As mentioned previously, in “Impossible Voyages” I’m watching and writing about a run of new (to me) science fiction films to be watched over this year (and possibly beyond). You can read the rationale and ground rules here. In the meantime, we are advancing from 1920 to 1924 with this movie, #6 in this series.
Spoilers Ahead
Aelita (1924)
Directed by Yakov Protazanov
The Story: When a mysterious signal is heard on radio stations around the world, it inspires Russian engineer Loss dreams of traveling to Mars, where he imagines the signal originates. His dreams include images of a richly developed Martian society, including its beautiful queen, Aelita. At the same time, Loss becomes increasingly jealous of his wife, Natasha, whom he believes is having an affair–this grows in intensity until it leads to murder. Loss escapes justice and travels to Mars with some others on a spaceship of his own design. Their arrival helps to trigger a revolt amongst the slaves which is in the manner of the Russian Revolution.
Starring: Nikolai Tseretelli as Loss, and also Loss’ friend and scientist Evgeni Spiridonov. Valentina Kuinzhi plays Natasha. Nikolay Batalov is Gusev, the former soldier who also travels to Mars. Pavel Pol plays Viktor Erlikh, a low-level government worker who uses his position to his profit, and whom Loss suspects is having an affair with his wife. Igor Ilyinsky plays Kravtsov, an amateur detective who wants to join the police.
On Mars, the film features Yuliya Solntseva as Aelita, Konstantin Eggert as Tuskub (the ruler of Mars), Aleksandra Peregonets as Ikhoshka (Aelita’s maidservant) and Yuri Zavadsky, the guardian of the Mars’ Radiant Energy Tower.
Comments: I have to confess–each time I think about this film, I’m tempted to accidentally call it “Alita: Battle Angel” because of the science fiction film from 2019. I’ve never seen that one, so it’s actually possible that it will wind up in this series, although that isn’t my intention at the moment.
Aelita, on the other hand, is a Russian film that is also known as Aelita: Queen of Mars or even King Hybrid some reason, on IMDb. It’s a movie that I found hard to get through because the story is slow and covers a lot of ground (a lot more than my plot summary would indicate) and because so much of that ground seems to involve the social dynamics of life in post-Revolution Moscow.
No doubt if I had a richer understanding of those nuances, then the first two thirds of Aelita would take on greater meaning for me. But even as far removed as I am, when I can slow down my expectations and lengthen my attention span, the movie gives me an interesting glimpse of what that life might have been like.
The picture you get is a of a country that is going through the wringer. Trains are crowded, supplies are highly rationed, and housing is scarce. But we quickly see that in general people are optimistic and hopeful, and that life is moving in a positive direction. The Revolution which started in 1917 is certainly viewed as a positive thing, though given the level of influence that the state had in Soviet cinema, this is hardly surprising.
Onto this backdrop comes Engineer Loss (as it was spelled in the English-language subtitles of the version I watched–other sites and documentation call him “Los”), who is one of the more dour protagonists of a movie that I remember seeing. The man roams through story looking almost perpetually miserable and depressed. Though he has a lovely and hard-working wife, Natasha (who helps to coordinate the distribution of much-needed supplies in the city), his only joy seems to be the belief that maybe the mysterious signal that was received at the radio station where he works has actually come from Mars. The signal contains only three strange words: “Anta Odeli Uta.”
Loss and his colleague, Spiridonov dream about building a ship that could actually take them to the red planet, and Loss spends his days fantasising about what life would be like there.
Those fantasies include the beautiful Queen Aelita (from Anta Odeli Uta…get it?), who in turn spends her days defying the orders of the planetary ruler Tuskub and using a forbidden technology to watch life on earth, including Loss himself. It’s actually pretty trippy when you think about it–who is watching who?
Anyway, the actual Mars sequences are pretty scarce in the movie, at least for the first two thirds. Instead, time is taken up in a variety of subplots, especially that of the ne’er-do-well Viktor Erlikh and his wife, who have recently arrived into Moscow.
His wife is an old acquaintance of Spiridonov, and she romances him in order to make money from the expensive gifts he gives her (they tell him that Viktor is her brother).
