We went Sunday to The Trylon Cinema, a 90-seat “art house” theater to see Aelita: Queen of Mars, a 1924 Soviet silent film, with live accompaniment music by The Poor Nobodys.
Aelita: Queen of Mars, directed by Yakov Protazanov, was the first Soviet science fiction film. Based on a novel by Aleksey Tolstoy (a distant relative of both Leo Tolstoy and Ivan Turgenev), it’s an odd mix of science fiction, romantic tragedy, and Soviet propaganda. It was made not long after the end of the Russian Civil War with a background of class conflict, refugees and resettlement, rationing, and the black market.
Nikolai Tsereteli as Engineer Los is obsessed with building a ship to travel to Mars. There’s a long subplot with his new wife Natasha (Valentina Kuindzh) being wooed by black marketer and corrupt petty official Viktor Ehrlich (Pavel Pov). Meanwhile on Mars, Alita reigns but Tuskub rules. Lots of small ruling class and large subjugated proletariat class parallels to the Russian Revolution. Aelita gets to see earth thanks to a secret invention and, miracle of miracles, basically falls in love with Engineer Los.
The scenes on earth are mostly of drab, hard lives in the aftermath of war.
But for me the best part of the film itself was the Constructivist set and costume designs of the Mars scenes.
Yes, Engineer Los makes it to Mars, in a wildly implausible flight on a spaceship that looks like it could have a coal-fired engine manned by drunk Oompa Loompas (its propellant is never specified).
The Poor Nobodys did a damn fine job with music they had written specifically for the film. If you live in the Twin Cities, do check out the Trylon’s schedule. The version we saw was a digital semi-restoration by The National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. Several low resolution versions are available on YouTube, for example this one:
