Spoilers for all three films, Interstellar included!
Andrei Tarkovsky is one of the most influential directors in cinema history. Featured prominently on lists of the best in his craft, he is considered by some a spiritual master and even in the state that persecuted him, he was seen as the greatest Soviet poet. According to Ingmar Bergman, Tarkovsky created a new language, true to the nature of film, and from it weaved entire worlds, uniquely his, in which he distillated theological issues, philosophical questions, particularly that of time and the place of man in the universe, emotional struggles and artworks reflecting them. Nothing that is human or art escaped him. Many movie-goers have heard this language spoken most likely without even realizing, since Tarkovsky's mark on cinema stretches past his death in 1986. Recently even multiplex audiences were exposed to it, because it filtered into a blockbuster movie. (Stranger things have happened... I think, I'm not sure.)
During the London press conference for Interstellar, director Christopher Nolan quoted Tarkovsky's cinematic poem, Mirror, as an influence on the way he and cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema shot the elements. Even if he hadn't, Tarkovksy's impact is plain and obvious in several instances within the first act of the film and weaved much more subtly throughout with the 2014 entry echoing back to 1972's Solaris. This has been remarked upon by several observers, including director Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino also mentioned Terrence Malick, a confessed favorite of Nolan's, in his assessment of Interstellar. Interestingly, Malick's The Tree of Life has a manifest Tarkovsky-ian feel with several shots hearkening to his films, Mirror in particular. Malick makes use of Tarkovsky's signature slow, hypnotic levitation scenes, mirroring that of the maternal figure.
I believe an ideal illustration of this symbolic manifestation is the imponderableness scene from Solaris. Love plays an essential part in Interstellar, too, and the question here is to which degree is love a spiritual reality and to which it is a measurable, scientific one. Solaris goes to great lengths to preserve the mystery and ineffability of love, which is what transforms “Khari” from a creature of pure, cold, almost mechanical intelligence created by Solaris in an effort to reach its human observers, into a sentient being. It is, also, what eventually destroys her, as she is unable to subsist with the pain human feeling inculcates. This pain is by all intents and purposes weaponized in Interstellar, as Cooper uses it almost as a force to push himself across galaxies in an effort to save and then to get to his children.
Given that it is a space film, Interstellar has by necessity a few short zero gravity sequences, but they are shot in a clinical, documentary style that goes no further than its pragmatic reasoning. The influence of Mirror is most evident in the beginning, right from the first shot, in fact, as the camera slowly pans through meandering dust. Slightly later, the dust levitates through the air in a hypnotic manner reminiscent of the hair-washing moment from Mirror. In fact, there are aspects of the scene in Nolan's film mirroring directly that of Tarkovsky to the point where the overall effect is similar: sidereal and one of unreality weaving its own, entirely cinematic reality.
Tarkovsky defined film-making as “sculpting in time”. Truly his films and Mirror in particular often reflect on time and man's and art's place within in and in relation to it. Time almost never flows chronologically in his films, but in a highly internalized way, sinewy and uneven, guided by memory, emotion and theological and philosophical concerns. In Mirror time is supremely subjective, personified as memory incarnate, as the film is in its entirety a stream of consciousness. Its reflection comes in the form of imagination, which Tarkovksy depicts metaphorically through various art works. Mirror is the ultimate experiment of Tarkovsky's vision of film: his raw material is time itself and from it he molds something unique, something that only camera can capture--the fleeting moment, fluid and elusive, forever trapped on celluloid.
On the flip-side, there is Solaris, which delves into the motif of the “impossible return”. Time is a source of endless paradoxes, just like the fact that man does not truly know itself. The main character, Kris Kelvin, is a psychologist who fails to understand himself and the people he loves most, and is unable to chart the regrets brought about by his broken relationships with his father and his wife. The impossibility of returning to the moment these fell apart haunts him and pushes him towards even further self-destructiveness, as he pursues an ill-fated connection with the mirror-image of his wife generated by Solaris. Time is the great breaker and maker of human contact here. In the end, however, catharsis is still possible, as the film circles back into itself, making the impossible return possible and offering the hope of forgiveness and reconciliation. But time is treacherous: did life truly spring from the frozen heart of the alien ocean or is it all an illusion caused by separation time and death impose?
In The Tree of Life time is cosmological, grand, internal and external. It is a mirror into which both man and stars gaze. The birth of a baby echoes that of the supernova. Time glides through and over both, not represented with the shots, but expressed in the movement of the camera, and as implacable and miraculous for celestial bodies, as it is for humans.
The time of Interstellar is wholly external, a tangible, scientific reality, but for that all the more unconquerable. It is quantifiable and reduced to a formula written on a board, but it still ticks away mercilessly, robbing humanity of the little life it has left on Earth. It speeds and slows down according to its own laws that can be written down, but never tempered with. Time does not blend sinuously within the fabric of the universe as it seems to do in The Tree of Life, nor does it flow internally and externally, building temples of consciousness like in Mirror, but rules life with an iron fist, while the characters watch helplessly as it ages and robs them their loved ones, to which the return if wholly impossible, until it is not, only to be made futile. Cooper finds he had no desire to go back to his past all along and that his children no longer need him. He is the ghost of an age his entire race surpassed.
Time is a force of nature, made no less fearsome by its intelligibility, as shown by the fact than it is an experienced physicist who voices this anxiety. Memory does not dictate its flow but is something to be wrenched from its inexorable grasp. In the end, humanity can only resign itself to it, forming an uneasy alliance, as it propels itself into the uncertainty of space, the ultimate domain of the most terrifying of universal constants. However, it is not desolation that awaits past the event horizon of the future, into which Cooper gets a glimpse. Love turns out to be the cosmological mirror, into which time stares, and the hopeful outlook of the film offers the promise of a mankind able to reconcile both through scientific knowledge. The precious moments of his children growing up, which Cooper thought lost forever, unfold before him again, yet his access to them is denied and his unable to prevent his past self from leaving his family. All he can do is fulfill an elemental parental role: to pass on wisdom. It may be love that motives him, but what he sends his daughter across time and galaxies is a mathematical formula. It is not love, but knowledge that tames time.
In Interstellar, knowledge is not only possible for man, but imperative. It is humanity's only salvation. In The Tree of Life, it is not necessary, the universe itself is both mysterious and self-explanatory. In Solaris, it is impossible, folly, and not quite man's real target. It is not aliens or data that humans seek into the vastness of space, a fellow scientist tell Kris in a crucial scene in Solaris, but a mirror: man needs man. In both Solaris and Interstellar, humans find themselves in space: symbolically in the first and literally in the second. After travelling through a wormhole and through time to the edge of a black hole, the characters of Interstellar discover that it was humans from the future who provided the means to escape a dying Earth; Cooper comes face to face with his decision to leave his family and the memory of his daughter, while his colleague, Amelia Brand, is drawn to the planet with the key to the species' survival by the man she thought lost to her forever. In Solaris, Kris rediscovers and looses his wife again and then finds his home on an island of an alien ocean and with it, the chance for a solace and forgiveness that previously eluded him.
Mirror is available for legal viewing on youtube courtesy of Mosfilm (No, Criterion doesn't have it yet.)
The Tree of Life is available on DVD (no Criterion yet).
Interstellar is in theaters now.