Page 114 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 95
Exter’s theatre design from the start had aimed to give three-dimensional depth to
the stage picture and to animate its immobile décor. Not only did Aelita continue this
line of design experiment, but it made use of Kamerny actors, including Nikolai
Tsereteli–the Kamerny’s Romeo–making his screen début as Los/Spiridonov.
But, whereas Romeo and Juliet was embellished with extraordinary ‘frozen
dynamics’, echoing Boccioni’s sculpture, Aelita received a more austere treatment
and moreover one precisely conceived for the medium of cinema. 56
As in cinema history, canonic considerations in art history seem to have told
against Exter. It would certainly be wrong to classify her and Rabinovich’s work as
‘Constructivist’ in the narrow sense defended by Christina Lodder, but equally the
latter’s critique seems to be based on doubtful premisses:

aesthetic factors dominate [Exter’s] creations for the School of Fashion…and
her costume designs for the film Aelita. In both these branches of work
considerations of strict utility played no role, and Exter’s use of geometrical
forms as decorative elements stressed the essentially painterly nature of her
approach to clothes. Aelita’s costume billowed out into extravagant vegetable
protrusions more reminiscent of Art Nouveau than Constructivism, and her
maid’s trousers, constructed of rectangular metallic strips, seemed designed
to impede rather than facilitate movement. It is significant that whereas
Stepanova and Popova used the theatre to realise prozodezhda
[‘production’ or work clothing] Exter produced these decorative fripperies. 57

Another historian of Russian and Soviet art, John Bowlt, makes the important
observation that, while the Aelita costumes may look ‘unwieldy and rather absurd’
on paper, ‘in the movie they function perfectly’. This is because they rely upon and
actually exploit the changing viewpoint of cinema and its artificial ‘additive’ space. 58

Knowing that in the black and white film, color in her designs would be
superfluous, Exter restored to other systems of formal definition. This,
together with her acute concern with space as a creative agent, prompted
Exter to use a variety of unusual materials in the construction of the
costumes and to rely on sharp contrasts between material textures–
aluminium, perspex, metal-foil, glass. 59

Many judgements on Aelita have been passed without doubt on the basis of
drawings or stills alone, but viewing confirms how accurately the effects
were calculated for this (literally) fantastic, yet flat and monochrome, world of Los’s
dream–a very different challenge from the theatre projects tackled by other artists
during the short-lived moment of Constructivism, but one approached according to
the same analytic principles:

both in Exter’s costumes and Rabinovich’s sets, industrial materials served a
definite objective: they defined form in the absence of color; in their