Page 248 - Inside the Film Factory New Approaches to Russian and Soviet Cinema

NOTES 229
Khokhlova. All sources, however, point to Aellta as probably the biggest box-office
success before The Bear’s Wedding.
14 The Bear’s Wedding was scripted by Lunacharsky, whose wife appeared in it.
Konstantin Eggert played the lead and co-directed with the experienced Vladimir
Gardin. Leonid Trauberg recalled, in conversation, Eggert’s popularity with women
after his portrayal of the vampire count.
15 Pravda, 1 October 1924.
16 Izvestiya quoted in: J.-L.Passek (ed.), Le Cinéma russe et soviétique (Paris: 1981), p.
183; Lunacharsky quoted by L.Pliushch in a note on Aelita, in: La Victoire sur le
soleil: Russe 1905—1935, documentation accompanying an exhibition and film
programme at the Cinémathèque de Toulouse, 1984.
17 T.Dickinson and C.De la Roche, Soviet Cinema (London: 1948), p. 20. Although
there are references to a print of Aelita in London in the 1920s, it appears never to
have been shown publicly.
18 Bryher [pseud. of W.Ellerman], Film Problems of Soviet Russia (Territet,
Switzerland: 1929), pp. 113—14.
19 ibid.
20 P.Rotha, The Film Till Now (London: 1929; expanded edn 1960), p. 98.
21 This short account of Mezhrabpom-Rus and its links with Germany owes much to
Vance Kepley’s valuable article, ‘The Workers’ International Relief and the Cinema of
the Left 1921—1935’, Cinema Journal, vol. 23, no. 1 (Autumn 1983), pp. 7—23. ‘Left’ in
the Soviet context of this time meant formally experimental or avant-garde, while
elsewhere it tended to mean socialist or sympathetic to the USSR. See also pp. 70—1
this volume.
22 Leyda, p. 146.
23 ibid., p. 147.
24 Kepley, ‘The Workers’ International Relief. . .’, p. 12.
25 FF, p. 97.
26 Four and Five was announced as opening at the Ars Cinema on 19 September 1924
and reviewed in Pravda on 24 September.
27 A.V.Lunacharskii, ‘Revolyutsionnaya ideologiya i kino–tezisy’, Kinonedelya, no.24
(1924); FF, p. 109.
28 On Protazanov’s career in France, see: L.Borger, ‘From Moscow to Montreuil: The
Russian Emigrés in France 1920—1929’ and K.Thompson, ‘The Ermolieff Group in
Paris: Exile, Impressionism, Internationalism’, Grifftthiana (Pordenone, Italy), no. 35—
6 (October 1989), pp. 28—39, 50—7. On the terms of Protazanov’s invitation, see
Leyda, p. 186n. Arlazorov refers to an ‘Ivan the Terrible’ project he had interrupted
and did not return to (p. 128).
29 Arlazorov, p. 119.
30 Letter to Nikolai Chaikovsky quoted in M.Slonim, Modern Russian Literature
(Oxford: 1957), p. 370.
31 Surveyed in D.Suvin, ‘The Utopian Tradition of Russian Science Fiction’, Modern
Language Review, no. 66 (1971), pp. 145—51.
32 All references to the translation by Leland Fetzer, Aelita, or the Decline of Mars (Ann
Arbor, Mich.: 1985).
33 Ye. Zamyatin, ‘Novaya russkaya proza’ [The New Russian Prose], Russkoe
iskusstvo, nos 2—3 (1923); translated in Ginsburg, p. 102.