Page 103 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

84 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED

Figure 8 The beginning of Aelita is set specifically in December 1921, amid the chaos
bequeathed by the Civil War and the start of the NEP.

his flight…. The rising of the Martian workers has the stamp of the
‘monumental’ foreign films, striving to convey quantity rather than quality. 15

Izvestiya ironically proclaimed ‘the mountain has produced a mouse’; while
Lunacharsky, writing in Kino-gazeta, hailed it as ‘an extraordinary phenomenon’,
but felt that ‘it would have been preferable not to depart from Tolstoi’. 16
As actual familiarity with the novel and the film faded, criticism has largely
recycled earlier opinions. Thus Thorold Dickinson, writing in 1948, could only
speculate: ‘It would be interesting to meet someone who can recall having seen
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Aelita. Perhaps the film failed to fuse so many divergent styles of acting.’ One of
his sources was no doubt the pioneer English-language historian of Soviet cinema,
Bryher, who had also been unable to see Aelita when preparing her Film Problems
of Soviet Russia in 1928 but was aware of the eclectic composition of the film: ‘It is
reported that actors from opposite schools and pupils from the State School of
Cinematography were used in the production, and that very interesting effects were
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achieved.’ Controversy raged from the outset, of course, over the stylised Martian
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décor, with Pravda describing it as ‘like Aida at the Bolshoi’. But, for serious