discourse in lieu of discourse. Sign as the other; the other as 'absence', dissolve. A new cinematic space evolves—that which exists between a 'presence' and 'absence5, between the individual and history, between art and State. Thus, objects are no longer captured as primary or deferred significations as they so eloquently (and so effectively) are in Eisenstein. In their materiality, they are lit up first as a sensuousness carrying in it the density of a specific "fictional quality". A rusted door, a leaf floating over limpid water, a half-eaten toast getting wet in the rain, rain, the sound of a rail-trolley moving towards a mysterious/forbidden zone, wind-swept faces—benumbed and apprehensive, the extended close up of a woman 'reappearing' years after her death on a spaceship, the soggy quality of the mysterious zone, objects—medieval coins, torn pages of ancient books, books open in the middle, silvery phials, a syringe, a portrait ofchrist, a revolver—submerged under shallow, still water .... Objects that are also a space. It is also, and not insignificantly, the space of a paradox: of sensuousness moving radically away from naturalism. The only exception to this paradoxical quietude in the entire work of Tarkovsky seems to be the extraordinary tunnel sequence in Solaris where the conceptual, the rhetorical and the sensuous converge, for once, with so much energy that their reduction to the placid serenity (or the mere sensuous) of the next shot achieves a thematic 'counterpoint' unparalleled in the history of world cinema. Perhaps 'counterpoint' is not a fair description of this ensemble abruptly cut back to an entirely contrary movement—a 'cut' so radical in its intensity that it is not possible to reduce it to the status of a methodological device. In Stalker, one sees the 'lurking' sensuousness become the thematic function: what lurks on the periphery is the space between the individual on a 'journey to salvation', a history undeciphered and wasting under still, shallow water, and an unseen State whose presence, however, is felt all along. In Solaris, on the other hand, the evolution of sensuousness is itself the problematic—a knowledge aspiring towards an ahistoric sensuousness while the 'dead'—human spectres from not so distant past—continue to rise from memory. Time—neither mechanistic nor psychic—witnesses a struggle for sensuousness, for history. The question here is more fundamental and, in a sense, more abstract—also, more human. Not surprising, therefore, that Tarkovsky, who stands in a dual context of immediacy and past, returns to classical forms, taking care not to reduce them into formats. Eisenstein, in vastly different circumstances, had returned to these classical forms—to classical Journal of Arts and Ideas 71 TARKOVSKY'S SOLARIS