Solaris in particular seems more relevant than ever with the rise of ChatGPT and other generative AI services that do not understand what their outputs mean to us, and often produce eery simulacra of life.
The final scenes of Solaris show this situation brilliantly in that their content matches the way it is shown: The scenes themselves mirror the depicted content with perplexing compositions, zooms and transitions, almost as if they were themselves created by an entity that does not understand the content or medium:
https://youtu.be/Z8ZhQPaw4rE?t=9489
Quoting from the book:
"QUESTION: Do you mean, for example, that the hands
didn’t move as human hands would move, because the
joints were not sufficiently supple?
BERTON: No, not at all. But . . . these movements had no
meaning. Each of our movements means something,
more or less, serves some purpose . . . "
The final scenes of Solaris show this situation brilliantly in that their content matches the way it is shown: The scenes themselves mirror the depicted content with perplexing compositions, zooms and transitions, almost as if they were themselves created by an entity that does not understand the content or medium:
https://youtu.be/Z8ZhQPaw4rE?t=9489
Quoting from the book:
"QUESTION: Do you mean, for example, that the hands didn’t move as human hands would move, because the joints were not sufficiently supple?
BERTON: No, not at all. But . . . these movements had no meaning. Each of our movements means something, more or less, serves some purpose . . . "