that speck of solar dust we call Earth, has been graced – or cursed – by human life? (pause) I have to doubt it.”
After the crew has splashlanded on their new world (their starship unexpectedly comes down in a lake, sinking in it shortly after the three surviving astronauts escape to a nearby shore via a bright yellow life raft), Taylor is accused by his companion John Landon of thinking that “life on Earth was meaningless” and that he “despised people.” Based on these character traits, Landon concludes that Taylor only joined this deep space mission to run away from human society and their home planet.
Taylor corrects his cohort’s interpretation of his actions:
“No, no. It’s not like that, Landon. I’m a seeker too. But my dreams aren’t like yours. I can’t help thinking somewhere in the Universe there has to be something better than man. Has to be.”
These story ingredients and more lead up to one of the most famous plot twists in film history: The lone surviving astronaut, Taylor, eventually discovers to his shock and horror that he has been on Earth the whole time, only several thousand years in the future!
Not long after they went on their mission in the late Twentieth Century, humanity had the global thermonuclear war Taylor always feared would eventually happen, destroying civilization and turning most of the descendants of the survivors into little better than brute animals. Consequently, other primates such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutangs rose up in both intelligence and dominance and inherited Earth, effectively creating a planet governed by apes.
Taylor does not find the superior alien intelligences he long hoped for. Instead, he only finds other terrestrial primates who are now in charge of the world he came from. To add insult to injury, they retained many of the similar and often negative traits that Taylor did not care for from his fellow contemporary humans.
Even in the first sequel of the original series, Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), the intelligent bipeds Taylor (and later another time-traveling Twentieth Century astronaut named Brent) encounters in the underground ruins of New York City (which the apes only know of as the Forbidden Zone) are human-descended mutants with incredible psychic powers but are otherwise disfigured both physically and mentally from their long generations in an irradiated subterranean world.
These mutants worship a nuclear bomb encased in a golden missile, mixing in traditional Roman Catholic rites (their “god” is kept in the remains of St. Patrick’s Cathedral) with their own unique interpretations. A famous line from their religious mass is “Glory be to the Bomb and to the Holy Fallout – As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be; world without end. Amen.”
We never learn if any intelligent extraterrestrials exist in the cinematic universe of Planet of the Apes, for we only keep coming back to Earth and its various native residents in an endless cycle. The wider Cosmos offers no clear answers to humanity here.
Silent Running
On this first day of a new century, we humbly beg forgiveness and dedicate these last forests of our once beautiful nation to the hope that they will one day return and grace our foul Earth. Until that day, may God bless these gardens and the brave men who care for them.
– The opening narration of Silent Running.
In March of 1972, Universal Pictures released the second representative “pure” Angst SF film of the golden era: Silent Running. As required, the science and technology of Silent Running are often way off from reality and the overriding social message is about as subtle as an avalanche. Nevertheless, this film works on multiple levels.
By the start of the Twenty-First Century, modern humanity has mistreated Earth’s ecosystem so badly that all its remaining flora and fauna have been relocated out to the vicinity of the planet Saturn aboard a fleet of converted space cargo freighters inside a collection of transparent biodomes. The plan is to one day be able to return all these surviving plants and animals to Earth and “grace our foul” planet with them before it is too late.
One might think that Earth would be unable to support human life after losing its biosphere, yet apparently in this reality that is where most of our species still lives. According to the film, the planet’s global average temperature is 75 degrees Fahrenheit, or 23.8 degrees Celsius. Deadly diseases have been almost eradicated, along with societal ills such as poverty and unemployment.
It is little wonder then that, with one very notable exception, the characters we do meet are quite content with their existence, a society that our not-without-questions hero describes as a place where “everything is the same” and that “all the people are exactly the same.” He also adds that “there is no more beauty, and there’s no more imagination. And there are no frontiers left to conquer. And you know why? Only one reason why… nobody cares.”
Civilization on Earth in Silent Running must, by necessity, be an all-around very artificial one for humans to survive and live there. As an indication, in the film we learn that most of the main characters prefer to consume processed synthetic food provided from a dispensing unit rather than eat something grown naturally in the biodome soil.
Silent Running focuses on one such spaceship in particular named Valley Forge. Of the four human crewmembers onboard, three are beyond bored with their tending duties out by Saturn and cannot wait until they can return to Earth in six months’ time when their work shifts are up.
The other member of the crew, one Freeman Lowell (played by actor Bruce Dern), is the polar opposite of his comrades: Lowell is the only one who genuinely grasps what their home world has lost and cares deeply that the surviving organisms they tend (well, he tends, truthfully) are transplanted back on Earth as originally planned. Lowell is also convinced that his professional knowledge of botany, plus eight years of dedication and devotion to this effort, will make him the logical choice for director of the federal parks and forest system once those in charge reestablish this organization.
Unfortunately for Lowell and the remaining terrestrial ecosystem, the fleet receives orders one morning “to abandon, then nuclear destruct all the forests… and return our ships to commercial service.”
As an extra layer of heavy symbolism, the biodomes are not just to be ejected into space and either destroyed or merely abandoned to the void, they are to be obliterated with nuclear devices.
While Lowell’s three companions gleefully go about setting up the demise of the domes, our botanist decides to take drastic action: He kills the three men and takes off in the Valley Forge away from the rest of the fleet (who have apparently detonated all their biodomes with no similar incidents of rebellion) with the last remaining dome still attached to the long vessel.
The rest of the film involves Lowell trying to keep his sanity and assuaging his guilt for murdering his coworkers as he plunges deeper into space alone – except for several robot workers called drones he has renamed and reprogrammed to serve as both artificial friends and caretakers of the dome life – in a desperate attempt to save the very last forest from Earth.
Eventually another spaceship from the fleet finds the Valley Forge. Realizing they will destroy the final biodome and arrest him for his perceived crimes, Lowell ejects the dome into interplanetary space with a single drone to maintain the life within it. Then, using the remaining nuclear charges, Lowell blows up Valley Forge and himself.
In the final scene of Silent Running, the last biodome is shown slowly drifting away from us into the starry darkness. The surviving drone, which Lowell named Dewey, poignantly maintains the surrounding plants and animals of Earth as they head into an unknown future. The scene is accompanied by song lyrics from musician and activist Joan Baez (born 1941): “Tell them/It’s not too late/Cultivate/One by one/Tell them/To harvest/And rejoice/In the sun.”
Is it too late for the human race in the universe depicted by Silent Running? We are left to wonder and hope: Will the flora and fauna of the last biodome survive long enough to be found by future humans? Will these descendants understand and care enough to preserve this ecosystem and reintroduce it to its native world? Or will there even be any humans left in this future scenario at all, let alone any who might one day come across the dome in space?
Silent Running’s hard-hitting message was aimed at its contemporary audience, who were just starting to become truly and collectively aware as a society of the environmental problems they and their planet were facing from centuries of mismanagement by industrial civilization. Aniara took a similar approach on the same subject nearly fifty years later, with a space-faring humanity evacuating an Earth devastated by accelerated climate change, destined for a very artificial existence on Mars.
When I wrote my second of two essays on Silent Running one decade apart from each other (see the links to them below), I wondered if having the last plants and animals of Earth being preserved and relatively safe in deep space would make audiences more appreciative of space utilization for serving as a final refuge for our ecosystem. Or would it rather merely reinforce certain demographics standard views of space, that it is not “the kind of place to raise your kids” or anything else from Earth, to quote the song “Rocket Man” by Sir Elton Hercules John (born 1942), ironically – but perhaps not surprisingly – released in the same year as Silent Running.
COMMENT: For more on “Rocket Man” and its relation to cultural perceptions of settling the Final Frontier, along with my views on how humanity may need to be prepared to truly survive and thrive out there in the Final Frontier, see my Centauri Dreams essay titled “In Person or Proxy to Mars and Beyond?” here:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2022/11/04/in-person-or-proxy-to-mars-and-beyond/
I was pleased to discover in my research on the film that its director and producer Douglas Trumbull (1942-2022) wanted the viewers of his work to see space as the hero and savior of Earth, that our planet was neither separate nor cut off from the wider Universe. We need space to survive if we want to make it as a growing technological civilization.
However, I could not avoid a nagging suspicion that these particular concepts did not quite get through to everyone, especially when you have a main protagonist continually berating anything and anyone who wasn’t one hundred percent pro-nature and Back to Earth. Am I just being overly cynical, or was this aspect of Silent Running sadly too subtle for the masses? These concerns mirror my feelings on the messages in Aniara, where certain characters, images, and themes overshadowed the more subtle commentaries.
As with Lowell sending the last biodome out into the void, hoping that one day it will be found and properly appreciated, perhaps all one can do when sending out a message-ladened creation into the wider sea called human society is to hope that enough of the right people will find and grasp its meanings, then pass it on for the intended edification of others.
