Page 101 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

82 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED
than any other film of the time. Indeed, if we were not predisposed otherwise,
Protazanov’s juxtaposition of different registers and realities in Aelita might remind
us, if not of Kuleshov’s polemics, then of his own by no means straightforward
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realist practice, from Mr West to The Great Consoler. But the fact that it was
made by the ‘wrong’ director at a time when early Soviet production was being
valued for quite different qualities, together with its ‘inner space’ project being
persistently misconstrued, have all tended to erase the film’s conjunctural
specificity.
To grasp this involves sketching a number of contexts in order to explore the
crucial significance of the film’s drastic departure from the novel of which it is
actually more a critique than an adaptation. What emerges is a work defined by
multiple authorship and a product of the emergent ‘cultural industry’ of Soviet film-
making–two perspectives rarely brought to bear on the cinema of an era so
dominated by the mythology of protean artistic and ideological purpose. A
‘polyphonic’ text also, in Bakhtin’s sense, which allows us to read some of the
many discourses that defined the contested pluralism of the New Economic Policy
(NEP), Lenin’s contradictory legacy to the infant Soviet state. 6

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‘ANTA…ODELI…UTA…’
Premièred at the end of September 1924, Aelita was undoubtedly the major event
in Soviet cinema before the international breakthrough of Potemkin in in 1926.
Like the German The Cabinet of Dr Caligari [Das Kabinett des Dr Caligari, 1919],
which reputedly served as inspiration, it proclaimed a major industrial thrust to
produce cinema of ‘international quality’, which could both yield export earnings
and compete effectively with imports in the domestic market. To aim at these
ambitious goals amid the poverty and contradictory motives of Soviet production
in 1923, its producers assembled a remarkable array of talent and scarce
resources. They took advantage of the imminent return from exile of a well-known
writer, Alexei Tolstoi, to base the film on his latest novel: a fantastic tale of
adventure and romance set largely on Mars. Leading actors from the main
theatres were engaged to make their film débuts, along with promising newcomers
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and a vast army of student extras. To direct this prestigious subject, one of the
most celebrated directors from pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema, Yakov
Protazanov, also returned from exile.
Important as these coups must have been, a further vital ingredient was the
stylistic novelty which had distinguished Caligari. In place of the German film’s
‘Expressionism’, Aelita deployed the distinctive Russian modernism which was
already becoming known abroad under the often inaccurately applied names of its
various factions–Futurism, Cubo-Futurism, Suprematism and Constructivism–as
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these were rapidly assimilated into the design-conscious Russian theatre. From
Tairov’s Kamerny Theatre came the distinguished painter Alexandra Exter as
costume designer. Sets were commissioned from her former pupil Isaak