Page 119 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

100 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED
Martian dream as a ‘private’ domain, a compensation for the dissatisfactions of
everyday life and work. But, when Erlich is assigned to the apartment spare room
he has used for research, the state implicitly invades such remaining pockets of
‘bourgeois individualism’: Los longingly traces Aelita’s name on the dusty ornate
window of his threatened sanctuary and summons her image immediately before
the chairwoman of the Housing Committee announces the unwanted lodger. Los’s
unconscious response is to fantasise Erlich’s seduction of his wife, as ‘justification’
for his sense of loss, while this erotic fantasy is acted out in the calculated
seduction of Los’s alter ego Spiridonov by Erlich’s wife Elena. Indeed, as Leonid
Pliushch notes in his acute reading of the film against the background of Tolstoi’s
reactionary Smenovekh sympathies, the film’s ‘doubling’ of the novel’s single
character into a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ engineer effectively echoes Tolstoi’s
identification of Mars with the decadent West and also with the ‘paradise lost’ of
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tsarist Russia. Spiridonov actually emigrates under the influence of Elena–his note
confesses ‘the past turned out to be stronger’–and Los, symbolically, starts his
dream flight to Mars still disguised as Spiridonov (the same actor plays both
roles).
The interpretation of Los twice killing the image of his wife proposed by
Pliushch identifies the first jealousy ‘murder’ with the petty-bourgeois world of NEP
and the second, of Aelita, as a political act necessitated by her betrayal of the
Revolution. This reading gains support from the crucial linking of Natasha and
Aelita through ‘transgressive’ intercutting, first when Los embraces Aelita after
arriving, then when he pushes her off the podium above the main Martian arena as
she orders the capture of the disarmed workers. Indeed an early image of the
exotic Aelita is ironically intercut with Natasha scrubbing at the sink. Killing the
fantasy of Aelita, as well as his distorted image of Natasha (whose name, Pliushch
notes, signifies ‘she who is born’), is the necessary prelude to her ‘rebirth’ as a true
Soviet woman and to Los’s regeneration as a ‘good’ Soviet engineer. In terms of
allegory, there is a distinct echo of Mayakovsky’s Mystery Bouffe, which ends with
representatives of the ‘unclean’ class killing Queen Chaos and declaring ‘the door
into the future is open’.

9
BACK THROUGH THE LOOKING-GLASS
Aelita clearly disconcerted its first critics through a failure to respect genre and
narrative conventions; and the Soviet critical tradition has eventually categorised it
as a kind of generic melting-pot, from which can be traced Protazanov’s subsequent
comedies with Ilyinsky and, in Batalov’s Gusev, the early evolution of the
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obligatory ‘positive hero’. Such a view, however, though convenient, denies the
film’s integral structure and contemporaneity. One way to retain these, as
suggested at the outset, is to adopt the methodology applied by Bakhtin in his 1929
study of Dostoyevsky and consider Aelita as a ‘polyphonic’ work. Thus we are free