Page 120 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema
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INSIDE THE FILM FACTORY 101
            to consider how and why its different discourses coexist, and what kinds  of
            dialogue they conducted with its original audience.
              Bakhtin’s book on Dostoyevsky also contains a highly relevant analysis of ‘The
            Dream of a Ridiculous Man’,  treating this as a prime instance of the genre of
            ‘Menippean satire’, which may help to define more precisely the processes at work
            in Aelita. According to Bakhtin:

              The most important characteristic of the Menippea lies in the fact that the
              most daring  and unfettered  fantasies and adventures  are  internally
              motivated,  justified and  illuminated here by a purely ideological  and
              philosophical end–to  create  extraordinary situations in which to  provoke
              and test a philosophical idea…. A very important characteristic…is the
              organic combination within it of free fantasy, symbolism, and–on occasion–
              the mystical-religious element, with extreme…underworld naturalism…. The
              Menippea is a genre of ‘ultimate questions’. [It] seeks to present a person’s
              ultimate, decisive words  and actions,  each of which contains  the whole
              person and his whole life…. [It] often includes elements of social utopia which
              are introduced in the form of dreams or journeys to unknown lands…. Finally,
              the Menippea’s last characteristic–its topicality and publicistic quality. This
              was the ‘journalistic’ genre of antiquity, pointedly reacting to the issues of the
              day. 75

            In a fairly obvious sense, Protazanov’s film amounts to a ‘menippea’ based on the
            would-be epic of Tolstoi’s novel; and the process which achieves this is what
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            Bakhtin termed ‘carnivalisation’.  The crucial aspect of carnival, he argues, is the
            ambivalent ritual of crowning and discrowning, which embodies notions of change,
            relativity, parody, death, renewal, etc. Typically, the slave or jester is crowned and
            thus, temporarily, the world is turned upside down.
              It is Bakhtin’s powerful concept of carnival that may help illuminate the organic
            function of otherwise puzzling aspects of the film. Consider, for instance, the role of
            Kravtsev, the fool, jester, doggedly  pursuing  his investigation and eventually
            helping unmask Erlich; or the extraordinary pantomime of Gusev being forced to
            rush through the Moscow streets in women’s clothing when his wife hides his own
            clothes to prevent him going to Mars. What could be more ‘carnivalesque’, more
            subversive of Tolstoi’s romanticism, than the start of the space flight, with Gusev
            cross-dressed, Los disguised and Kravtsev playing ‘Pinkerton’? Bakhtin, both in his
            acute analysis of the Dostoyevsky story and his ‘historical poetics’, offers more
            insight into this much-maligned film than cinema history has yet produced.
              In the historiographic tradition of belittling Aelita it has become customary to
            invoke the animated film Interplanetary Revolution [Mezhplanetnaya revolutsiya]
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            released in the same year as a ‘parody’ of it.  In fact, viewing confirms that there
            is no discernable relationship between the two (although a script for an unrealised
            parody of Aelita by Nikolai Foregger apparently exists in the cinema archives) but
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