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