Page 111 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

92 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED
[he] was always searching and striving for something new and more
interesting. 39

That Protazanov should want to deal with the Soviet reality to which he had
returned seems highly plausible, if only to ward off the inevitable suspicion attaching
to returned émigrés and likely attacks from the vigorous young opponents of
entertainment cinema who had increased their influence during his absence. The
cost of a full-scale Martian spectacle was another practical reason for revision and,
despite contemporary rumours of reckless extravagance (possibly encouraged by
Aleinikov as a shrewd publicist), the original set designs for Aelita still proved too
costly and had to be reduced in scale. 40
The key to combining the exotic potential of Tolstoi’s Martian romance with
‘something contemporary’ proved to be a device which Protazanov had used to
great effect in his first production abroad, The Agonising Adventure
[L’Angoissante aventure, France, 1920]. This was the ‘uncued dream’, whereby an
apparently realist narrative moves into dream mode unbeknownst to the spectator
until the unexpected dénouement of awakening –of which the best-known later
example is probably Lang’s Woman in the Window [USA, 1944]. But, whereas
this device functions in The Agonising Adventure to enclose a typical tragic
melodrama of the pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema within an acceptably
sophisticated French ‘frame’, Aelita attempts an altogether more complex
structure. Here dream and reality alternate from the outset, with a minor
motivation in Tolstoi’s novel–Los has thrown himself into invention after his
young wife’s tragic death–transposed into Los’s neurotic jealousy of his living wife
Natasha, which produces the ‘Martian narrative’ as a compensatory fantasy
satisfying (or combining?) his erotic frustration and engineering ambition. This
narrative hierarchy is then destabilised when Los appears to build the rocket which
will take him to his imaginary Mars, until the resulting paradox is resolved by his
awakening in the railway station. So effective was this device that Protazanov
would use it again, for the British soldier’s dream, in his first sound film Tommy
[Tommi, 1931]. 41
Protazanov’s Los thus becomes a recognisably Russian hero and, as such, one
virtually unique in early Soviet cinema: a ‘bourgeois specialist’ ostensibly
committed to building communism, but still emotionally, perhaps unconsciously,
unadjusted to the new order–a Soviet version of Russian literature’s traditional
‘superfluous man’. Protazanov had succeeded in getting from his scenarists a
remarkably apt vehicle for entering the world of Soviet Russia, a time machine
that deals with the contradictory present of the NEP in terms of a discredited past
(flashbacks to the pre-Revolutionary privileges of Erlich’s cronies) and an imagined
future, still shaped by Symbolist culture. Aelita recapitulates the ‘threshold’
strategy of The Agonising Adventure by interleaving a Russian film d’art
(moreover one more ambitious than anything attempted before the Revolution)
with the portrayal of Soviet reality, as seen with the affectionate curiosity of the
returning native. 42