Aelita - Der Flug zum Mars

The Old U.S.S.R. was quite a bizarre country; aristocratic balls were illegal and so was private property. This Herr Graf, for example, had to suffer the indignity of sharing the hundreds of empty rooms at the Schloss with homeless people. What's more, the caviar was rationed out-and even the commoners got their share.

So the fact that a Bolshevist engineer has the dream to travel to Mars after having received a mysterious and coded message from outer space was not at all strange to this Herr Graf. It was not even a surprise that this dream comes true.

"Aelita" (1924) ,directed by Herr Yakov Protazanov, was the U.S.S.R.'s first science-fiction film and was a notable success and became known even beyond the frontiers of Russia. Even after all these years, the oeuvre maintains its singularity, artistic qualities and its weirdness.

Obviously the film surprises the audience, especially with the Mars futurist part. This is skilfully intertwined with a parallel story of a Bolshevist couple whose relationship is endangered by jealousy and suspicion. Even the queen of Mars, Aelita (Frau Yuliya Solntseva) will get involved as she falls desperately in love with the Terrestrial Bolshevist, our hero, the engineer Losi ( Herr Nikolai Tsereteli ). The engineer dreams of travelings to Mars partly as a way of dealing with his earthly problems but, more importantly, to export the October revolution beyond the small confines of earth. Thus, the red planet must become truly red.

The part of the film set in Mars astonishes even a German count with its particular costumes and sets, designed by Frau Alexandra Exter and Herr Isaac Rabinovich ( this Herr Von must add that Herr Protazanov's cinematographic background was influenced by European early avant-garde; he worked in Germany and France before the Bolshevists asked him to return to Russia) . This gives the film a suitably bizarre and fascinating atmosphere that is most appropriate for such an unusual story.

It must be said that the film isn't all absurdity, extravagance and propaganda delirium. As this German count said before, the film combines science-fiction with a down to earth story that reflects the daily hardships of the Moscow citizens trying to make a living at the beginning of the 20's. There is also some humor about people feeling nostalgic for the old regime and who are not quite accepting of the new order. The character of Kratsov (Herr Igor Illynksy), an amateur investigator, adds a bit of humor and brightness. Overall, the film is a successful combination of realism, comedy and science fiction; surely, one doesn't expect all this from those rude Bolsheviks.

And now, if you'll allow me, I must temporarily take my leave because this German Count must return to the aristocratic earthly world.

Herr Graf Ferdinand Von Galitzien http://ferdinandvongalitzien.blogspot.com

Having seen so many early movies pushing the communist agenda, I have tired a bit. To be fair, it was certainly creative of the filmmaker to use the science fiction genre and space travel to make a point. The characters represent either the old ways or the new. There is a comfort in being the ruling class and prospering on the backs of the disenfranchised. The Martians are dealing with the same thing. They seem to have devices to watch the earth and keep what is going on a secret. Until love forces things out in the open. The images are interesting curiosities of the time. I had never heard of this film and when I saw the title I thought it was one of those schlock films of the fifties. It is interesting, though slow moving. I was amazed when the wife got shot but, of course, we find out later that things aren't quite as they appear. See it just to get an idea of the type of film being made.

Certainly one of the more interesting and unique silent movies that you will see, "Aelita" is well worth watching despite its flaws. It's no masterpiece, but it offers an intriguing and often creative mix of science fiction, melodrama, and history. It also has an interesting story that holds your attention and moves at a pretty good pace.

Don't be automatically put off from seeing this film by the fact that everyone mentions the dose of silly Soviet propaganda that comes with the rest of it. It's definitely there, but the political elements are not terribly obtrusive or heavy-handed, although there are a couple of times when they are unintentionally humorous. There are many other themes that are just as prominent, or more so - such as relationships and jealousy, fantasy and reality, real-life concerns versus idealistic projects.

The dual settings of Moscow and Mars are used rather well, setting off the differences and similarities between the two societies and relating them to the concerns of the characters. There is a nice contrast between the settings and props in Moscow, which are drab but effective, stressing the pressing concern of everyday matters, and the weird, distinctive Martian sets and costumes. The latter are creative and interesting to look at, and if they are sometimes a bit over-the-top, they are no more so than most cinematic conceptions of other planets. The film's historical setting is also quite interesting in itself. It is set a few years before the movie's release, at a time when Russia was just emerging from the chaos of revolution and civil war. The atmosphere of rebuilding and uncertainty forms an important part of both the plot and the themes of the movie, and it also provides a historical look at an often forgotten era. Most of the cast and characters (at least the ones in Moscow) are believable enough that you want to find out what happens to them amidst all this.

You can certainly find plenty of better silent movies or better sci-fi movies than this, but you would find many more that are far worse, and not nearly so distinctive. For the price of putting up with a handful of political blurbs, you get to see an interesting story with some substance and plenty of unusual and creative details.

