Aelita

Aelita is a science fiction film that features the first space travel by earthlings: Destination Mars. I recommend it highly for film history buffs and aficionados of the science fiction genre that are also interested in fashion and design.

It is hard to believe that impoverished and ravaged Russia still in the midst of the horrible Revolution that was to destroy the country economically for decades and that certainly tried its best to pulverize most of its traditional culture, could produce something so visually advanced as this film. A lot of the footage will remind you of Rodchenko photographs, or the Russian posters of the time, which were works of art done by the avant-guard artists in an explosion of creativity before Stalin's arrival sent them all underground, to exile or the Gulag.

Los, an engineer of talent and determination, thinks that the radio signal beamed all over the earth is a definite message from Mars. He frantically begins to work on a space craft that will ultimately take him to Mars, while ruining his personal life in the process(not much change there in career challenging relationships since then and now).

Meanwhile Mars' Queen, Aelita, (Yuliya Solntseva) has discovered that some of her scientists have created a telescope device that can watch the detailed life on planet Earth. She sneaks a peak through the telescope device and of course, concentrates on the first appealing sign of earthy interest, engineer Los, who has a Slavic-Icon look come to think of it, looks a lot like Vladimir Putin. She immediately falls in love with him and finds it hard to concentrate during her Martian day while constantly thinking about that man on earth....

In Mars they are all perfectly dressed in elaborate costumes that include a helmet- and-mask device for the slaves and delicate transparent plastic layers, headdresses and arm decorations for the upper class, in a very chic-futuristic look which must have influenced the bold designs of Paco Rabanne in metal and plastics a full forty years later. These outfits are quite extraordinary for being the first in this genre and are much more detailed and visually interesting than the ones in Metropolis, where only the robot is really fashioned in futuristic style.

Aelita looks gorgeous, beautifully dressed and wears a striking headdress that is most becoming, though a little cumbersome when she begs him to "unite our lips, like they do on earth" for the first red-hot kiss on Mars. She looks striking trailing her appliquéd gown in the gorgeous Constructivist set, that is surely a Modernist's dream of decor. Alexandra Exter, one of the women artists in the Russian avant guard is credited with the designs, she had considerable experience in theater sets, and it shows here. Los impulsively sides with Queen Aelita's struggle to overthrow the regime of exploitation, finding nothing wrong in the 'revolution' being conducted by an imperious Queen in her regalia, proving once again that love is blind, even in interplanetary relationships.

This was however a difficult film to watch, and that is why I gave the seven stars rating, because not unlike other great Russian films, the length and timing are just so much more extended that we are used to in the West. You may find yourself fast-forwarding the slower scenes in Soviet Russia that look particularly dim by comparison to Mars.

There is also an episode, almost surreal in the way it interjects into the Russian reality plot, where a worker breaks his chains and fashions the hammer and sickle symbol. The man's naked torso with the chains is the first we see of this allegorical vision, he looks like one of the medieval heroes from "Alexander Nevsky", but shirtless, showing off the primal muscle splendor of Slavic manhood, an unexpected delight that may well be the first unintentional homo erotic intervention in official Communist propaganda.

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.

"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!

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.

Bizarre Russian sci-fi, socialist silent about a scientist who builds a rocketship, flies to Mars, and leads the Martian proletariat in a communist revolution. Or at least that's what I've always heard that that was what Aelita was about. In reality, this part of the plot only takes up about fifteen minutes of this 111 minute film. Most of it takes place on Earth, where a scientist, Los, suffers the infidelities and hedonism of his wife. He watches her with scorn as their philandering neighbor feeds her pieces of chocolate. This movie may hold the record for having the most unnecessary subplots. There's a man who is training to be a spy/private detective/undercover policeman (the professions seem kind of mixed up) and then there's a soldier who has had much experience `winning over' neighboring lands to the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, on Mars, curious Queen Aelita is wasting the planet's energy supply by using a newly invented telescope to watch Earthlings. She falls in love with the scientist. The movie is mainly valuable for the early science fiction settings. The filmmakers do a very good job with the art design on Mars. Of course everything looks very silly and impractical, but it's always amusing. Some of the sets and costumes are more imaginative than anything in Metropolis. Of course, Prozanov isn't anywhere near the talent Lang was, and most of the time the images are haphazardly composed. The Earth sequences, which take up the vast majority of the film, are not too bad, to tell you the truth. In fact, the story is pretty good. It certainly needed to be cleaned up a lot, especially so we might understand why the side characters exist in the first place (it makes more sense when they get to Mars, ¾ of the way through the picture). The acting is quite excellent. I thought the Martians were particularly well cast. I was actually quite enjoying Aelita: Queen of Mars, but the cop-out ending is rather bothersome. It's worth seeing, but it might be helpful to know beforehand that it's going to fall apart completely by the end. 7/10.