For your further edification of Silent Running, here are the links to my two essays on the film. The first is from The Space Review and the second work is from Centauri Dreams:
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1337/1
As supplements to my previous essays, here is the novelization of Silent Running in Adobe PDF format, published by Scholastic Books in the same year as the film’s theatrical release. The novel was written by longtime children’s book author Harlan Thompson (1894-1987), who based his work on the screen story and screenplay by Michael Cimino, Deric Washburn, and Steven Bochco.
You may find a link to the original screenplay, dated December 6, 1970, in this detailed essay on the film – which I note has some sentences and topic structure which happen to very closely match and parallel certain ones from my own Centauri Dreams essay on Silent Running. Is imitation the sincerest form of flattery?
https://cinephiliabeyond.org/silent-running/
As is so often the case, both the novelization and the screenplay have many interesting story, character, and background details that did not make it into the final cinematic version.
To give just one example, I learned that the space freighter Valley Forge was originally called the Apopka. This name is derived from the Seminole word “Ahapopka,” for “potato-eating place.”
There is a large lake in Florida and a mid-sized city nearby with the same name. Lake Apopka, just northwest of Orlando, was once a popular tourist attraction until various industries severely polluted it and a major environmental cleanup was required. Perhaps this is why Apopka was first chosen for the premier vessel of the film?
TV Tropes also has some very interesting details on Silent Running:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/SilentRunning
Solaris
“If man had more of a sense of humor, things might have turned out differently.”
– Snow (Snaut) in the chapter “The Dreams” of Solaris (1961) by Stanislaw Lem.
“Science explains the world, but only Art can reconcile us to it.” – Stanislaw Lem
Solaris is a remarkable work, first appearing in print in 1961, written by the great Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006). In short…
A future humanity that has expanded to the stars with faster-than-light (FTL) interstellar travel capabilities has discovered an immense alien being covering an entire exoworld like a global ocean, which they name Solaris. After over a century of exploring and examining this vast entity, their scientists have gotten little further than documenting and cataloging its various features and behaviors: They are unable to learn how Solaris came to be and why it acts and manifests as it does.
As often happens when our species is confronted with a grand unknown, an entire industry has built up around theories, hypotheses, speculation, conjecture, and even mythologies about Solaris, with few being definitively backed up by scientific empirical proof. About all the scientists have determined with certainty is that Solaris is alive, sentient, and can somehow shift the orbit of its engulfed planet about a binary star system to keep its world stable as it travels through space.
COMMENT: This last activity was how astronomers first noted the special nature of Solaris, as the planet’s orbit about two large suns should have become naturally unstable otherwise, eventually destroying the globe.
At one point, the remaining scientists on a science station established on the surface of Solaris decided on their own authority – out of desperation to wrest at the least some deeper secrets from their object of study – to aim an intense beam of X-rays at the alien ocean to force a reaction from their titanic subject. The results of their actions were both unexpected and downright terrifying to the station tenders.
A psychologist named Kris Kelvin is sent by Earth authorities to Solaris to determine what has become of the station staff, who have been sending back increasingly strange and cryptic messages.
Kelvin soon learns what has happened at the station, if not exactly why at first: Each scientist has a “visitor” of their personal pasts brought up from deep inside their psyches and made physical by Solaris, who are unable and unwilling to leave the scientists’ presence.
Kelvin himself receives such a “guest” not long after arriving at Solaris Station, in the form of his wife, Hari (Rheya): Ten years earlier, she had committed suicide but is now present and seems as real as the original person she resembles.
Three films based on Solaris have been made of this work since its arrival: The first one was a Soviet teleplay production from 1968. The second came from the legendary filmmaker Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (1932-1986) in 1972. The third and so far most recent version was released in 2002, written and directed by Steven Soderbergh (born 1963).
The focus here will be primarily on the Tarkovsky version as our third “pure” example of Angst Science Fiction.
Stanislaw Lem did not care for either of the later cinematic representations of his novel, as he saw them focusing too much on the “love story” between Kelvin and Hari and not the multifaceted meanings of the alien being whose given name is also the title of his work.
This essay goes into the details about how Lem felt regarding Tarkovsky’s vision of Solaris, despite the author’s collaboration with the film director:
https://culture.pl/en/article/lem-vs-tarkovsky-the-fight-over-solaris
Some interesting quotes from this piece:
Only a few years after its original publication, a Russian translation of Solaris appeared by Dmitry Bruskin. It is still considered to be canonical to this day, despite some deviations from the Polish original. One in particular is that the name of the planet, Solaris, was now a masculine noun as opposed to the original feminine in the Polish, and this somewhat shifts the emphasis in the book: it’s easier for readers to imagine that this mysterious planet-ocean is viviparous if female. A pair of female translators corrected this injustice – in 1976, a more complete translation was released by Galina Gudimova and Vera Perelman, where the original gender of the planet was restored, though in Russian discussions the masculine gender is still used by force of habit.
…
Clearly, Tarkovsky was completely uninterested in ‘Solaristics’ and the sentient ocean, both much expanded upon in the original book. Instead he was concerned about the problem of ethical and moral imperatives – and that is what he made his movie about.
Lem didn’t agree with this at all:
And what was absolutely terrible was that Tarkovsky introduced Kelvin’s parents and even some aunt into the movie. But most of all, his mother. […] The mother is Russia, the Motherland, Earth. That just enraged me. […] My Kelvin decides to stay on the planet without the slightest hope, but Tarkovsky painted this sentimental picture of an island with a little house on it. When I hear about the island and this little house, my skin crawls with irritation.
From ‘Tako Rzecze… Lem: Ze Stanisławem Lemem Rozmawia Stanisław Bereś’, Wydawnictwo Literackie, Kraków 2002, trans. KA & AZ.
Edoardo Rugo wrote an in-depth essay comparing the written and cinematic versions of Solaris for the Italian publication Filosofia (Number 69, 2024-11-01) titled “Solaris for Lem and Tarkovsky. Novel and film between the impossibility of progress and the abyss of the past”:
https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/filosofia/article/view/11182
Abstract
In 1961 the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem realized Solaris, one of his best known and most appreciated works. Describing the encounter with an indecipherable planet-ocean, Lem highlights the impossibility of truly communicating with the Other and brings out the aporias and complexities of positivist thinking.
Eleven years later, Andrey Tarkovsky adapts Lem’s subject for cinema. In the homonymous movie, though, the Russian director imprints his own peculiar conception of time and history: the Tarkovskian ocean becomes a source of connection with a past seen as the only hold for the present, a crystal in which, however, the actual seems to succumb to the virtual.
Lem’s peculiar conception of progress is here put in contrast against the personal and humanistic nostalgia of the Russian director. The aim of the text consists in this comparison: two divergent philosophies of time expressed by two authors through their respective work.
On the author’s official Web site, Lem had this to say regarding the relationship of the two main characters as depicted in the Soderbergh film version:
https://english.lem.pl/arround-lem/adaptations/solaris-soderbergh/147-the-solaris-station
…to my best knowledge, the book was not dedicated to erotic problems of people in outer space… As Solaris’ author I shall allow myself to repeat that I only wanted to create a vision of a human encounter with something that certainly exists, in a mighty manner perhaps, but cannot be reduced to human concepts, ideas or images. This is why the book was entitled “Solaris” and not “Love in Outer Space”.
OBSERVATIONS: That many who view the film versions of Solaris tend to aim their focus on the main relationship between Kris Kelvin and Hari/Rheya over the other much more cosmically significant parts of the plot is not terribly surprising, despite Lem’s understandable and expected frustration with this response to his work: That most of these same folks likely never read his originating novel undoubtedly contributes to this situation.
This happens for the same reason that cinematic audiences gravitate towards discussing the virginal state of Altira in Forbidden Planet (1956), the three “cute” little service robots named Huey, Duey, and Louie in Silent Running (1972), and the violent sport in Rollerball (1975): These beings and group activities are far more relatable to a typical human’s tribal mindset than the far loftier and sometimes unsettling themes and settings offered in these stories. This situation applies to both the average layperson and even the educated scholar on occasion.
On the same page, Lem also rightfully compared Solaris to another famous novel, which was far more than just a story about the whaling industry of the Nineteenth Century:
I am also capable of finding analogies to other works, located in high regions of the world literature. Melville’s “Moby Dick” could serve as an example; on the surface the book describes the history of a whaling ship and Capitan Ahab’s pernicious quest for the white whale. Initially the critics destroyed the novel as meaningless and unsuccessful – after all why care about some whale the captain most likely would have converted into a number of cutlets and barrels full of animal fat? Only after great analytical efforts the critics discovered that the message of “Moby Dick” was neither animal fat nor even harpoons. Since much deeper, symbolic layers were found, in libraries Melville’s work was removed from the “Adventures at Sea” section and placed elsewhere.