"Aelita" was screened as part of the National Film Theatre's science fiction season, but I can't help fearing that anyone who came to see it in the expectation of Martian adventures would probably have been very disappointed. (Edit: having read a selection of IMDb reviews, I gather this was all too correct, alas...) It certainly wasn't what I was expecting, but I actually enjoyed it a great deal for what it is: basically, an ordinary domestic drama of life in the undernourished, overcrowded post-war Moscow of 1921, with its black-marketeers, buffoons and ambitious dreamers. Intercut with this are the protagonist's imaginations of a stylised, balletic Mars, where the wilful figurehead Queen becomes fascinated with this alien Earthman she has never met; the more frustrating his day-to-day life becomes, the more he takes refuge in these plans and visions, and finally the two worlds become mingled entirely as he seeks escape in interplanetary flight.

The obvious comparisons to make are with Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" and H.G.Wells' "Things to Come"; I have to say that I actually found "Aelita" as visually inventive in its science-fiction sections as either of these -- and considerably more enjoyable. It has the human dimension and the humour that both of the former worthy sagas lack; for example, the soldier Gussev is obliged to turn up at the last minute for blast-off wearing women's clothing, because his wife has locked up his own equipment in an attempt to keep him from making the trip! And it benefits from the well-worn tactic of introducing recognisably contemporary characters into its alien setting to serve as audience identification figures; the dream-structure also allows it to get away with a good deal in the way of events that seem oddly arbitrary or clichéd at the time, while explaining them later. With hindsight I suspect that some of the revolutionary grandiloquence we laughed at was actually intended to be ridiculous (Protazanov had been a successful pre-revolutionary director who had only just been induced to return to Soviet Russia, and there is a striking sequence in "Aelita" where characters hark back wistfully to the 'old days'): the film has a good Soviet moral, but not the one you are led to expect, and it knows how to deflate the bubble of wild fantasy.

Nikolai Tsereteli and Vera Kuindzhi make an attractive and sensitive leading couple as the engineer and his wife, although the latter suffers from the limitations of the orthochromatic film stock of this era which tends to bleach out blue eyes altogether, to occasionally grotesque effect. Pavel Pol is also impressive as Erlich, the agreeable con-man who is billeted on the couple, while Igor Ilyinsky and Nikolai Batalov provide comic relief without becoming tedious.

The space technology shown has a definite air of Jules Verne, but take-off is effectively suggested using blurring camera views rather than extensive model work, and the characters stumble from their ship on landing in a convincing (and concealing) cloud of dust -- although there is an impressive fiery splashdown in the alien city. The Martian interior settings are deliberately conceived in theatrical terms, with the Martian characters moving in balletic mime that contrasts with the down-to-earth approach of the humans when they arrive, and there are some eerie scenes of the comatose workers being stacked for storage; the overseers with whips, on the other hand, are rather crudely prosaic. Some of the intertitles in the Martian sections come across as rather stilted, although it's hard to known how much of this is a problem with translation from what is presumably high-flown Russian. I did wonder if there were intertitles missing earlier on, as at some points the transitions seemed extremely abrupt.

For this performance a minimalist live accompaniment was provided by the appropriately named group Minima in a modern idiom which worked surprisingly well not only with the visions of Mars but with the 1920s Moscow setting. For my own part, even at the moments when I felt that the film really had gone too far for credibility I still found myself well-disposed towards it as a whole; when it subsequently proved to unwind itself to a neat conclusion, I felt pleasantly vindicated. I had heard that despite the subsequent 'socialist realist' image, much silent Soviet 'domestic' drama is in fact very good, and on the basis of this film this genre definitely seems worth a look. Lovers of ray-guns (although these do figure) and space adventure, on the other hand, will probably feel short-changed -- as, apparently, did the original critics, although I'm glad to say that this did not prevent the film from being a box-office smash at the time!

A remarkable film from 1924, of immense historical interest. See the turbulence of Russia as it was just a few years after the 1917 revolution and the subsequent war 1918-21 against the foreign-backed White Army. But see it all in the context of a most amazing futurist film, at least the equal of the other two equivalent futurist greats from Germany and Britain - Metropolis (1927) and High Treason (1928), respectively. Arguably it is the best of the three, with avant garde sets and costumes that could have come straight out of the Bauhaus' choreography workshop. The version shown on Australian TV had a presumably later added music score that was just so perfect and integrated to the film's plot and visuals that it could not possibly have been better had it been original. It had a mesmerising robotic, minimalist, mechanical and repetitive character that was simply made for a futurist and surreal film like this. The cyrillic characters of the silent narration only add (for us Westerners, at least) to the mystery and surreality of the whole story, and one can only feel sorry for those who, after all this tour-de-force, feel shortchanged from an unfulfilled need for a more banal storyline. Or aggrieved by the perception of the film as mere propaganda. There's always reruns of Rambo and The Green Berets for you, fellers! It's a pity most cinephiles are oblivious to the existence of this film, as wider availability and screening would ensure its fame as one of the greatest silent, futurist and early modern films.