Meanwhile, Viktor is put into a room in Loss’ house, where he is playfully flirty with Natasha, while also using the house to hide sugar he uses his bureaucratic position to steal. Natasha is semi-charmed by Viktor, although this seems to be the result of Loss’ joyless demeanour and neglect than anything else. Eventually Loss is driven to a kind of mad jealousy, and after returning from a six month trip away (which he took without consulting his wife) he comes to mistakenly believe that she is being unfaithful to him, and in a fit of rage shoots her dead !
This is more than halfway through the film, and from there things move more rapidly. Loss runs away to the local train station, but ends up returning and avoids facing justice for his crime by disguising himself as Spiridonov, so nobody knows that he (Loss) ever came back from his work trip at all. Spiridonov had abruptly gone away, making this possible. The movie doesn’t actually tell us where he went to, only that the lure of the past was too strong and that he’s left Russia all together. I’ve read that that means he found happiness in a life in the West, but that’s not explicit in the movie. You don’t see Viktor’s wife after Spiridonov leaves so maybe they took off together?
What also makes Loss’ impersonation possible is the fact that both Loss and Spiridonov are played by the same actor–Nikolai Tseretelli–a feat that is achieved through some simple but effective makeup (Spiridonov has a beard and moustached and wears glasses) and also through some clever editing and split-screen filming. There are numerous scenes where the two characters interact on screen, and the illusion is very compelling. These shots are so matter-of-fact that if I didn’t know, I’d never guess there was anything unusual going on.
Anyway, as Spiridonov, Loss finishes building the spaceship and recruits a fellow traveller, former war hero Gusev (who features in another subplot that has been going all this time), who signs up because he struggles to find meaning in a world where there isn’t a war to fight. Gusev also has a wife–a nurse he met while recovering from injury. Like Natasha, she is someone who works to rebuild Russia and make it a better place for people, but like Loss, Gusev seems unwilling to be satisfied with an ordinary domestic existence. Again, I’m missing a lot of the context to understand all that this movie is saying about society, but it’s obvious that it’s saying something.
The third space-traveller in the movie turns out to be Kravtsov, a bumbling, somewhat comical would-be detective who has been rejected by the police, but keeps trying to investigate crimes anyway. He becomes suspicious of Spiridonov (really, Loss) for Natasha’s murder and ends up following him onto the spaceship just as it’s being launched. Ironically, when he discovers that Spiridonov is really Loss, he assumes that Loss is innocent of the murder (which of course he isn’t) and guilty only of impersonating someone else’s identity.
Kravtsov is so committed to proving his worth to the police that when they get to Mars, he petitions the ruler of Mars that he hand over the dangerous criminal he has travelled with so that he can be arrested. Kravtsov of course just gets arrested himself for his troubles.
I should take a minute here to talk about the Mars sequences of the movie, as they are striking. Of course, the Martians just look like humans but in bizarre clothing that is on the whole more imaginative than what we saw in A Message from Mars or A Trip to Mars.
The Martian sets are also memorable. What we see of Mars is angular and full of harsh geometry that stretches across multiple levels. The society itself ruled by Tuskub, who maintains control via a large army of police-like guards. The work is done by a legion of slaves who strangely wear boxes on their heads, emphasizing the demeaning aspects to this arrangement.
When the ruling class wants to save on power they send a third of the slaves to be frozen in a refrigerated that exists under the city. The similarity and potential influence of all this on Metropolis (which came out a few years later) is unmistakable.
The exact relationship between Aelita and Tuskub is not explored. I assumed at first she was his wife, but I read somewhere that she is his daughter. I didn’t see anything on screen that indicated it one way or the other. What was clear is that with the help of her handmaiden Ikhoshka, Aelita does what she can to sneak around the edges of society to get what she wants without getting in trouble. Most dramatically, when Tuskub plans to terminate the humans who are arriving in their ship, Aelita orders Ikhoshka to stab in the back the chief astronomer, so he can’t tell Tuskub where the ship will be landing.