YOUR HOMEWORK ASSIGNMENT: I always encourage everyone to read this true literary classic by Herman Melville (1819-1891). Here is an annotated version online: http://powermobydick.com/
OBSERVATIONS: I find it interesting on several levels that Lem chose to compare Solaris to Moby Dick. Both novels deal with a small group of humans facing an immense and intelligent being with enigmatic motives dwelling in an even vaster and more mysterious environment: For the white whale it was Earth’s largest ocean, the Pacific, and for Solaris it was the ocean of interstellar space. Both human tribes attempt to tackle their quarry for their own limited purposes, only to find themselves outmatched in every way and threatened with doom from their actions. Finally, both beings are presented and viewed as a type of deity with motives far beyond the thoughts and desires of mere mortals.
In spite of all that has been said, along with the documented fact that Tarkovsky was not a fan of typical science fiction, including and especially 2001: A Space Odyssey – the Soviet director found Kubrick’s work focusing too much on its future technologies and leaving the human characters and their surroundings sterile – both Lem and Tarkovsky may have been more aligned on the main themes of their versions of Solaris than either of them realized, or wanted to admit.
Having finally watched all of the 1972 version of Solaris to completion, I felt that most of Tarkovsky’s film was much closer to Lem’s vision than I was originally led to believe – even though the beginning and especially the ending of Tarkovsky’s work were different from the novel.
In the finale of Lem’s work, after the surviving scientists have figured out a way to permanently remove their “visitors”, Kelvin leaves the science station and flies out to Solaris itself, landing near a part of its gelatinous mass and ruminating thusly…
Must I go on living here then, among the objects we both had touched, in the air she [Hari] had breathed? … In the hope of her return? I hoped for nothing. And yet I lived in expectation … I did not know what achievements, what mockery, even what tortures still awaited me. I knew nothing, and I persisted in the faith that the time of cruel miracles was not past.
In contrast, Tarkovsky’s Solaris creates physical islands among its bulk after the scientists beam an encephalogram of Kelvin’s mind into the ocean entity in an attempt to make the alien understand humanity. Not long after, Kelvin finds himself back at the home of his father we witnessed at the beginning of the film – only for the camera to pull back and reveal that Kelvin is still on Solaris and both the home and his father are part of the creations on one of the islands.
COMMENT: Just to throw in the Soderbergh version of Solaris for good related measure, the ending of the 2002 film mirrors Tarkovsky, where Kelvin remains on the alien world – having been physically engulfed with the science station by Solaris – to presumably spend the rest of his life with a version of his wife in happiness and peace. Hollywood has never been a real fan of ambiguity because it usually doesn’t sell as many tickets.
Despite all his protests and languid imagery contrasting beautiful Earth nature with human society’s stark technological civilization, Tarkovsky did not shy away from the bigger questions of Life, the Universe, and Everything that Lem posited throughout his rather short novel.
As one prime example, Dr. Snaut (Snow) gives a truncated version of this speech in the novel about humanity’s true intentions for expanding into the wider reality beyond Earth…
“We take off into the cosmos, ready for anything: for solitude, for hardship, for exhaustion, death. Modesty forbids us to say so, but there are times when we think pretty well of ourselves. And yet, if we examine it more closely, our enthusiasm turns out to be all sham. We don’t want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos. For us, such and such a planet is as arid as the Sahara, another as frozen as the North Pole, yet another as lush as the Amazon basin. We are humanitarian and chivalrous; we don’t want to enslave other races, we simply want to bequeath them our values and take over their heritage in exchange.
“We think of ourselves as the Knights of the Holy Contact. This is another lie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors. We don’t know what to do with other worlds. A single world, our own, suffices us; but we can’t accept it for what it is. We are searching for an ideal image of our own world: we go in quest of a planet, of a civilization superior to our own but developed on the basis of a prototype of our primeval past. At the same time, there is something inside us which we don’t like to face up to, from which we try to protect ourselves, but which nevertheless remains, since we don’t leave Earth in a state of primal innocence. We arrive here as we are in reality, and when the page is turned and that reality is revealed to us – that part of our reality which we would prefer to pass over in silence – then we don’t like it any more.”
Colder than Space: Comparing Solaris with Aniara
In Michael Kuciak’s 2019 interview with Pella Kågerman for Final Draft, the co-writer and director of Aniara revealed that their film “was inspired by Kubrick and Tarkovsky.” Although the article does not state which of these directors’ cinematic creations inspired the Aniara team, it takes little effort to conclude she meant 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris, respectively.
In this interview from 2019 with Kagerman by Thomas H. Sheriff, she confirmed that scenes with the Mima showing memories involving water reeds was an homage from similar scenes in Tarkovsky’s Solaris…
https://flipscreened.com/2019/08/27/interview-its-not-a-warning-its-a-scream-aniara-2018/
To quote:
PK: Yes! It was. I’m so happy that you mention it. One of the editors with this project worked with Tarkovsky on The Sacrifice [1986], and he told us that Tarkovsky was actually very displeased with his shot of seaweed. Because the whole idea had been for him to shoot frogs. So he had brought – not thousands, but plenty of frogs there, and put them into the water, and they were swimming along. Then they put the lights on and they all disappeared. And it’s so funny that something we feel is so iconic, and we want to pay homage to it, is something that he himself saw as a failure; as a shot lacking the frogs.
In another interview that same year for FF2 Media, Pella’s husband and creative partner Hugo Lijia said they “watched all the space films but tried really hard not to imitate any of them.”
When one compares the various nature scenes in Aniara to the nature segments in Solaris, it is hard not to see the influence/inspiration the Tarkovsky film had on the Swedish one. This refers not only to the look and feel of these scenes but also the thinking behind them: Namely, that Earth and its natural habitats are where humanity truly belongs, in addition to being with other members of our species.
For more thoughts on this and Tarkovsky’s take on the importance of art in his work and life overall, see this essay titled “The Natural and Modern Worlds in Solaris” by David Hanley in Offscreen Volume 15, Issue 1 from January 2011:
All three examples being discussed here – Lem’s Solaris, Tarkovsky’s film, and Aniara in both their poetic and film versions – see art and love as humanity’s primary salvation against a vast, cold, and indifferent Universe.
COMMENT 1 of 2: The 1972 cinematic version of Solaris alone contains multiple examples of both art and love, including camera time spent focusing on a copy of the famous painting The Hunters in Snow (1565) by the Dutch artist Pieter Bruegel the Elder (circa 1525-1530 to 1569) displayed prominently in the wood-paneled library of the Solaris Station:
https://news.artnet.com/art-world/as-seen-on-solaris-tarkovsky-bruegel-2453923
There is also this relevant essay for further ponderings on the subject matter…
“Painting in Time: The Role of Painting in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris” by Saleh Ghorbanian:
https://publication.avanca.org/index.php/avancacinema/article/view/383
COMMENT 2 of 2: This is my interpretation of why Tarkovsky focused on The Hunters in Snow: The painting depicts a group of three hunters and their pack of dogs returning to their village from a largely unsuccessful hunting expedition during the winter season. In their snowy path are the tracks of a rabbit or hare that the hunters either could not catch or missed seeing altogether. These hunters could represent the Solaris scientists who went after the secrets of their alien quarry, the ocean being Solaris, only to return with little of real, useful substance to show for all their efforts. The rabbit which left their footprints in the snow represents the wider truths about Solaris and the Universe itself as hints, which the scientists and humanity overall have yet to find. The village represents the planet Earth, where the hunters and their species are best suited for and where sustenance in the form of a pig carcass – a domesticated (read the known) farm animal as opposed to a creature of the wilderness (read the unknown) – being prepared for consumption at a nearby inn is visible to the left of the hunters. In Western literature and art, the leftward direction often symbolizes home and the safety of the familiar.
Tarkovsky’s Solaris is a response to the modern technological world we have created, which includes our scientific awareness of just how big, ancient, and populated our Cosmos is, compared to what most people thought of and about the Universe in earlier eras and why it all exists. In the Soviet artist’s view, modern humanity can barely handle contemporary technological civilization, let alone the wider realities of the Universe.
One big difference between the various Solaris sides and Aniara is that Solaris stills see hope in and for humanity by its capacity for art and love. The poet and poem of Aniara see redemption only in the presumed afterlife of Judeo-Christian thinking, while the film version only sees salvation for us in staying on Earth and caring for the planet. Everywhere else is either empty or too far away to do any good and even then, the hypothetical latter possibilities offer no guarantees of safety and redemption.
