Page 110 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 91
The deeper cultural and ideological significance of both the novel and the film’s
new scenario will be considered further below, but at this point it is worth noting
that Tolstoi’s Martian tale can scarcely be regarded as innocent escapism. Its
‘ideological questionableness’, as we have seen, was noted as a matter of course in
the Pravda review; and Zamyatin’s contemporary article drew attention to
Tolstoi’s reliance on the Theosophist mystic Rudolph Steiner for his Atlantis myth.
Even at a superficial level, the novel’s rejection of Mars–whether construed either
as the decadent West or the Imperial Russian past–seemed ambivalent.
Aelita was of course written while Tolstoi was still abroad. It may well be
significant that one of his first works after returning to the Soviet Union, Azure
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Cities, has a remarkably similar theme to that of the Aellta film. In it an idealistic
young communist architect dreams of building ‘azure cities’, but when illness forces
him to return to his provincial home town, he finds that little has changed since the
Revolution, except for the worse, as opportunists take advantage of NEP. In despair,
he sets fire to the town, hanging his utopian designs aloft on a pole, then turns
himself over to the authorities with the bitter words: ‘Life does not forgive rapt
dreamers and visionaries who turn away from it.’ Although Tolstoi would also
pioneer the fully fledged Soviet science-fiction thriller in The Garin Death Ray,
Protazanov’s Aelita ‘adaptation’ anticipated the direction of the novelist’s more
serious and personal work, culminating in the third volume of The Road to
Calvary.

5
PROTAZANOV–ON THE THRESHOLD OF A
DREAM
The impetus to tamper seriously with Mezhrabpom-Rus’s prestigious literary
property, whatever the probable outcry, seems to have come from Protazanov,
who was certainly no stranger to controversy. Indeed his early career had
benefited greatly from the scandal created by the film he co-directed giving a lurid
account of the circumstances that led to Lev Tolstoy’s death, The Great Man
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Passes On [Ukhod velikogo startsa, 1912]. Later, within weeks of the October
Revolution, his Satan Triumphant [Satana likuyushchii, 1917] became a byword
for ‘diabolism’, with its Expressionistic portrayal of the havoc wrought on a pastor
38
and his flock by the devil incarnate. But, on the strength of his surviving pre-
Revolutionary work, it would be a mistake to categorise Protazanov as a mere
sensationalist or opportunist. He was already a complex and above all a versatile
artist, placing his skills and stylistic daring at the service of the dramatic material
chosen for each film–which choice would seemingly often be influenced by
topicality and the potential for publicity.
One of his scenarists on Aelita, the young playwright Alexei Faiko, recalled:

Protazanov was very keen to do something contemporary. Work on the
script was neither fast nor smooth. Protazanov made all sorts of demands…