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Red Films, Blue Prints: Early Soviet Cinema's Architectural Imaginary

2020; Wayne State University Press; Volume: 61; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.13110/framework.61.2.0107

1559-7989

Cook,

Eastern European Communism and Reforms

Red Films, Blue Prints:Early Soviet Cinema's Architectural Imaginary J. English Cook (bio) Cinema can be a very real weapon in the battle for construction. —Alexander Medvedkin1 If you have an idea-phrase, a particle of the story, a link in the whole dramatic chain, then that idea is to be expressed and accumulated from shot-ciphers, just like bricks. —Lev Kuleshov2 On April 24, 1927, a months-long fair in Moscow called the "World's First Exhibition of Models of Interplanetary Apparatus, Mechanisms, Instruments, and Historical Materials" opened with fanfare to the Soviet public. Located at 68 (now 28) Tverskaia Street, not far from Maiakovskii Square, the exhibition displayed the largest-ever array of cosmic artifacts to international audiences. At the exhibition's entrance, a converted shopfront had been transformed into an imaginary planetary landscape. A black-and-white photograph of this installation reveals a craggy terrain, set back and bookended by slanted scaffolding, depicting blue vegetation, orange soil, a massive silver rocket, and an astronaut teetering over the edge of a crater.3 According to Asif A. Siddiq, rather than representing a far-away, fantastical scene, this set and its neighboring displays created a rigorous, visionary environment in which space exploration seemed within grasp. "Our mind is not accustomed to all the 'wonderful and unknown,' which literally was [sic] seen and heard, as if in a dream," wrote one visitor in the guestbook, "yet we [End Page 107] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. The entrance to the "World's First Exhibition of Models of Interplanetary Apparatus, Mechanisms, Instruments, and Historical Materials," Moscow, 1927. Courtesy Ron Miller. understand that this is not a fantasy but a completely feasible idea supported by the achievements of science and engineering."4 In an era of vast Soviet change, even the most faraway landscapes appeared easily within reach. Dreamscapes and lunar landings had been subjects of scientific study and the science fiction genre for decades, particularly in mediums like photography and film. From the lunar photographs and engravings of Warren De La Rue and William Henry Fox Talbot (e.g., "The Half Moon," c. 1864) to early moving pictures like Georges Méliès's Le voyage dans la lune / Voyage to the Moon (FR, 1902), extraterrestrial landscapes continued to fascinate.5 One of the more famous Soviet examples of this phenomenon is the film Aelita/Aelita: Queen of Mars (Iakov Protazanov, USSR, 1924), which both mirrors this interest in space travel and overturns it. Released roughly two and a half years before the opening of the Moscow exhibition, Aelita was heralded as one of the major cinematic events of the 1920s.6 The first Soviet work by Iakov Protazanov, a renowned director who had been active in pre-revolutionary Russia, the film refashions Alexei Tolstoi's popular serial novel of the same name (Aelita, 1923). A slow-paced, complicated melodrama of the type preferred by pre-Soviet audiences, the work is chiefly remembered today for its Martian sequences, in particular the Constructivist costumes, props, and sets designed by Aleksandra Ekster, Isaak Rabinovich, and Sergei Kozlovsky.7 These visuals gained such [End Page 108] widespread attention that, nearly forty-five years later, the general designer of the Soviet space program, Vladimir Chelomei, would name a proposed mission to Mars "Aelita"—after the cinematic experience that he had had as a ten-year-old boy.8 Despite its space travel themes, however, the film's narrative concludes by reneging on its cosmic interests, redirecting attention away from dreams of a lunar landscape and onto the industrial terrain of a fantasy already underway: the construction of a utopic Soviet Union. The following pages will trace several ways in which artistic renderings of fantastic, imaginary landscapes played a critical role in bourgeoning, early Soviet ideology, including in Aelita. Rather than focusing on more commonly referenced examples of such themes, however (e.g., works of the avant-garde), this paper will highlight how these radical dialogues often appeared in more popular formats. Films in particular had the ability to reach mass publics across vast Soviet terrain, as scholars like Oksana Bulgakowa and Denise Youngblood have shown. This relatively transportable...