Aelita

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: 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.

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.

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.

"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!