Even Lem’s take on things is more hopeful than those in Aniara. Lem simply states that current humanity is not truly prepared for the realities of the Universe beyond their home world. This does not automatically mean we are doomed; instead, we need to evolve – biologically, intellectually, morally – to become more aware and wiser of existence beyond Earth before we can make a real go at it. Kelvin’s acceptance of whatever fate awaits him on Solaris at the end of the novel is a positive step in that direction.
In contrast, the message from Aniara to humanity says Stay on Earth, take care of the home planet, and wait for the next life for meaning and happiness. Even then, this last part is primarily from the 1956 poem regarding the afterlife as redemption.
At the end of the 2018 film, we only see a very dead and derelict spaceship drifting through the Milky Way galaxy: Its crew and passengers have long ago turned to dust. Their various attempts to escape their fate were all ultimately unsuccessful. There are also no signs whatsoever of what became of the humans who remained in the Sol system: Did they die out with the loss of Mother Earth on the sands of Mars, or did they purposefully expand into the rest of the Universe? We are never told.
COMMENT: The makers of cinematic Aniara wanted their viewers to walk away from their work with a sense of hope, in spite of the fact that everyone in the story expires in the end and all that is left millions of years later is a non-functioning vessel drifting with neither purpose nor goal throughout the void of space. I honestly must wonder how much success they had with that belief, for the inherent nihilism of their creation is overwhelming. I will discuss this theme of hope further later in my essay.
In Andrei Tarkovsky Interviews, edited by John Gianvito (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2006), the Soviet artist said the controlling idea of Solaris is that “human beings have to remain human beings, even if they find themselves in inhumane conditions.”
This quote applies even more so to Aniara, where thousands of people find themselves on a spaceship hurtling out of control while each potential hope for rescue (and redemption) fails, along with their essential supplies necessary for survival. Many of these trapped souls eventually failed at remaining dignified human beings long before the failure of the ship’s systems, which is what Tarkovsky is implying in his quote regarding the characters of Solaris.
Or, perhaps more accurately, those onboard the Aniara who cannot hold on to their dignity and sanity – two hallmarks of what is considered civilized behavior – have become rather all too human in the more biological sense, reverting to their baser selves with only a veneer of social graces (in the poem, many of the passengers of the Aniara revert to levels of barbarism and outright insanity far more extensively than in the film).
Even MR, the Mimarobe, who maintained her sense of self and optimism far longer than most of her fellow passengers and worked tirelessly to uplift their spirits through education and especially art with her beam screen that projected beautiful scenes of terrestrial nature into nearby space, ultimately lost her social composure with the loss of her partner and their son in the sixth year of their involuntary voyage.
Although MR eventually becomes one of the longest survivors on the Aniara, well before that time we witness the Mimarobe literally going through but the most basic of social behaviors, doing only what she must do to maintain herself and little more.
It is often rather easy for those not undergoing terrible circumstances to tell others to “remain human beings, even if they find themselves in inhumane conditions.” Yet at the same time, it is people just like Tarkovsky who demand that humanity return to nature and a simpler version of themselves, such as they imagine life was like before the advent of civilization.
The request has its nobility and healthier aspects, yet little is done to further instruct the intended audiences on how one goes about doing this without sinking into poverty or even worse conditions – especially if the rest of technological society with all its rules and regulations carries on around you, offering little support in return.
Once again, Aniara is even more complicit in this “lesson”: While the people of the Aniara are part of the species that has brought such climactic devastation to this future Earth, for them it is far too late to reverse the damages already done or wait long enough for our planet’s biosphere to heal itself as it has done during previous global catastrophes going back for eons.
This ecological situation is even worse in the poem: Over thirty nuclear conflicts have turned Earth into a lifeless radioactive slagheap! The escaping passengers onboard the Aniara are subsequently punished with the karma of being imprisoned by their own technology and left to die slowly in existential horror.
Of course, what is inflicted upon the denizens of the Aniara is really meant as a warning to the audiences of the film and poem. Yet the viewer is given little guidance by the makers of these art forms as to how they can go about saving Earth and then living sustainably within it.
Perhaps the warnings are enough: After all these works of art are neither documentaries nor instruction manuals. However, left to their own devices and combined with the emotional devastation that Aniara creates with its viewers/readers, the audience may find itself trapped by feelings of helplessness against a problem they feel is too big to tackle on their own, or even in groups.
I hope to be wrong here, however. Sometimes all it takes is the right person to be suitably motivated to change the course of history. After all, we are neither stuck on an uncontrollable spaceship nor has Earth’s ecosystem reached an irreversible breaking point.
To bring this back to Solaris, we also have done little more than dip our collective toe into the cosmic waters: We are at least aware of how much we do not know about the rest of the Universe, which may provide us with enough armor and other defenses to be sufficiently successful when humanity gets serious about expanding into the Final Frontier.
Although there is so much more to discuss about Solaris, at this juncture I will leave you with these references and specific quotes for your further enjoyment of Solaris…
This next relevant quote by Tarkovsky himself comes from here:
Sculpting in Time Reflections on the Cinema, Andrey Tarkovsky. University of Texas Press, Austin, 1986.
It would perhaps be superfluous to mention that in one form or another all my films have made the point that people are not alone and abandoned in an empty universe, but are linked by countless threads with the past and the future; that as each person lives his life he forges a bond with the whole world, indeed with the whole history of mankind…. But the hope that each separate life and every human action has intrinsic meaning makes the responsibility of the individual for the overall course of human life incalculably greater.
In a world where there is a real threat of war capable of annihilating mankind; where social ills exist on a staggering scale; where human suffering cries out to heaven – the way must be found to reach another. Such is the sacred duty of each individual.
An author’s poetic principle emerges from the effect made upon him by the surrounding reality, and it can rise above that reality, question it, engage in bitter conflict; and, moreover, not only with the reality that lies outside him, but also with the one that is within him.
Lem and Tarkovsky’s takes on the film Solaris:
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Shot by Shot: A 22-Minute Breakdown of the Director’s Filmmaking in Film, June 18, 2020:
To quote from the above essay:
Indeed, Tarkovsky seemed to deliberately half-ass the generic elements of film. He used leisurely shots of tunnels and highways of 1971 Tokyo to depict the city of the future. He devoted only a couple minutes of the film’s nearly three-hour running time to things like spaceships. And you have to love the fact that the space station in Solaris has such distinctly unfuturistic design elements as a chandelier and a wood-paneled library.
Tarkovsky, of course, isn’t interested in science. He’s interested in art and its way to evoke the divine. And his primary way of doing this is with long takes; epic shots that resonate profoundly even if the meaning of those images remains elusive. Solaris opens with a shot of water flowing in a brook and then, later in the scene, there is a sudden downpour. The camera presses into a shot of a teacup filling with rain. It’s a beautiful, memorable, evocative shot. Maybe the image means something. Maybe its beauty is, in and of itself, its meaning. Either way, Tarkovsky forces you to surrender to his deliberate cinematic rhythm and his pantheistic view of the world.
Solaris, Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky – Psychological and Philosophical Aspects, by Nicolae Sfetcu, MultiMedia Publishing (ed.), January 5, 2019:
Some relevant quotes from the above essay:
Solaris deeply disturbs this society because it invalidates the laws and fixed rules the society is used to. The ocean has a noetic behavior allowing dreams to create, from its own biological material, temporary geometric structures on its surface, as well as some disproportionately independent versions of the human form of people who have approached it, from the footprints of scientists’ memories. (Weissert 1992) The ocean is thus endowed with a “symmetrical” logic that helps it overcome formal communication barriers.
According to Godel’s theorem (see NOTE), there is a need for a meta-level approach to language. But astronauts are not prepared for this awareness of the unconscious. Their dialogue with the unknown becomes difficult and tense, and instinctively and dogmatically rejects this way of communication. Kris is the only person in the movie capable of evolution.
NOTE: [Kurt] Gödel’s incompleteness theorem is a fundamental theorem in mathematical logic, which establishes a correspondence between the semantic truth and the syntactic probability in the first-order logic. If you want to know more about this famous theorem, seek here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/goedel-incompleteness/
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3 Philosophical aspects
Jonathon Rosenbaum notes that Tarkovsky’s Solaris, (Andrei Tarkovsky 1972) unlike Lem’s novel, (Lem 2012) is rather anti-science fiction than science fiction. (Rosenbaum 1990, 60)
Rosenbaum suggests that while the film is denying our archetypal space travel, the main concern is the psychological investigation of Kris Kelvin, while trying to rediscover a lost humanity in the face of technology and science. (Duffy 2003) As Tarkovsky noted:
“l am interested above all in the character who is capable of sacrificing himself and his way of life – regardless of whether that sacrifice is made in the name of spiritual values, or for the sake of someone else, or of his own salvation, or of all these things together.” (Andrey Tarkovsky 1996, 217)
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“Can only Hari be considered an alien amorphous structure, or should its behavior be considered? Her emotional development and suffering, her epistemological journey toward self-knowledge, and especially her intense relationship with Kelvin, make the film an autonomous and deeply philosophical work of art: (Tumanov 2016)
“The major deviation Tarkovsky undertakes in his film consists of a principal shift in the overall intention of the narrative prompted by the firm belief that love and human emotion have a primary meaning in the universe…” (Deltcheva and Vlasov 1997, 533)
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Tarkovsky noted that “Man’s unending quest for knowledge, given him gratuitously, is a source of great tension, for it brings with it constant anxiety, hardship, grief and disappointment.” (Andrey Tarkovsky 1996, 198)
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The problem is that, as Duffy says, (Duffy 2003) humanity has lost touch with itself, with its own spirituality and many elements that bind it. His conclusion is that although Solaris expands many of these elements, he is ultimately unable to reconcile Kris Kelvin’s rediscovery of individual humanity into the film, suggesting that Solaris is not responding to this optimism.
