On Wednesday, November 1, the Red Century film series crossed its path with the Spaced Out: the Outer Space and Altered States series organized by Yale Film Colloquium, a program curated by PhD students in the Film and Media Studies Program. The previous week’s screening of Storm over Asia offered to the audience a depiction of the revolution in Mongolia, but, at least on film, Bolsheviks’ advance did not stop there. In Aelita (1924), Yakov Protazanov entertains the possibility of the revolution on Mars, following the eponymous novel by Alexei Tolstoy—a distant relative of Leo Tolstoy. Protazanov was an extremely prolific director: he made more than a hundred films, including adaptations of War and Peace and Dostoyevsky’s Demons. As Amanda Lerner, a graduate student who introduced Aelita, put it, he “made films for the masses.” Indeed, his work might not be as innovative as Eisenstein’s or Pudovkin’s, but the audience often gasped—and even more often bursted out laughing—during the screening.
The plot of Aelita can strike as rather strange. A Soviet engineer receives a mysterious radio message and decides to build a spaceship in order to go to Mars and find out its meaning. In the meantime, his jealousy is ruining the relationship with his young and beautiful wife; he finally ends up killing her in a fit of rage before departing for Mars. There he meets queen Aelita, who reigns but does not rule. She has been watching him from her planet and is already in love with him—the feeling seems to be requited, albeit complicated by the memory of engineer’s wife. After an unsuccessful attempt to free Martian slaves, the engineer kills Aelita who was using him to seize the power, and suddenly finds himself back on Earth. His wife is alive and well, and after a reconciliation, he burns his spaceship designs saying that there are enough things on Earth that one should take care of instead of dreaming of Mars—a remark that sounds quite ironic if one considers the so-called Space Race between the Soviet Union and the United States.
Lerner, whose research focuses on Soviet and Post-Soviet science fiction, mentioned that the dream device is still widely used, including in some contemporary television series. She also posed the problem of whether Aelita should be considered as fitting with the science-fiction genre at all, suggesting that everyone in the audience tries to answer that question for themselves.
The film was accompanied by Donald Sosin, resident pianist for the Film Society of Lincoln Center, BAM, and the Museum of Moving Image. Sosin also worked as a resident film accompanist at the Museum of Modern Art. He composes music for silent films himself, and his work includes scores for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, A Story of Floating Weeds, Blind Husbands, and many others. The week before, he performed the score for Storm over Asia, and will return to Yale for two more films: Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (November 8), and Fragment of an Empire (November 29). This time, he was joined by his wife, actress and singer Joanna Seaton, and Alicia Svigals, a composer and klezmer fiddler, who co-founded the Grammy-winning band Klezmatics. The score they performed was entirely improvised.
The screening of Aelita was the last screening of the Spaced Out series, but the Red Century: Russian Revolution on Film will continue. For information on upcoming screenings, visit: http://europeanstudies.macmillan.yale.edu/calendar
The series Red Century: Russian Revolution on Film is sponsored by the Russian Studies Program at the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center; Whitney Humanities Center; and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Memorial Fund.
Written by Mariia Muzdybaeva, a graduate student in the European and Russian Studies program.