Page 121 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

102 DOWN TO EARTH: AELITA RELOCATED
the idea clearly remains attractive, since Protazanov’s film represents an
anomalous mingling of genres and ideologies. 78
Much has been made of the fact that its subject and genre(s) were not repeated,
as if to confirm an implicit verdict of misjudgement or failure: even the sympathetic
79
Leyda describes it as Protazanov’s ‘least important’ Soviet production. This,
however, is to apply too narrow and conventional criteria. For Aelita can surely lay
claim to being the key film of the early NEP period, born of a unique moment in
post-Revolutionary Soviet society, reflecting its realities as well as its aspirations in
a complex and original form, and linking its hitherto isolated cinema with
important currents in world cinema. Rather than serve as a model for future films,
it chronicled the acute period of adjustment that followed the end of the Civil War–
the film’s time-span of 1921—3 is crucial–and probed the new contradictions of
80
NEP. Aelita may have earned the anathemas of Vertov and LEF, standard-
bearers of the new ‘factography’, but it was by no means out of step with other,
less dogmatic, currents of artistic innovation, like the young writers of the Serapion
81
Brotherhood, or of such individualists as Zamyatin and Olesha. With its bold
juxtaposition of diegetic levels and complex reworking of both literary and visual
sources, the film celebrates a heterogeneity and topicality that are, in their way, as
impressive as the achievement of either Kuleshov or Eisenstein at this early stage
in Soviet film-making. More than their first polemical, propagandistic sketches for
a radically new cinema, Aelita appears truly, in Bakhtin’s sense, a ‘polyphonic’
work, conducting a dialogue between past and present which is traversed by as
many different discourses as indeed were their later works.
But did Aelita in fact have any successors? The film that comes closest to its
carnivalesque spirit is probably Mezhrabpom-Rus’s 1925 short Chess Fever
[Shakmatnaya goryachka], which again combines fantasy, slapstick and street
realism in a highly topical satire, with another eclectic cast–this time consisting
largely of film-makers, including Protazanov himself . 82
Beyond this immediate echo, Aelita looks forward to the elaborate ‘making
strange’ of Soviet life attempted in Ermler’s masterly A Fragment of Empire
[Oblomok imperii, 1929] by means of an amnesic protagonist. The only other
Soviet film before the 1960s which makes similar use of a fantastic dream
counterpoint may well be Room’s suppressed A Severe Young Man [Strogii
83
yunosha, 1934]. But during the 1940s this form would flourish abroad in fables
both Freudian (Lady in the Dark, Spellbound, Dead of Night) and philosophical (A
84
Matter of Life and Death, Orphée). Aelita, like its director, richly deserves
rescuing from the periphery of a largely static, parochial view of early Soviet
85
cinema. To do so involves breaching the cordon sanitaire that has long protected
the canon of Soviet ‘left’ modernism from its antecedents and competitors, and
taking new bearings amid the cultural, economic and political cross-currents of the
1920s.