Paolo Pardo

The Italian Solaris

A restored version of the "Italian Solaris" has been released on DVD in Italy. This is thus a good time to provide you with an overview of the various problems associated with the original Italian theatrical release of the film. Paolo Pardo has done the research and provided us with the following.

De Laurentiis deliberately decided to cut almost one hour from the film, in order to make it a "true" science fiction film — more appealing to the general public. This is even evident by looking at the film's Italian promotional materials, and also the cover of the Italian DVD: our hero wearing full astronaut's equipment — you don't see anything like that in the actual movie — apparently saving a damsel in distress.

If you see (the Italian) Solaris for the first time, the thing you immediately notice is the odd dubbing. Although I don't prefer dubbed movies, this is the only way you can watch a film in Italy which comes from abroad. For this reason, we have quite good dubbers, and the best of them give their voices to various actors. In Solaris they used a kind of "raw" dubbers, their voices have strong dialects/accents and have a totally negative and baffling influence on the film. In addition to this, there are various mistakes in dialogue translations (e.g., they mistook "library" for "laboratory").

Now about the cuts. They are so many that it is quite impossible to list all of them. To get a rough idea of what they did to Solaris, just consider the fact that Berton and his son are totally absent from the film. There is thus no dialogue between Berton and Kris, and no trace of Berton's black & white inquiry film and of his car trip (and therefore none of Tarkovsky's amazing juxtaposition of traffic noise and nature). But footage was also cut on the space station from the Sartorius and Snaut dialogues — especially from Snaut's talk just a few minutes before the end of the movie.

After all this cutting, the Italian editor found a solution to retrieve some of the important dialogues which disappeared: they put them in the mouth of a brand new character who is not in the original film, and they did an "off-screen dialogue digest." Sometimes the dialogue is completely rewritten — one may think this was done in an attempt to try to achieve some level of internal consistency, but the actual reasons are often quite unclear.

The film starts with titles appearing over the images of flowing water, with Bach's musical background. Then, just after the starting titles, we see Kris' father walking towards him (and us) screaming "Kris come home! You have nothing better to do than walking around picking soil?!" (Original dialogue: "What did you have to offend him for? You're too harsh"). Here also the editing has been altered, since this sequence appears several minutes later in the original version (Kris' father has just heard from Berton that he is very upset and is leaving). From now on, Kris' father takes upon himself his original dialogues, plus a digest of the ones which were cut from the now surgically removed Berton. So, starting from the very first dialogue lines, he is forced to show a seriously split personality...

Now about the "digest" process. Sometimes the original dialogue is replaced by the "digested" one, and the various characters have interchangeable dialogues: Kris and his father with Berton, Snaut with Sartorius. More often a character says something in the sequences where nobody talks or his original dialogue is replaced by the digested one. Maybe the pivotal sequence to examine this process is the one in which Kris is burning papers and other things in the yard. You can find there a totally "counterfeit" conversation between Kris and his father: both speak when they aren't visible or have their back on the camera or — this is almost unbelievable — the smoke from the fire hides their mouths, permitting the dubber to put additional words into their mouths. The following table illustrates the process.

Finally, here is another example. They have just seen the movie with the younger Berton and the board of inquiry (this entire sequence is absent from the Italian version). Kris and his father are sharing a moment of intimacy inside the house.