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96 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED
Figure 10 Los’s dream companions, Kravtsev (Ilyinsky) and Gusev (Batalov), meet the
Martian slave-labourers underground, when they are arrested with Aelita’s maid, Ikushka
(left).
transparency or reflectivity they joined with the space around them and
created an eccentric montage of forms. 60
The Martian dream in this Aelita was not after all intended as a vision of the future
or an exercise in anti-aesthetic design efficiency. On the contrary, thematically it
had to combine an impression of extreme technological refinement with the
trappings of a feudal, hieratic society and an erotic motive. Hence the highly
effective play of stasis and movement centring on the representation of light–
petrified rays, dynamic translucent forms echoing the perspex sculptures of Gabo
–and the subtle evocation of an Atlantean-Egyptian autocracy largely through
costume and make-up. By evoking a modified Kamerny style, Protazanov was
acknowledging the power of the Symbolist tradition, yet also gaining distance from
it through the film’s cultural montage form.
