It's all about snow: Limning the post-human body in Copuc/Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972) and It's All about Love (Vinterberg, 2003)

Abstract

This article centres on the cloned bodies of Hari in Copuc/Solaris (Tarkovsky 1972) and Elena in It's All about Love (Vinterberg 2003), exploring how the films negotiate what it means to be human and post-human. It draws on recent work in human geography, which calls for an ethics of relationality that thinks through the body and extends the social beyond the human, and on post-humanist critical theory, which offers insights into the allegedly techno-organic hybrid nature of the contemporary human condition and the dispersal of subjectivity and memory into technologies of information. Both films emphazise the intercorporeal connectedness of the human with organic life and technology, and approach the problem of unknowability and unrepresentability in human art of non-human forms of life. They do this by alluding to the representational inadequacy and illusionary quality of film, and by gesturing to the communicative power of affective perception and sense memory.