Page 104 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 85
Western critics, not opposed to stylisation in principle, the fundamental issue has
probably been that first expressed by Rotha in his influential The Film Till Now in
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1929. Rotha, a passionate admirer of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, insisted that the
stylised ‘Cubist’ design of Aelita could not be compared with the earlier German
film because it was ‘designed fantastically in order to express an imaginary idea of
the planet Mars, and not, as in Caligari, to emphasise the thoughts of a distorted
mind’. For later art historians, the issue of Exter’s Constructivist credentials has
often loomed larger than any analysis of the film’s plastic achievement.

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THE MEZHRABPOM-RUS INITIATIVE
Aelita effectively inaugurated a new production force in Soviet cinema,
Mezhrabpom-Rus: a strategic innovation that would do much to rescue film-
making from the impoverishment it had suffered since nationalisation, but which
would also earn the hostility of ‘left’ elements by its apparent compromises with the
pre-Revolutionary past and the capitalist West–while also providing support for
many of the same ‘left’ directors, including Pudovkin and, later, Kuleshov and
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Vertov, as well as such foreign leftists as Ivens and Piscator. So ingrained has
been the doctrine of Soviet cinema’s ‘invention’ ex nihilo during the Civil War ‘agit’
period that the lines of continuity between pre- and post-Revolutionary production
have only recently been recognised: yet these are vital to an understanding of the
origins of Aelita.
Mezhrabpom-Rus was a quintessential creation of the New Economic Policy. It
resulted from an injection of share capital into the existing Rus studio by the Berlin-
based organisation Internationale Arbeiterhilfe, known in English as Workers’
International Relief (WIR) and in Russian as Mezhdunarodnaya Rabochaya
Pomoshch’, yielding the acronym ‘Mezhrabpom’. Rus itself had been re-formed as
an experimental collective on the basis of Trofimov’s pre-Revolutionary production
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company. In the desperate situation that led to nationalisation of the Soviet
cinema industry in August 1919, the commissar responsible, Lunacharsky,
recognised the need to stimulate production that had some chance of meeting
cultural and entertainment criteria, while being in some broad sense politically
‘progressive’. He therefore supported and defended the group who formed the
‘Artistic Collective of Rus’ in early 1918 under the leadership of Moisei Aleinikov,
for a long time the force behind Cine-Phono, a trade magazine largely financed by
the producer Yermoliev. This collective included Fyodor Otsep, Aleinikov’s former
assistant and scriptwriter for such pre-Revolutionary films as Protazanov’s The
Queen of Spades [Pikovaya dama, 1916]; Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky, the cameraman
and later director; Nikolai Efros, former head of the Moscow Art Theatre literary
department, together with one of its assistant directors, Alexander Sanin, and a
number of actors from the same theatre. Against all odds, the collective succeeded
in producing a Lev Tolstoy adaptation, Polikushka, in 1919—20, which Aleinikov