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The world’s first feature film to use interplanetary travel as the main plot line, Aelita is based on A. N. Tolstoi’s still-popular novel. A brilliant engineer and a crusty soldier travel to the Red Planet to find it inhabited by meek humanoids and ruled, with an iron fist, by the beautiful Aelita. (Yulia Solntseva, who played the queen, went on to inflict a similar fate on her future spouse, the great Aleksandr Dovzhenko). Spectacular unrest ensues; will our heroes make it back home? Free of earthly logistics, the film’s unique set design captures Soviet Constructivism at its most unhinged.
Silent with live piano accompaniment by Donald Sosin
Preceded by
Interplanetary Revolution / Mezhplanetnaya revolutsiya
Z. Komissarenko, U. Merkulov and N. Hodataev, USSR, 1924; silent; 9m (fragment)
So successful was Aelita upon its release that it earned its own cartoon spoof in the same year! Interplanetary Revolution doesn’t just capitalize on Aelita’s popularity, however — it serves as a mild political corrective. In 1924, the year of Lenin’s death, the Communist Party began to distance itself from the “world revolution” doctrine; therefore the notion of the rising Martian proletariat was just past due, and safe to ridicule.
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Wed Aug 16: 8
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