 |
| Images courtesy of Gorky Film |
Soviet writer-director Yakov Protazanov’s film career spans
all the way back to 1909 with the short film The Fountain of Bakhchisaray before
joining the Gloria Film Company in Moscow where he’d meet his wife and soon
land work in the director’s chair.
Experienced with years as a film worker adept in every technical
subcategory, Protazanov soon began work on silent films such as an adaptation
of Aleksandr Pushkin’s Departure of a Grand Old Man chronicling the
final days of Leo Tolstoy. Following the
Russian Civil War, the director emigrated to Europe and while he had spent
years before in France and Italy in the early 1900s, his prior departure and
return to Moscow in 1923 bore particular impact on what ultimately became his
most famous film: Aelita, Queen of Mars.
The very first Soviet science-fiction film to depict
interplanetary space travel from Earth to Mars with decorated extraterrestrial
life forms and hulking robot guards, the 1924 silent epic Aelita based
on the novel by Aleksei Tolstoy is every bit as grand and pioneering in scale
and technical filmmaking as Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis. Though largely grounded in a narrative
involving a subset of characters thriving after the Russian Civil War in 1921
Moscow, the film is best remembered for its fleeting fantasy elements. Following
a mysterious transmission of unknown origin, a coworker of an obsessive
engineer named Los (Nikolai Tseretelli) jokes the message could be from Mars,
triggering a series of daydreams involving Mars and a civilization of aliens
led by King Tushkub (Konstantin Eggert) and the titular Queen Aelita (Earth actress
Yuliya Solntseva in her screen debut).
Meanwhile in the real-world Los’ wife Natasha (Valentina
Kuindzhi) mingles with a former elite playboy turned dejected miscreant Erlikh
(Pavel Pol) which spurns the jealousies of Los and intensifies his daydreaming. At a certain point in the film, in a
precursor to, say, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, the line differentiating
fantasy from reality becomes increasingly blurred involving an all-out war
triggered by an intergalactic romantic longing felt between the engineer Los
and the Queen of Mars herself. There’s
also a subplot involving a close friend of the engineer, Spiridonov (Nikolai
Tseretelli in dual roles), who is being duped and embezzled by Erlikh before
disappearing, prompting an inexperienced detective Kratsov (Igor Ilyinsky) on a
stowaway mission with Los and former soldier Gusev (Nikolai Batalov) which
takes them to the very edge of the galaxy itself.
Originally exhibited in Leningrad with live piano music composed
and performed by the legendary Dmitri Shostakovich and featuring dual 1.33:1
black-and-white camerawork by German cinematographer Emil Schünemann and future Morozko (the 1924 version) director Yuri
Zhelyabuzhsky beautifully capturing the sets by Isaac Rabinovich and Victor
Simov and costumes designed by Aleksandra Ekster, Aelita is regarded as
perhaps the first Soviet blockbuster.
Replete with an advertising campaign which including mysterious radio
spots naming disembodied portions of the title half a year before the film’s
premiere and detailed poster prints, the staggering super production helped
grease the rails for subsequent space travel works such as Cosmic Voyage in
1936 and its depictions of zero gravity and the surfaces of other planets. The costumes themselves would play a notable
influence on the Flash Gordon serials, Lang’s forays into the subgenre
and decades later Slava Tsukerman’s New York science-fiction odyssey Liquid Sky. While more audiences know the
Lang epic (one of my favorite films of all time I should add), the Soviet film
most certainly predated and rolled out the red carpet for it.
The mysterious and beautiful female face of the film itself,
played by then-newcomer Yuliya Solntseva, has an extensive history herself in
the annals of Soviet cinema. Eventually
marrying the legendary Ukrainian film director Aleksandr Dovzhenko and studio
founder of Dovzhenko Film, Solntseva eventually became the first woman to win
the Best Director Award at Cannes for effectively the country’s first Sovscope
70mm production with Chronicle of Flaming Years. Written by her late husband who also wrote her
next distinctly Ukrainian film The Enchanted Desna, it cemented her
place on the Cannes jury in 1975. Seeing
her here as the titular Aelita displays even in 1924 a powerful young
woman ready to take on the film world and usher in new technical directions previously
unseen in Soviet cinema. Playing off of
her in dual roles is Nikolai Tseretelli as the daydreaming engineer Los while
his friend Gusev is played by Bed and Sofa actor Nikolai Batalov. Probably most notable of all is Volga-Volga
actor Igor Ilyinsky as the makeshift dime store sleuth trying to crack the
mysterious theft of sugar and disappearance of Spiridonov.
Beloved by audiences by lambasted by Soviet critics over ideological
reasons largely stemming to then-production company Mezhrabpom-Rus (now Gorky
Film) being a ‘cooperative’ outfit, the 1924 science-fiction epic was a
commercial hit which was prevented from being screened abroad by
authorities. Around the same time, an
animation workshop created animated sequences for the film which were
ultimately rejected and reused in the 1924 Soviet sci-fi cartoon Interplanetary
Revolution. With the official
authoritative assessment of the film being that it was a ‘failed commercial
experiment’, Aelita was largely dismissed by critics as a purported
Western export and for decades it was ignored if not disavowed. While disregarded in its native country,
abroad the film gained cult traction among filmmakers like Repo Man director
Alex Cox and American science-fiction author Frederik Pohl who compared it to
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris.
As a Western filmgoer interested in Soviet science-fiction, Aelita
is something of an undiscovered silent cinema powerhouse whose images
remain striking if not prescient while trying to examine the sociological
context of living in a post-Civil War era Soviet Union. Though the film has played in some
microcinema venues over the years, it has yet to receive the same sort of
reverent attention as Metropolis or A Trip to the Moon. In time that may change but for the moment it
remains one of the subgenre’s best kept secrets ripe for measured rediscovery
by enthusiasts, fantasy-fiction fans and silent film aficionados alike.
--Andrew Kotwicki
