Page 116 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 97
In practice, it appears that both Rabinovich’s ‘Constructivist’ cityscape and
Simov’s sets proved too expensive for Mezhrabpom-Rus and much of the actual
design seen in the film was by Viktor Kozlovsky, an accomplished cinema art
director from the pre-Revolutionary industry who had gained valuable experience
on its lavish historical subjects and, especially, on the fantastic live-action films of
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Wladyslaw Starewicz. Kozlovsky seems to have occupied the same supervisory
role at Mezhrabpom-Rus as the art-department heads of Hollywood studios,
mediating between bold stylistic innovation and the demands of budget and
timetable. And all that is not ‘Martian’ in Aelita was presumably designed by him.
For it is not Mars, but Moscow, that is the film’s main setting. As befitted a film
directed by a returning exile, it uncovers an extraordinary range of the early Soviet
experience–from the crowded trains and stations as recovery begins after the Civil
War, through relics of the ancien régime (climaxing in the decadent night-club
which resembles nothing so much as a bal des victimes), to signs of the new culture
–posters, an agit-performance at the evacuation centre, the orphanage where
Masha goes to work–and industry (the radio station and bustling construction sites
where Los works) and the streets and crowded apartments of Moscow at the peak
of the New Economic Policy. More thoroughly than in any other Soviet film of the
period, the precarious equilibrium of the NEP, with idealism and opportunism both
rife, is exposed and indeed becomes the film’s dramatic and ideological pivot.

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DREAMERS AND DETECTIVES
What undoubtedly must have seemed most attractive about filming Aelita was the
prospect of Soviet cinema’s first science-fiction film, for the early 1920s had seen
an extraordinary explosion of Soviet writing and publishing in a genre which had
previously been the preserve of the intelligentsia. The Revolution had given fresh
impetus to a long-standing Russian fascination with programmatic fantasy, itself
already enshrined in the Bolshevik tradition. Lenin had titled his 1902 strategic
pamphlet What Is To Be Done? explicitly after Chernyshevsky’s ‘underground’
novel written in 1862, which included the dream of a future social order based on
female emancipation and the rational division of labour. Another Bolshevik leader,
Alexander Bogdanov, had responded to the defeat of the 1905 Revolution with a
novel, Red Star [Krasnaya zvezda, 1908], in which a discouraged Russian activist
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is inspired by the discovery of a Communist utopia on Mars. Now the creation of
utopia was a state aim; and even H.G.Wells, one of the many foreign science-fiction
writers already well known in translation, was surprised by Lenin’s enthusiasm for
technological and even interplanetary speculation amid the country’s devastation in
1919.
Surveying the prodigious range of science-fiction publishing during NEP, from
the experimental (a ‘cinematic montage’ novel by Bobrov and a ‘factographic’
collaboration by Shklovsky and Ivanov) to the ephemeral, Leonid Heller concludes
simply that ‘science-fiction accompanied Soviet literature from the moment of its