Solaris is a movie that begins as a search for answers and comes to provide these answers along with a whole range of different questions.
The film suggests that fiction is as strong as “reality” and that imagination is the only foundation on which “reality” is based. Life is trying to connect to another life. Man’s attempts to classify and preserve this form of interaction will always be condemned to failure and will reflect a major mistake in the panoptic world we live in.
Heterotopia is a place where such categories, classifications and restrictions do not apply. In such spaces we can identify that existence is best understood as a field of unsubstantiated imagination, where possibilities are endless, and restrictive boundaries are reduced inefficiently. (Duffy 2003)
Through his exploits in the heterotopic space, Kelvin had the chance to return to some of the past mistakes of his life, and thus re-discovers his own humanity and confirms his place as a free individual subject to make his own choices. Certainly, this experience must be viewed with at least one optimism.
“’We are only seeking Man’”: Gender, Psychoanalysis, and Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, Elyce Rae Helford, Science Fiction Studies #57, Volume 19, Part 2, July 1992.
https://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/57/helford57art.htm
“Humanism and Pessimism in Space: How Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris Turns an Unnerving Premise into an Intimate Film”, The Gemsbok.
By Daniel Podgorski
June 16, 2016
https://thegemsbok.com/art-reviews-and-articles/thursday-theater-solaris-andrei-tarkovsky/
To quote from the above link, which includes a video:
Solaris and Disagreements with Kubrick and Lem:
Personally I have more affinity for the perspective in Kubrick’s 2001, which holds to the realistic – or perhaps optimistic – notion that technology may result in unfathomably beneficial progress or profoundly deep tragedy, depending on its application and context. But the overriding pessimism of Tarkovsky’s production can boast two things to its credit, which are lacking from Kubrick’s film: A deep examination of the nature of human connection, and a respect for the natural world which many people would be sure to support.
While Kubrick deeply appreciated Solaris, Tarkovsky found 2001 to be “phony” and “fake.” Certainly one can see why Tarkovsky, so deeply allied to his vision of what sort of emotional experiences humans need and ought to seek, would have rejected 2001‘s bold integration of futuristic technology into both everyday life and humanity’s ostensible path of progress.
Conclusion:
What fascinates me about the movie Solaris is that Tarkovsky accomplishes all at once a number of things attempted in a slew of other movies before and since, and does so with finesse and talent. Consider Christopher Nolan’s recent blockbuster space thriller Interstellar, which nails a stunning visual presentation of the universe, nails the momentum of a great action movie, and yet becomes exceedingly shallow when it nears topics of philosophical importance to the film, such as love and selfishness.
Soderbergh’s creative take on Lem’s work does deserve some attention, as done here…
Book and Movie Review: Solaris by Stanislaw Lem and Steven Soderbergh
By Nina Munteanu
August 22, 2021
Two quotes from the above essay on the Soderbergh film version of Solaris:
Soderbergh’s Solaris is a poem to Lem’s prose. Both explore the universe around us and the universe within. Not particularly palatable to North America’s multiplex crowd, eager for easily accessed answers, Solaris will appeal more to those with a more esoteric appreciation for art.
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In the final analysis, both book and movie are incredibly valuable but for different reasons. Soderbergh paints an impressionistic poem, using Kafkaesque brushstrokes on a simpler canvas, to Lem’s complex tapestry of multi-level prose. Lem challenges us far more by refusing to impose his personal views, where Soderbergh lets us glimpse his hopeful vision.
I think that both, though, come to the same conclusion about the ethereal, mysterious and eternal nature of love. On the one hand, love may connect us within a fractal autopoietic network to the infinity of the inner and outer universe, uniting us with God and His purpose in a collaboration of faith.
On the other hand, love may empower us to accept our place in a vast unknowable and amoral universe to form an island of hope in a purposeless sea of indifference. Whether love mends our souls to the fabric of our destiny; enslaves us on an impossible journey of desperate yearning; or seizes us in a strangling embrace of unspeakable terror at what lurks within – surely, then, love is God, in all its possible manifestations. This is unquestionably the message that unifies book and movie. And it is one worth proclaiming.
Although this next essay deals with a different Lem science fiction novel, His Master’s Voice (1968), there is more than enough material here to be relatable to Solaris and the themes of this section. Both stories deal with humanity encountering an alien intelligence with motives and actions so inscrutable that it limits their abilities to understand what they receive, as an analogy for the entire Universe.
“The Two Cultures Revisited. Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice”
Interlitteraria 2019
By Dominika Oramus
Abstract. I would like to take, as my starting point, the famous 1959 lecture of C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, where science fiction is by and large ignored, and see how the consecutive points Snow is making are also discussed in the following decades of the 20th century by other philosophers of science, among them Stanislaw Lem, Steven Weinberg, and Jonathan Gottschall.
In 1959 Snow postulated re-uniting the two cultures through the reform of education. In the 1960s and 1970s Lem did not believe in any reform, but prophesied that science left alone would procure the final war and, probably, the self-inflicted technological death of the West. I am then going to juxtapose Snow’s argument with a science fiction novel concerned with the same civilizational crisis: Stanislaw Lem’s His Master’s Voice.
This is the audiobook version of Solaris with the much-improved translation from Polish to English, released by Audible Frontiers in 2011 and narrated by Alessandro Juliani:
To quote from the above, complete with original multiple syntax issues:
Lem voiced disappointment of Kilmartin and Cox English translations. Indeed those translations came from a previous French translation. Lem’ s wife and son received with favorable feeling Professor Bill Johnston 2011 direct translation from Polak, acknowledging that this version capture successfully the spirit of the original. For legals issues this version is only available by audiobook or kindle digital edition. There were not printed version. In other side, with respect to the movies: “Lem himself observed that none of the film versions depict much of the extraordinary physical and psychological ‘alienness’ of the Solaris ocean.”
Two more relevant links:
Solaris: The Definitive Edition
By Stanislaw Lem; Translated by Bill Johnston; Read by Alessandro Juliani.
https://www.sffaudio.com/new-releases-solaris-by-stanislaw-lem/
https://hdaudiobooks.com/stanislaw-by-solaris-lem-audiobook-free/
In the summer of 2007, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) released a radio play version of Solaris on their Radio 4 as a Classic Serial, in two hour-long episodes:
This is the transcript of the 1972 film version shown above. Note the lack of character names regarding who is saying what or any stage directions, as per usual in this format:
This is the 1968 Soviet television play of Solaris, the first such adaptation of Lem’s 1961 novel:
Dark Star
Dark Star began its existence as a student film project produced between 1970 and 1972. The film was eventually reworked and released into theaters in 1974 in an expanded format to match the length of a typical mainstream cinematic presentation.
Dark Star has it all in terms of angst science fiction: A wonderfully low budget that proves overly expensive special effects are no substitute for an intelligent and entertaining film, a high degree of existentialism – its co-creator John Carpenter (born 1948) called his film “Waiting for Godot in outer space” – purposefully random science and astronomy references that sound legitimate but often aren’t, and a crew stuck on a starship on a seemingly endless mission who are forced to deal with their reality to the degrees their upbringing allow them to. There is even a guest alien to cause havoc with both the ship and its hapless passengers.
At its center, Dark Star is a deliberate satire of all those science fiction stories of earlier eras which made voyaging through deep space an exciting and ultimately rewarding adventure, including and especially 2001: A Space Odyssey. The film also takes pot shots at similar promotional verbiage and attitudes about the real Space Age, which by the early 1970s felt like it belonged to an earlier era that was subsequently heading into a decline after the grand Apollo years of sending human astronauts to the Moon and back.
In the year 2150, humanity is expanding into the Milky Way galaxy, settling new worlds. Some of these exoplanets, however, are not celestially stable, posing a threat and a roadblock to the cosmic Manifest Destiny plans of our species.
