"Solaris" by Andrei Tarkovsky as the boundary of the semiotic sphere: the cine-onto-semiotic operator at the threshold of transduction

Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Solaris" has long been regarded as a genre exception in his filmography, where the science fiction backdrop supposedly recedes before the director's familiar poetics of long takes and elemental forces. However, for Tarkovsky, the frame is not limited to representation or aesthetic play. He operates as a cinematographer who not only shows reality but reconstructs the very ontological situation of the viewer. In the case of "Solaris," this operator faces an ultimate challenge. The ocean of the planet serves as a literal materialization of a pre-individual field, while the "guests" become the result of transduction, in which the disparity between the human and the non-human seeks resolution but does not find a stable form. The article employs a synthesis of the philosophy of individuation by Gilbert Simondon and the semiotics of culture by Yuri Lotman. Methodologically, the work relies on three approaches. The first consists of an immanent analysis of the film, where the logic of images and editing decisions are derived from the internal organization of the frame rather than being imported from external theories. The second method highlights key episodes as points of bifurcation: the library scene, the appearance and destruction of Hari, the finale with the island house. At these points, the disparity either attempts to resolve into a new dimension or freezes in a negative remainder. The third method employs transductive transfer, borrowing operational schemes from physics and biology to describe cinematographic parameters. The novelty of the study lies in connecting two philosophical traditions. From Simondon, we take the language of becoming, where metastability and internal resonance transform the long take into an event of being rather than an aesthetic gesture. Lotman's semiotics allows us to describe the semiotic sphere of the station as a space of borders, where autocommunication and explosion do not restructure the code but merely expose its impotence. The synthesis leads to the concept of a cinema-ontosemiotic operator acting at the limit of transduction. Unlike Tarkovsky's earlier films, where the operator still found a resolution for disparity, "Solaris" captures the moment when transduction is carried out by the inhuman Other, while the human remains merely a catalyst or victim of the process. This calls into question the very possibility of art acting as a mediator between order and chaos and opens a new perspective on the evolution of the director.