Aelita

"Aelita" (1924) is based upon a novel by A. Tolstoy Produced, in the U. S. S. R (founded in 1922.) The movie is set at the beginning of the NEP (New Economic Policy) in December 1921. The version I watched has English titles by Kyril Dambueff and Mark Bennett. Annoying piano music by Alex Rannie.

On December 4, 1921, at 6:27 p.m. Central European Time, radio stations on Earth received a strange signal. It is intriguing to see all the instrumentality of the deciphering office. The speculation on Mars is Sort of the first X-files.

Loss (a scientist that is obsessed with going to Mars) imagines a Mars with Aelita (Yuliya Solntseva,) a vamptress with a fascination with fascinators (a form of headgear.) "Touch my lips with your lips as those people on Earth did."

Meanwhile back on Earth his wife, Natasha (Valentina Kuindzhi) seems to have a thing going with their new male squatter.

We have a natural blend of politics and space (or Loss's imagined Mars.) I will not go into detail. However, you will need to watch this film to be culturally savvy.

_Aelita: Queen of Mars_ is a visually-interesting satura ("mish-mosh," "stew"), bringing together soap opera, political drama, romantic comedy, crime-drama + farce, science fantasy, and, finally dream-vision.

The sequences set on Earth tell some rather, well, mundane stories of jealousy and political corruption, interesting for being set in Moscow during the hungry years around 1924 and having the villain a minor Soviet official.

(Caution, though: the villain's name is spelled "Erlich" in the titles on the Kino re-issue of the film. If that is a correct rendering, that's the Yiddish word for "righteous" and a Jewish name, so Comrade Erlich may be oddly Jewish--if aristocratic _and_ Bolshevik--and the film engaging in some old-fashioned Russian antisemitism [where confused categories aren't surprising]. If the name is "Ehrlich," Comrade Minor Official may be of German descent and the film more newfangled in trashing insufficiently Russified German-Soviets [who are also aristocrats and Bosheviks].)

The scenes on Mars are much more interesting, visually.

As David A. Cook states in his _History of Narrative Film_ (a standard film-course text), the Martian sets are "designed completely in the Constructivist style." They follow the principles of Vsevelod Meyerhold in trying to create "a machine for acting": which works here in producing a futuristic vision that was to go on to the FLASH GORDON series and other visually classic works of High Modernism.

There's also imagery of a Mechanized Underworld and Mechanical Hive: ideas that don't go back beyond H. G. Wells's _Time Machine_ (1895) and _First Men in the Moon_ (1901) and E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909)--and visual and thematic possibilities that were going to go on to works from Fritz Lang's _Metropolis_ (1926) to George Lucas's _THX-1138_ (1971) and beyond. And there's a revolution on Mars, which is something neither Lang nor Lucas could/would pull off.

Ideologically, _Aelita_ is about as sophisticated as _Birth of a Nation_ or _Metropolis_ or _Gone with the Wind_, and less offensive (even to a viewer named "Erlich"). It should be seen for the same reason as we see _Wizard of Oz_ and _Dune_: to see the visuals. Just Fast-Forward through the dumb parts, in all of them.

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

"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.