Apparently, there are enough of these unstable globes throughout the star systems that a task force called the Advance Exploration Corps (AEC) has been established to deal with these uncooperative alien planets. Utilizing crewed starships with faster-than-light (FTL) propulsion, the AEC carries out its primary task with bombs powerful enough to obliterate the entirety of these worlds in one shot.
Oh, and did I mention these “Exponential Thermostellar Devices” are also equipped with Artificial Intelligence (AI), presumably meant to expedite the critical missions of this “special breed of man who has dedicated his life to blazing the trail through the most distant, unexplored galaxies [!], opening up the farthest frontiers of space.”
To further add:
“The task they face is one of unbelievable isolation and loneliness. So far from home that Earth is no longer even a point of light in the sky, they must comb the universe for those unstable planets whose existence poses a threat to the peaceful colonists that follow. They must find these rogue planets – and destroy them. Among these commandos are the men of the scoutship Dark Star.”
We are introduced to the crew of this particular AEC vessel, registry number ADC 2239-5531, who are in the middle of conducting their latest bomb run twenty (relative) years into their mission. We soon learn that not everything about the Dark Star and its crew are as wonderful and glorious as the authorities back home would have the public think…
The space vessel is slowly falling apart due to age, wear, and accidents, with the government claiming they cannot help due to federal budget cuts. To give just one example, via the ship’s mission log: “Storage Area 9 self-destructed last week and destroyed the ship’s entire supply of toilet paper.”
The men of Dark Star are responding in their own individual ways not only to the “unbelievable isolation and loneliness” of their jobs deep in the interstellar void, but also in reaction to the recent accidental death of their previous commander, a fellow named Powell.
Their current leader, Dolittle, would like nothing more than to return home to California and surf the waves at Malibu. Dolittle is so focused on completing his mission that he reprimands one crewman named Boiler when the fellow announces a high probability of intelligent extraterrestrial life “in the Horsehead Nebula sector.”
“Don’t give me that kind of bull!” Dolittle shoots back. “Damn wild goose chase is what it is! Remember when Commander Powell found that 99-plus probability of intelligent life in the Magellanic Cloud? Remember what we found? A damn mindless vegetable, looked like a limp balloon. Fourteen light years for a vegetable that went squawk and let out a fart when you touch it. Remember that? Don’t give me any of that intelligent life stuff. Find me something I can blow up!”
Another crewmember, Talby, escapes this form of purgatory by staring out of the ship’s transparent dome at the stars and waiting for what he calls the Phoenix Asteroids, a cluster of planetoids “that circle the universe… once every 12.3 trillion years.” Talby also tells Doolittle that these mysterious objects “glow… glow with all the colors of the rainbow. Nobody knows why. They just glow as they drift around the universe.”
As our story progresses, conditions between the men and their machines only deteriorate, until one particular technological failure – exacerbated in part by the aforementioned guest alien creature onboard – leaves Bomb Number 20 still attached to the ship, where it states that “detonation will occur at the programmed time” regardless of the fact that it will not drop on the designated target exoplanet.
In a wonderfully surreal scene, Dolittle leaves the Dark Star at the suggestion of Commander Powell – who isn’t quite as dead as the audience was initially led to believe, but has been kept on literal ice in the Cryogenic Freezer Compartment of the ship’s Freezer Room at “absolute zero” – to meet with Bomb 20 hanging just out of the bomb bay to teach the AI about phenomenology, a field of study which involves the conscious mind and how it relates to the world around it through direct experience.
In summation, Dolittle tries to convince Bomb 20 that nothing really exists outside of itself so that this Exponential Thermostellar Device will not explode. At first, we are led to believe that Bomb 20 buys Dolittle’s explanation as the cuboid-shaped machine rumbles back into its berth inside the Dark Star.
However, we soon learn that Bomb 20’s computer brain has decided that since “the only thing which exists is myself,” it is going to recreate existence: With a biblical flourish (“In the beginning there was darkness, and the darkness was without form and void…. And in addition to the darkness there was also me. And I moved upon the face of the darkness. And I saw that I was alone.”) and the words “let there be light,” Bomb 20 detonates, destroying the Dark Star and everyone in it except for Dolittle and Talby, who were outside the vessel and far enough away to survive the explosion.
COMMENT: Commander Powell also manages to survive the destruction of the spaceship, tumbling off into the void still encased in a block of ice. As Dolittle and Talby watch their former captain drift away, Dolittle notes that “the skipper always was lucky.”
In the end, Dolittle and Talby drift away from each other: By an amazing coincidence, Talby encounters the Phoenix Asteroids on their 12.3 trillion-year journey around the Universe and floats away with them. Dolittle grabs a long, flat piece of metal debris from the remains of the Dark Star and uses it as a surfboard to surf into the atmosphere of the unstable alien planet they failed to obliterate, ending his existence as a “falling star.”
Script to Screen provides both the transcript and the video of Doolittle talking to Bomb 20, along with the ending of Dark Star here:
https://gointothestory.blcklst.com/script-to-screen-dark-star-60255aff2ad4
For an in-depth look at Dark Star, please enjoy this essay I wrote on the film here:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2017/11/19/dark-star-and-staring-into-the-cosmic-abyss/
Sleeper
While the 1973 film Sleeper does not quite fit into the Angst SF category as defined in this essay – there is a quick background scene of a real astronomical observatory on struts, a brief mention of a Space Shuttle and the need for a hydrovac suit to fly in it, the main character sarcastically refers to himself as Flash Gordon, and later makes a crass remark about eating food that looks like “interstellar space cookies” – it does fit the bill of the standard counter cultural attitudes towards humanity’s future and science in general during the Golden Era of modern science fiction.
Directed and co-written by Woody Allen (born 1935), Sleeper is the tale of a man named Miles Monroe who is admitted into a New York City hospital in 1973 for a minor ulcer operation. Complications ensue and Miles is placed in cryogenic suspension to preserve his life and to wait for a time when medicine has advanced enough to repair him.
More complications occur and Miles is not reawakened until the year 2173, where he finds himself in a future America controlled by a police state. The rest of the plot involves Miles encountering and commenting upon the various factions that are either trying to change the status quo of their society or are more than happy to take advantage of its benefits for themselves.
It is the last scenes of dialogue in Sleeper between Miles and artist turned revolutionary Luna Schlosser (played by Diane Keaton, born 1946) that pull together what Allen and many others were feeling about the earlier promises of the institutions they were raised in during the earlier half of the Twentieth Century:
Miles Monroe: “Hey, that’s science. I don’t believe in science. You know, science is an intellectual dead end. You know, it’s a lot of guys in tweed suits cutting up frogs… on foundation grants and –.”
Luna Schlosser: “Oh, I see. You don’t believe in science. And you also don’t believe that the political systems work. And you don’t believe in God, huh?”
Miles: “Right.”
Luna: “So then, what do you believe in?”
Miles: “Sex and death. Two things that come once in my lifetime. But at least after death you’re not nauseous.”
Of course, this is a very simplistic and one-sided message. Even for politics, if everything about it was corrupt, society and even our species would have collapsed a long time ago. Nothing is ever perfect, but neither are these institutions so far gone that they can be dismissed with a few words of sarcasm.
I point back to my commentary on the 1936 film Things to Come where the artists and their factions who are against further technological progress, namely sending humans to the Moon, hypocritically never once consider abandoning the comforts and privileges they already enjoy thanks to the efforts and sacrifices made by past generations to secure their present and future. Quite frankly, they and we cannot have it both ways and still expect a productive technological society to take care of us.
The Black Hole
One place you might not expect a lot of Angst SF cinema is from the Walt Disney Company. In their long history, Disney has made their share of science fiction films and were also involved with other productions of the genre such as Forbidden Planet. However, in the decades before Disney acquired major franchises and studios, most of their efforts were relatively light affairs and certainly lacking in real angst as defined in this essay.
When Star Wars came along in May of 1977 and turned into a phenomenal hit that surprised contemporary Hollywood, Disney wanted in on this cinematic gold mine.
After the death of its founder, Walt Disney, in December of 1966, the company he founded began a decline in output quality and popularity that would last until the late 1980s. In the midst of their downward turn, Disney saw an opportunity with the Star Wars franchise that promised exciting adventures – and lots of potential box office cash – in “a galaxy far, far away.”
The company decided to go with a script that had been floating around since the early 1970s: Originally called Space Probe One, they renamed it The Black Hole and eventually released it as a film into theaters in December of 1979.
Disney tried to have it all with The Black Hole: A film for adults that would also appeal to kids, in particular the kind flocking to see Star Wars and its emerging crop of copycats. Among the cute (and some not so cute) robots and requisite laser battles, there were also some rather dark themes and scenes – and no, this is not a black hole joke. Disney even tried to emulate the famous Stargate Sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey towards the story’s end, with mixed results.
