A cryptic radio transmission baffles scientists and statesmen around the globe. Only the dreamy Soviet engineer Los correctly surmises that the signal is coming from Mars. With the Soviet Union mired in a period of New Economic Policy retrenchment — and Los’s wife Natasha cavorting with duplicitous aristocrats behind his back — who wouldn’t yearn to leave the Earth behind? Alas, Mars is just as backwards as the West, practically an intergalactic Barclays outpost, with the proletariat imprisoned underground while Aelita and her family pursue maximum profit. This very strange film was the product of two Russian artists who had been reluctantly brought back into the fold after periods of post-Revolutionary exile — director Yakov Protazanov had helmed dozens of Czarist-era film fossils while novelist Alexei Tolstoy had renounced his anti-Bolshevik politics and embarked on a series of science fiction epics that wed the prestige of his family name to the party line. The movie adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel was envisioned as a calling card for the Soviet film industry generally and the Mezhrabprom-Rus studio specifically, with eye-popping Constructivist-Martian costumes from Alexandra Exter and sets from Viktor Kozlovsky. Alas, this popular success was viciously mocked in the increasingly strident Soviet press. Director Lev Kuleshov dismissed Aelita as “the blind alley of pre-revolutionary cinema” while critic Vladimir Blyum lamented it as an exemplar of a trend where “it even became de rigueur to spice agitational pictures with a romantic subplot, far-fetched stunts, and happy endings …. Agitation steeped in stupidity began to merge into counter-agitation.”

35mm from the Walker Arts Center

Preceded by: “Trip to Mars” (Fleischer Studios, 1924) – 7 min – 16mm