Once all the players are on Mars, Aelita and Loss quickly give in to their passion for one another, while Gusev discovers the plight of the Martian slaves and incites them to revolt with stories of the glorious Russian Revolution and all the wonderful things that it brought to his country. Aelita seems to go along with this, but after the battle is won she orders the guards to turn against all the slaves and drive them back into their caves, so that she can now be the absolute ruler of Mars. Realizing how treacherous is, Loss attacks her and ends up pushing her off a ledge to her death.
And then the movie pulls it’s big twist, and we return to a scene from earlier in the film when Loss had fled after shooting Natasha and was standing at a train station watching advertising posters being put up. The posters reveal that the mysterious signal, which set this whole movie into motion, was really part of an advertising campaign for automobile tires! And the whole movie, from this point onwards, was part of another extended daydream.
Loss goes back home to face the consequences of Natasha’s death, only to find that she’s still alive! He missed her when he shot her (to be fair, we never saw her get hit). He repents for his terrible jealousy and to the deep concern of all modern audiences, she forgives him. We also see that Gusev and his wife are happily going off to the next chapter of their life, and that Kravtsov is arresting Erlikh (no wife in sight) for foul play…against Spiridonov! Loss meanwhile destroys all his sketches for his spaceship and determines with Natasha to focus on the needs of their life on earth.
It’s a happy ending, although like I said in real life I’d say if your husband got so jealous that he shot at you with you a gun multiple times and only didn’t kill you because he’s a bad shot, that you might want to exercise a little caution before accepting him back again.
It’s also a confusing ending because it’s hard to know right away what was real and what was not. At first, I thought the film was saying that the entire signal was all a daydream, and thus so was the entire movie. Indeed some of what I’ve read about the film seems to imply this. But if you pay close attention it’s clear that all the earth-bound scenes up to Loss fleeing after the shooting and standing by the train station is supposed to be “real”. We even see the posters for the tires being put up onto the walls just before the movie makes a strange cut forward to Loss impersonating Spiridonov. When Loss “comes to” after the battle with Aelita, he’s standing in exactly the same place watching the same posters being put up.
(Although on even closer scrutiny, you also see clearly that Loss “wakes up” from his daydream about five minutes earlier than he went into it–there are explicit close ups of the clock both before and after it all happens, so I don’t know what you are meant to make of that!)
It’s all far-fetched, of course, as apparently the wireless signal being sent out to advertise the tires went around the world–the movie starts with people receiving the mysterious signal all over the planet in multiple languages. That’s a tire company committed to building it’s brand!
(Apparently, the film itself used a similar advertising campaign. About six months before it premiered, ads started to be published with the same words as the movie’s mysterious signal. Later, this evolved into ads that claimed that this text was being received by radio stations around the world! Only later were these ads connected to the actual movie title. It seems to have worked, as the film was a financial success).
Anyway, if you can some oddities in storytelling, and also have some patience for the movie’s slow first half, there is a lot to appreciate here. The performances are all good, especially Nikolai Tseretelli in the double-lead role, Nikolay Batalov as Gusev (who is either joyful and jolly, or else itching for meaningful action–almost the exact opposite temperament of Loss), Pavel Po as the scheming Erlikh, and Valentina Kuinzhi as the saintly but beleaguered Natasha.
Maybe the most memorable, however, is Yuliya Solntseva and Aleksandra Peregonets as Aelita and Ikhoshka, who both work hard to create genuinely alien personas that even though some of what they do is a little hokey, on the whole it is incredibly effective.
The production design of the film is also solid, especially as I’ve said when we are on Mars, and though sometimes I got a bit lost in all the aspects of Russian society that we were visiting, there is no doubt that the characters are well-developed and specific.
In the end, the movie consigns all the science fiction elements of the story to the oblivion of “it was all a dream”, which from a modern perspective is hard to not be unsatisfied with. But given that the movie is as much a reflection on Russian society and the impact of the revolution as anything else, it doesn’t seem out of place here.
Aelita was, as I’ve said, hard work for me to get through. I kept having to rewatch sections because I would lose focus and not be sure what was going on, and after I finished the film I watched the whole thing again at double speed (skipping forward at some sections) so I could get a solid view of the whole experience. That sort of effort might not what you are looking for in a movie, but for me it helped me to see how well put-together the whole thing is, and I’m glad I did it.
