Film Chronicle
2018; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/thr.2018.0020
ISSN1939-9774
Autores Tópico(s)Gothic Literature and Media Analysis
ResumoFilm Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) Aelita, Queen of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov (Flicker Alley, 2015) Things to Come, directed by William Cameron Menzies (Criterion Collection, 2013) Arrival, directed by Denis Villeneuve (Paramount, 2017) Avatar, directed by James Cameron (20th Century Fox, 2010) District 9, directed by Neill Blomkamp (Sony Pictures, 2009) Elysium, directed by Neill Blomkamp (Sony Pictures, 2013) The Day the Earth Stood Still, directed by Robert Wise (20th Century Fox, 2003) Soylent Green, directed by Richard Fleischer (Warner Brothers, 2008) Blade Runner: The Final Cut, directed by Ridley Scott (Warner Brothers, 2017) Ex Machina, directed by Alex Garland (Lionsgate, 2015) 2001: A Space Odyssey, directed by Stanley Kubrick (Warner Brothers, 2007). In a letter from 1953, Raymond Chandler mimics and mocks science fiction (incidentally confirming a belief I have long held that humankind is divided into two great fandoms, that devoted to detective stories and that devoted to sci fi): I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels. I flicked on the heat bars and the Brylls ran swiftly on five legs using their other two to send out crylon vibrations . . . Count me along with Chandler in the detective story fandom. On the whole I prefer mean streets to manda grass, plain old bullets to seven-legged Brylls. I like the sense of realism, of the here-and-now, always operative in detective stories, even amid the simplifications and conventionalities of the genre. The mystery of crime is an ineluctable part of the only world we know. But I can see that sci fi, especially in cinematic form, has certain possibilities—an opening up of the imagination to other worlds, different from the one we know; idealism alternating with despair about the future; a willingness to engage with the scientific disciplines that control and excite contemporary life. Once it was religion that supplied a narrative about human perfectibility and imagined salvation for us. Now time travel, rocketry, and cybernetics do. Once also religion imagined our [End Page 108] torments, and one would have to say that these too are now scientifically conceived, as Kingsley Amis hinted with the title of his 1960 survey of (written) science fiction, New Maps of Hell. Let us do some time traveling of our own, back to 1924 and one of the first substantial efforts in the sci fi cinema, the Soviet silent Aelita, Queen of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov, with a script based on a novel by Alexei Tolstoy. To watch this with pleasure you will need to make allowances, primarily for the laughably crude special effects, including the least convincing interplanetary journey ever photographed, but also for the film’s indecisiveness about what it wants to be. It is partly a tale of domestic jealousy acted out in ordinary Moscow settings, a tale predictable in plot but well performed, especially by Valentina Kuindzhi as the nearly erring wife of an engineer who neglects her for dreams of travel to the Red Planet. It is partly a documentary about the new Soviet state of which the engineer and his wife are citizens. Theirs is a vibrant, idealistic society but also one with problems, and surprisingly, these are frankly admitted, with documentary-style shots of enthusiastic parades and of dams being thrown up across mighty rivers alternating with sequences revealing mismanagement and civic corruption. Additionally, Aelita is a farce about a bumbling detective wannabe. And finally—this is the part that really matters—it is a depiction of Mars as a Constructivist fantasy. A machine aesthetic rules; the set is all acute angles and oblique lines and geometric forms rendered with shiny surfaces, so that the screen becomes a series of abstract, hard-edged paintings. Characters appear in futuristic garb, charming if cheap costumes featuring helmets apparently fashioned from cardboard boxes, though Aelita the Queen gets to don a headdress more resembling a television antenna spun from sugar. It is the ruling classes who are privileged with this freakish haute couture. The more plainly dressed...
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