Keep in mind that The Black Hole was first formed during the Golden Age of science fiction. This is reflected in other films which arrived shortly after (and often due to) Star Wars but had been developed before that franchise began. The year 1979 was a bumper crop for these works: Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture are the two best known of these kinds of films. You may read more about them in detail in my essay located here:
The cylindrical star vessel USS Palomino is on a mission to find “habitable life” (their words) in the Milky Way galaxy when they encounter the largest black hole ever found. Even more amazing, this ultimate cosmic gravity well has a huge and mysterious starship somehow hovering dangerously near the collapsed star and yet not being pulled in.
Going through a holographic database of known Terran space vehicles, the Palomino crew soon determine this vessel is the long-lost USS Cygnus – named after the first celestial object identified as a black hole, designated Cygnus X-1 – which had been on a mission similar to theirs but never returned to Earth when the authorities ordered its crew home twenty years earlier.
Naturally the Palomino investigates the Cygnus, which they discover is not completely abandoned: An armada of service and security robots are found all over the huge ship under the command of one Dr. Hans Reinhardt, the lead scientist of the original expedition.
Of course, all is not as it seems: Incensed and refusing to obey the order to return to Earth, Reinhardt took control of the ship’s many robots and had the rest of the human Cygnus crew either exterminated or turned into mindless worker drones – all so he could complete his ultimate quest: To fly into, through, and beyond the black hole!
The Palomino crew attempt to stop Reinhardt and his drastic plan, but after multiple battles and several losses, the remaining members are trapped and left no choice but to take Reinhardt’s journey into the collapsed star.
After going through what can only be called a voyage at least partially inspired by the famous Stargate scene in 2001, the former Palomino astronauts emerge unscathed in either another part of the galaxy or another universe altogether as their rescue vessel heads toward an unknown planet. Roll credits.
There is a good story in The Black Hole: Unfortunately, it became muddled along the way as various company folks tried to make the film something for everyone, in particular the Star Wars crowd. That Disney was still trying to find its new footing at the time and was yet to become more experienced with adult-themed films did not help the situation.
Despite all this, The Black Hole is an example of Angst SF: There is plenty of bad science to go around, a heaping helpful of technobabble-level future technology, characters who either just want to go home or make science and space exploration look bad, and an ending that left the audience hanging as to the ultimate fate of the survivors.
In spite of everything you have just read here and perhaps elsewhere about this production, The Black Hole is still an enjoyable watch with perhaps one of the most intricate and exotically designed fictional starships in cinematic history (the USS Cygnus), some excellent practical special effects, a wonderful soundtrack produced by composer John Barry (1933-2011), and moments when you can see the better plot peering out from behind the Star Wars excess – even if much of it is derived from Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, in particular the 1954 Disney film version of the French author’s epic novel from 1870.
This 2019 article from The Hollywood Reporter is a very good summary of how The Black Hole came about on its fortieth anniversary, complete with interviews with some of the main cast members and those who made the film possible:
Aniara Lite: WALL-E
Although deep and socially relevant cinematic science fiction took a detour with the arrival of Star Wars in 1977, this particular niche thankfully never fully disappeared.
I want to focus on one film in this post-Force world that has definite parallels with Aniara: The Pixar Animation Studios film WALL-E, released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures in June of 2008. One will also note the comparisons with Silent Running from the following plot description…
By the Twenty-Second Century, human overconsumption, mismanagement, and pollution have made Earth’s environment so toxic to almost all terrestrial life that the entire population is evacuated into interstellar space aboard massive starliners provided by a megacorporation – which was ironically the primary source for the planet’s many problems in the first place.
As humanity settles into a lifestyle that is basically an endless cruise vacation, fleets of automated machines called Waste Allocation Load Lifters: Earth-class, or WALL-E, are left to clean up the global mess. Once these robotic trash haulers have removed the voluminous waste in what is assumed to be just five years, the star vessels will return to Earth and humanity can safely repopulate their home world.
Over seven centuries later, however, humanity is still cruising the galaxy aboard all those starliners: Earth’s ecological devastation was too much to resolve and nearly all the WALL-E units have long since ceased to function. As we witness aboard one representative vessel named the Axiom, every human has become almost exclusively dependent on the various robots, computers, and other mechanized devices that serve their basic needs.
NOTE: According to the Cambridge Dictionary, the word axiom means “a statement or principle that is generally accepted to be true, but need not be so.”
The current generation of passengers have become so used to an endless daily lifestyle of eating, lounging, perusing social media, and playing recreational sports like golf that they no longer know of any other way to exist. Even the stars they dwell among contain no interest for them, if they ever did. This indefinite vacation has turned the bulk of humanity dangerously overweight, lazy, and apathetic.
The Aniara was also a type of cruise ship in space, providing its thousands of passengers with various material luxuries and entertainment as they spent what was intended to be a three-week journey from Earth to Mars. Just like the folks on the Axiom, they too were refugees escaping an ecologically devastated home planet ruined by their own species.
COMMENT: According to the Pixar Wiki, the Axiom carried 600,000 human passengers and 500,000 robots. At the time of Earth’s evacuation, there were 200 billion people on the planet! The logistics of moving every human off the homeworld and into what had to be thousands of similar starships, to say nothing of the difficulties encountered by those who undoubtedly refused to leave Earth regardless of the poisonous environment, must have been mind-boggling.
Here is an interesting video made by The Templin Institute on the history and design of the Axiom. The video includes a discussion on how the current generation of passengers came to be in the state they are in 700 years after their ancestors left Earth. The implication here for maintaining a generation ship society is to simply keep fulfilling the passengers’ basic wants and needs so that they do not desire or even realize there are other ways to be and live:
What is interesting to wonder – and this leads to important questions and concerns regarding the concept of multigenerational starships – is if the Aniara could have been as well stocked with provisions and maintained as the Axiom was, might there have been less existential trauma and other issues among its travelers? After all, even the destination of the Aniara, the planet Mars, was no ecological paradise compared to Earth of earlier eras and the settlers would have to spend their lives dwelling in restrictive artificial environments.
The first generation of passengers on the Axiom (and all those other spaceliners sent into the void) were told they would likely be spending no more than five years cruising among the stars. At some point it must have become evident that they were not returning to Earth at the originally promised date.
Although we do not know how they reacted initially to this news, it is obvious that, unlike the Aniara’s compliment, the Axiom passengers had a longer time to settle into their new and frankly comfortable lifestyles when the change did arrive. They were probably placated with promises that it would take just a bit more than originally planned before Earth was ready for their return. By the time the people might have begun to question if and when they were ever going to return to their home world, they may have been on the starliner long enough that it was no longer a priority. Thus began the passengers’ long physical and mental decline.
COMMENT: In WALL-E, it is revealed via a classified video that in the year 2110, the head of the megacorporation Buy n Large (BnL) sent a secret message to all the starliners’ AI autopilots (named AUTO but sounds like Otto) that their plan to clean up Earth had failed and to just keep the ships and their passengers in deep space indefinitely. AUTO stuck to this plan even when it was determined centuries later that Earth was starting to sustain life again.
The examples we see of human social behavior in both WALL-E and Aniara bring up the following vital questions if generational starships are one of the ways we migrate to other star systems, or use them to cruise the galaxy indefinitely, stopping at exoworlds just long enough to resupply their vessel, sight-see, and so forth:
- Will people willingly want to spend their lives on the equivalent of a vast cruise liner?
- Even if life on such a ship is better than being on an ecologically ruined Earth, all their needs are met, and a dictatorial regime of rulership never emerges, will such passengers eventually become bored and unsatisfied to dangerous levels?
- Will they turn violent and cruel just to relieve the monotony?
- Will they instead turn to virtual worlds where they can live out any kind of lives they want?
- Will they become lethargic and physiologically unhealthy as predicted in WALL-E?
WALL-E and Aniara are doing what science fiction does best: Examining various “what-if” scenarios and showing their possible results. WALL-E may be a rather simplistic vision of one possible human future where Earth is an unlivable wreck and the humans who escaped into space fared little better in the end, but it does get out the message and implant the thought in the general public how best to take care of our home and live in harmony with each other.
After all, collectively we are just waking up to the fact that we do live on a very large but not infinite ship in space that has been going in circles about a yellow dwarf star for billions of years. As our population expands and our civilization demands more resources and room, we will need to address these concerns before they overwhelm our resources and we find ourselves unable to escape.
If we do and/or must leave our planetary home, we need to look at and test all the options carefully and with as much knowledge as possible before we fling our descendants into the vast void.
All Style and No Substance: Ad Astra
As with Interstellar from 2014, the film Ad Astra, released in 2019, is a good example of someone (or a group of someones) who does not truly grasp (or actually care about) science fiction, angsty or otherwise. Instead, as the section title above sums it up, they go for style over substance and assume/hope that their audiences will mistake it for deep meanings.
