Page 100 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

5

Down to earth: Aelita relocated
Ian Christie

Harmful literature is more useful than useful literature, for it is anti-
entropic.
Yevgeni Zamyatin 1

1
HAS ANYONE ACTUALLY SEEN AELITA?
Aelita undeniably has a bad reputation. As the first, and for long the only, Soviet
‘spectacular’, promoted and launched like its Western equivalents, it naturally
attracted suspicion in many quarters, despite (or perhaps ultimately because of) its
resounding box-office success. Today the film itself remains as little seen as ever in
‘serious’ circles, and shares with the likes of High Treason and Things to Come a
reputation of amounting to rather less than the undeniable impact of its science-
fiction décor, stills of which, however, enliven many general cinema histories. 2
These also appear in most surveys of science-fiction film and, especially, accounts
of Russian avantgarde art, where their futuristic geometry provides an essential
3
visual and plastic emblem of the era of heroic Soviet modernism. Yet the
accompanying commentary often belittles, when it does not directly condemn, the
film itself–and usually on the basis of a misleading plot summary.
Thus a self-perpetuating tradition has developed which effectively substitutes the
paradigmatic quality of the stills for the implied failure of the film. Its apparent
subject–a Soviet expedition to Mars which incites revolution against the ruling
despots–simultaneously evokes the utopian aspiration of much early Soviet art
while sounding risible; and the obviously theatrical stills, although more impressive
than those from most ‘canonic’ Soviet classics, also seem to justify the scorn which
the film originally attracted from advocates of a revolutionary new approach to
cinema. 4
However, to screen Aelita is to discover something rather different from the bête
noire of Soviet montage cinema’s pioneers. Instead of the ‘photographed muddle
of curves and triangles’ that so infuriated Kuleshov, we find an ambitious, multi-
layered work which draws upon pre- as well as post-Revolutionary Russian sources
and contemporary European influences to reflect the new Soviet life more fully