Aelita 1924
TheLiteraryBrain
Taking up the classical cinematic forms of narrative recently developed in the United States and retaining a Mélièsian interest in the spectacular, Aelita (1924), directed by Yakov Protazanov, succeeded Le Voyage dans la lune and went further by combining it with socialist realism and constructivism. The film’s crosscutting goes back and forth between the Soviet world (portrayed in realistic style) (one) and the Martian world (two) (depicted through constructivist settings). The two rather disparate worlds are then bridged when the protagonist-engineer Los (Nikolai Tsereteli) launches his rocket to reach Mars. Interestingly, the image of the round Earth once again plays the important role of indicating, or narrating in terms of its formal function, the change of space, although this time it is not rising from the horizon but moving away from the flying spaceship (the camera’s point of view). The spectators, who assume the perspective of the sugar-profiteer (Pavel Pol), are told in this fashion that the characters are leaving the Earth on a spacecraft (or whatever vehicle that the film does not even explicitly show). Along with this, the extraordinary space on Mars, presented with highly expressionist and stylistic sets and costumes, appears to be more symbolic than realistic. Like some Soviet reviewers who understood the Martian world to be merely the protagonist’s fantasy, we are confused by the reality of such a planet and constantly referred back to the film’s realistically set Soviet city.
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In spite of disputes over the film’s ideological message, the “Martian Union of Soviet Socialist Republics” seems to embody the Soviet revolutionary ideology. The constructivist Mars is but a symbolic allegory either for the pre-revolutionary bourgeois society, the post-revolutionary remnants of bourgeois culture (three), or else the fantasized realm of the protagonist-engineer.
Together with Le Voyage dans la lune, the speculative method shared by these two early classics of SF cinema clearly downplays the role of any scientific facts already available at the time with regards to Space or Space travel. Instead, they focus on messages conveyed through a symbolic space. The sets of the Moon in Le Voyage dans la Lune and that of Mars in Aelita are not supposed to present worlds of some remote realities but only to symbolically represent or designate our own world: a displaced reflection upon ourselves. They function in a similar way to theatrical sets. The plants of abnormally huge size on Méliès’ Moon and the geometrically shaped architecture on Protazanov’s Mars are not to be taken to represent what the Moon or Mars “really” look like. Rocks on the Moon, for instance, would not be made of paper or wooden boards and they would not move in the manner that a plane of painted sets would. Even if cinematic images of such hand-drawn sets are materially identical to that of real photographed space, they nonetheless manifest rather different qualities since most handcrafted 2D settings were easily discernible prior to the digital age. The crucial point here is that the shooting and performance of these films take place in a speculative space that requires the imaginative supplement on the part of the viewer.
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Translations: Italian - Spanish
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