Aelita: Queen of Mars

Soviet Union, 1924. Director Yakov Protazanov. 1h 51m.

Aelita remains one of the most ambitious endeavours of Soviet Russia’s silent cinema, and a bold showcase of its avant-garde design. The film is perhaps best known for its wild cubo-futurist aesthetic flaunted in its otherworld sequences on Mars. Here the angular geometric costumes and sets, designed by constructivist artists and designers including Isaac Rabinovich and Alexandra Exter, foreground hard, industrial materials such as metal sheets, celluloid and plexiglass. Complementing each other in a total look, both the costumes and sets form striking three-dimensional compositions of converging geometrical forms and material textures. As in many science fiction films after it, Aelita’s deliberate contrast between the Earth and an alien civilisation conceals a political message. The film is, in fact, less interesting as a science fiction fantasy than as a loaded ideological portrayal of the tumultuous reality of post-revolutionary Russia, with its nostalgia for the past and dreams of the future colliding in the uncertain present.

With Yuliya Solntseva, Igor Ilyinsky, Nikolai Tsereteli. Costumes by Alexandra Exter.

Past screenings

Wearing Time: Past, Present, Future, Dream – London
Tuesday 21 March 2017, 20:30 | Genesis Cinema
Post-screening discussion with Ian Christie and Djurdja Bartlett. With a live musical accompaniment by Stephen Horne, featuring a theremin (a musical instrument invented in Russia during the 1920s).