The Red Dawn of Scifi – Cornell Cinema Screens Aelita: Queen of Mars

Author: Xenia Ludtseva

 

Aelita: Queen of Mars is showing this Thursday, March 24th, at 7:15 pm at the Cornell Cinema. Anna Coogan & Tzar (Michael Stark and Brian Wilson) performing their original score to the film. $11 general ($15 at door) $9 students & seniors ($13 at door). Advance tickets can be purchased here.

 

Cornell Cinema has an absolute treat prepared, Aelita: The Queen of Mars. She is one of those thunderous firsts that open the sluices of possibility and gather a cult following by pinpointing the currents of our culture. She is to Metropolis what The Ghost in the Shell is to the Matrix, and the tour-de-force Soviet science fiction would not be able to achieve on screen until Solaris. She is also a film of extreme human beauty and a vestige of Russian history little known to the West, a peculiar junction of the proletarian consciousness, intelligent soulfulness, and the future.

 

 

Aelita is an awkward and delicate child of her age. An adolescent that walked the earth between two great storms, an echo of a potent and painful “what if” in Russian history – one final gasp of creative air before the country loses itself behind the Iron Curtain. She lacks grace, but she doesn’t need it. Her beauty is kinetic, hiding in the dynamic, disjointed parts, the merciless grandeur of sharp angles and Yulia Solnetsova’s heavy gaze. Every scene, word and gesture in the film falls like a heavy stone, because it had never been experienced before. It is an electrifying interaction, the very beginning of the science fiction film, one of the most powerful mass fantasies of our age, defining itself, breaking into reality with every silent frame.

 

 

In the 1920s, Russians were reinventing the very fabric of their world. With a decade of war behind, the promise of universal proletarian revolution still ripe in the air, and private capital not yet crushed in the jaws of Stalinism – the future was happening now. And that now was an immediate, radical imperative – as symbolic and violent as the destruction of the grand piano every time the mobs stormed another wealthy noble’s house. Poets were inventing new languages intently devoid of meaning, architects were planning enormous structures to accommodate social relations incomprehensible to bourgeois mind, painters were embracing color as its only subject, government was encouraging the population to treat sex ‘like having a glass of water.’

 

 

Amidst all of this, Nikolai Tolstoy (not War and Peace, the other one), the Red Count, prodigal son of the Soviet regime, wrote a slim volume about a voyage to Mars, the first piece of Russian-language sci-fi as the XX century knows it. That Aelita is a rather curious but unimaginative read in itself (as Tolstoy mostly did extremely cheesy history novels), mixing a thick communist ideology and beloved Russian ontological musings with a sweetly colonial space opera narrative. As a result, two Red Army soldiers end up on Mars, learn that its people are the lost civilization of Atlantis, have a fling with the ruler’s daughter, catalyze a proletarian revolution, fail, and come back home to build true socialism. #springbreak

 

 

But the film Aelita, which you will see this Thursday in the Cornell Cinema, is an explosion. Its director was Yakov Protazanov, one of the founders of the Russian cinema and the first to truly elevate moviemaking into an institution. The scion of a wealthy merchant family, he followed the same logic in making most of his movies – take a well-received and well-known piece of literature (cheesy historical novels, *sigh*) and bring it onto the screen. Conceived in a revolutionary climate, Aelita was not a revolutionary venture in herself. But, supplied with the costumes from the empress’ former dresser, decorations from the famed Moscow Art Theater, and theory of interplanetary travel from Tsiolkovsky’s books, she was unintentionally groundbreaking.

 

 

The movie’s plot takes great liberties with the literary original, making it into a more saturated story, full of dark nuances, doppelgängers, hallucinations and passions. Aelita attempts at emotional complexity and domestic drama with richness of space as its backdrop, and makes wide claims about our social condition amidst snowy postbellum Moscow, hitting notes deeper than desired in the proletariat entertainment. So she was not initially a success, and her influence in the USSR and abroad was not recognized until much later, when science fiction as a genre had developed enough to become introspective and willing to pay tribute to anything outside the Western world.