Ad Astra is such an all-around subpar yet expensive-looking film that I do not wish to waste time going into any real detail on it, except to emphasize that not only was its story and science absurd, but that it could not even land one of the key aspects of Angst SF: Ad Astra had a potentially happy future for humanity!
Our hero flies all the way out to Neptune to find his father, who is running a Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) effort named the Lima Project on a space station circling the ice giant world. Turns out this one project has somehow determined that there is no other intelligent life in the entire Milky Way galaxy; however, the project did collect enough data on exoworlds and alien star systems that the information could be used for both science expeditions and humanity settling the galaxy.
No, no Ad Astra: You were supposed to declare that no life exists beyond Earth, there are no good places for humanity to expand to among the stars, and that only our planetary home can save us.
I am not trying to be cleverly facetious and therefore secretly supportive of this film, please note. Ad Astra is poor cinema on multiple levels; that it has seemingly fooled many viewers by displaying only the trappings of an art house-style work is a sad testament to the otherwise educated members of society these days. As I warned near the beginning of this essay, this film shares many of the same traits as Interstellar in terms of its style, substance, and the public reactions to it.
Gravity – The Movie, Not the Fundamental Force of Nature
Another big-budget science fiction film that can be considered Angst SF but also contains major gaps in logic and physics, along with a strong undercurrent of anti-space messages, is the 2013 film Gravity.
Gravity starts off with an opening monologue card warning the audience that space is a dangerous, unpleasant, and all-around unlivable place…
At 600 km above planet Earth the temperature fluctuates between +258 and -148 degrees Fahrenheit. There is nothing to carry sound. No air pressure. No oxygen. Life in space is impossible.
We then spend the rest of the time watching the main character doing her darndest to escape being in the Final Frontier (low Earth orbit, to be exact) due to one increasingly absurd disaster after another and return home to the planet below.
The film’s message is clear. Gravity is Angst SF even though the main character has a potentially happy ending so far as she is concerned. Despite looking shiny and cool, winning accolades, box office receipts, and multiple Academy Award nominations, Gravity is still a flawed work under its glittery surface that reinforces its makers’ belief that humanity will only do best if it stays home.
Elysium
The year 2013 was home to yet another angsty style SF film that put space utilization and settlement in a bad light and showcased yet another future Earth with a humanity cursed with extreme levels of poverty, disease, and a wrecked environment: Elysium.
Named after the elitist ancient Greek mythological afterlife where only the greatest heroes (read warriors) and those who had connections with the gods could go when they die, Elysium is also the designation of a huge space station circling Earth inhabited by only the rich and powerful, who of course have everything, including really great health care technology right out of Star Trek.
The Elysium authorities also literally take out any illegal immigrants who dare to cross the border of space attempting to find a better life on the station, which resembles the free-floating space settlement plans studied by NASA in the 1970s.
Most of the plot in Elysium is bogged down in a standard story about an initially amoral guy who turns into a reluctant hero and fights some truly villainous villains to help save humanity and level the social class playing field. The film also goes for the Hollywood happy ending where everyone on Earth is given the chance for a better life in one dramatic turn of events.
I recognize that there is always some value in a popular-level film that makes an attempt to showcase the value of people regardless of their circumstances and enlighten the public on the need for the better ecological management of our planet.
What bothers me is that Elysium uses space and those who utilize it as the villains rather than the salvation of human civilization that it could be if we manage it right. We and Earth are not separate from the rest of the Cosmos: This misguided perception is what we have seen multiple times in both the examples I have presented in this essay and elsewhere.
Space itself can free our species from the limitations and problems that come from remaining on a singular world as we continue to expand our population numbers, occupy more of Earth’s surface, and consume greater amounts of its resources, many of which are not renewable.
Arrival
The 2016 film Arrival is an interesting case study for defining Angst SF. On its surface the film certainly comes across as serious and hard science fiction: Twelve giant alien spaceships resembling black concave lenses suddenly appear at seemingly random places across Earth. The vessel hovering just off the ground in remote Montana is investigated by a contact team which includes a male physicist named Ian Donnelly and a female linguist named Dr. Louise Banks.
In multiple meetings with the visitors, who are labeled heptapods and resemble large gray squids with seven tentacles they use interchangeably as legs and arms, Dr. Banks is slowly able to decipher their strange language, which they make not with sounds but as ink-like circles in the air with complex patterns emerging from the end of one of their “tentacles”.
Eventually the linguist learns that the heptapod language actually shapes one’s perception of time so that future events can be seen. The aliens have given humanity their language as a gift, as they will need our help with some undisclosed matter three thousand years from now. Their presence also brought our species to work together and live in peace after initial suspicions and tensions about their motives.
The Angst SF angle comes into play with Arrival thusly:
- The technologies of the heptapod spaceships, which remind one of the black slab Monoliths from 2001: A Space Odyssey in both their appearance and enigmatic nature, are never explained in the film. That there is some fundamental physics behind their features and functions is not relevant to the plot. They are meant to seem and feel almost divine in nature to give humanity both in the film and the cinematic audience the impression that gods have arrived from the heavens to either uplift or punish us.
- The effects of the heptapod language are based on the real concept that learning a new language can reshape the human brain. However, the film takes this idea and goes well beyond it: Those who learn this alien “speech” are given the ability to see their future as it transcends our linear view of time.
- The Two Cultures is on prominent display here: The physicist and linguist clash over the best ways to approach the alien visitors to learn as much as they can about them, especially why they have come to Earth. You know well in advance who is going to “win” this battle, even though in a real encounter with ETI, humanity would need every available tool at its disposal to have a serious chance at communicating with and understanding such aliens.
- Despite the story spanning interstellar levels and millennia, the real focus is on one woman and her relationship with her daughter, which has a tragic end depending upon how you look at it.
In essence, Arrival attempts to have its cake and eat it too, as it were. The film’s saving grace is that it is well made and thought-provoking. The angst elements do detract from the science in terms of how a real alien encounter would go: The fantastical effects of the unusual language aside, I was displeased with how the physicist and what fields he represents were downplayed in favor of the linguistic field by implying that only the “heart” or intuition can truly understand the Cosmos.
Once again, humanity makes itself the measure of all things. Even the heptapods will need us in thirty centuries time, despite already being far superior on multiple levels. Exactly what they will need from us then is knowingly left unsaid. In the short story upon which Arrival is based, the aliens eventually leave without giving us any reasons as to why they arrived at Earth in the first place. Now that is existential.
Here is an article which resonates on my complaint about the treatment of physicist Ian Donnelly and the hard sciences in general in Arrival:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chadorzel/2016/11/21/the-physics-that-got-left-out-of-arrival/
Some cases in point, quoted from the article:
The way this plays out in the movie, the fact that Ian is a physicist has basically no relevance to anything. He’s important because of the emotional role he plays in Louise’s future life, but he could be a medical doctor, a CIA agent, or even a soldier assigned to her as a bodyguard without fundamentally changing the plot.
In the original story, it’s critically important that Gary Donnelly is a physicist, because he makes discoveries about heptapod physics that illuminate and inspire the discoveries that Louise makes about their language. And those discoveries provide the in-story justification for the shift to Louise’s sense of time that makes the whole thing work. Removing that physics aspect not only leaves Jeremy Renner with very little to do in the movie, it shifts the story in the direction of woo-woo “mystical aliens are mystical” in a way that I don’t really care for.
The film doesn’t contradict the original story, though, so if you know the physics basis, you can mentally put it back in and fix the major problem. And if you don’t know the physics basis, well, that’s what I’m here for…
Here is a fascinating piece by computer scientist and physicist Stephen Wolfram (born 1959) discussing his involvement with Arrival as a science consultant. To give you an idea how little effort was put into the method of travel for the heptapod starship, Wolfram was basically given just one day by the film producers to come up with an advanced interstellar propulsion system that at least sounded plausible:
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2016/11/quick-how-might-the-alien-spacecraft-work/
There is also this quote from the article that sums up the issues with trying to get good (read accurate) science in a Hollywood production and why it is important:
There are, I think, several reasons Hollywood movies often don’t get as much science input as they should. The first is that movie-makers usually just aren’t sensitive to the “science texture” of their movies. They can tell if things are out of whack at a human level, but they typically can’t tell if something is scientifically off. Sometimes they’ll get as far as calling a local university for help, but too often they’re sent to a hyper-specialized academic who’ll not-very-usefully tell them their whole story is wrong. Of course, to be fair, science content usually doesn’t make or break movies. But I think having good science content – like, say, good set design – can help elevate a good movie to greatness.
Here is the work that Arrival spawned from, “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang (born 1967), in PDF format:
https://fyp.uoregon.edu/sites/default/files/chiang_story_of_your_life.pdf