Page 130 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE: YAKOV PROTAZANOV AND SOVIET CINEMA 111
pace of pre-Revolutionary film-making, averaging more than ten films annually
before the Revolution, he took over a year to complete Aelita. According to the
handsome programme that was distributed at screenings of the picture,
Protazanov shot 22,000 metres of film for the 2,841-metre movie (an unusually
high rate of waste) and employed a cast and crew of thousands. 33
This cast and crew was certainly one of the most impressive ever assembled in
the 1920s for a single picture. Fyodor Otsep, the head scenarist, and Yuri
Zhelyabuzhsky, the cameraman, had had considerable pre-Revolutionary film-
making experience. Although Protazanov’s Russian films had not been noted for
their external decorativeness (that being the hallmark of Yevgeni Bauer, whose
work Protazanov disliked), Protazanov paid tribute to new artistic trends by having
Alexandra Exter and Isaak Rabinovich design for the Martian scenes the
Constructivist costumes and sets for which the movie is famous. The casting was
stellar and, according to Protazanov’s custom in his Russian work, drawn almost
exclusively from the ranks of theatre actors. The troupe included the director
Konstantin Eggert, Vera Orlova, Valentina Kuindzhi, Olga Tretyakova and Nikolai
Tsereteli, and introduced to the screen Igor Ilyinsky, Nikolai Batalov and Yuliya
Solntseva. Ilyinsky and Batalov became the leading male stars of Soviet silent
cinema, and Solntseva enjoyed a following as well. 34
The promotional campaign was as lavish as the production itself: in the
provincial city of Voronezh, for example, aeroplanes dropped thousands of leaflets
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advertising Aelita. Protazanov intended to make his presence felt in his Soviet
début: the director of The Keys to Happiness had returned! Aelita did cause a
sensation but not quite the one that the Mezhrabpom studio and Protazanov had
hoped for.
No other film of early Soviet cinema was attacked as consistently or over so
long a period as Aelita. From 1924 to 1928, it was a regular target for film critics
and for the many social activists who felt that the film industry was not supporting
Soviet interests. This lively movie that the British critic Paul Rotha labelled
‘extraordinary’, though theatrical, was greeted quite differently in the pages of the
Soviet film press. Kino-gazeta, a relatively moderate newspaper, was unrelenting in
its opposition to Aelita, going so far as to label it ‘ideologically unprincipled’ and to
warn that the potential danger of a ‘rallié’ like Protazanov might outweigh the
benefits of his experience and professionalism. 36
These criticisms were echoed elsewhere, especially (but not exclusively) in
‘proletarian’ circles. Proletarskoe kino claimed Aelita had cost too much; another
newspaper with a proletarian orientation, Kinonedelya, attacked Aelita’s
scriptwriters as individuals ‘alien to the working class’ and advised that the Party
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keep bourgeois specialists like Protazanov under close watch. But the following
examples, similar in tone, came from varying sources. Viewers in Nizhni Novgorod
allegedly criticised its ‘petty-bourgeois’ [meshchanskii] ending and complained that
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the hardships of the Civil War years were absent from the film; to the young
director Lev Kuleshov, Aelita exemplified ‘the blind alley of pre-Revolutionary
cinema’. Prominent critic Ippolit Sokolov, a supporter of the entertainment film,