Littrans 207: Thursday, 2-4

Today’s topic

We will discuss our first cultural artifact, the Soviet-Russian film Aelita.

Related course note

Most of our in-class discussion will be about primary texts or cultural artifacts of SF from our three Slavic traditions, but we will not do full justice to the works we examine—circle to one or more of them for your assignments?

Let’s go over the quiz first

1.  The majority of the film takes place: (a) on Mars; (b) in Moscow; (c) on a spaceship; (d) it’s unclear where.

2.  The message “anta odeli uta” comes from Mars: true or false.

3.  Aelita speaks Russian with a distinctly American accent: true or false.

4.  Aelita leads a successful proletarian rebellion on Mars: true or false.

5.  How does the film end: what’s the twist? The Mars adventure is a dream.

 

Start-of-class discussion: let’s talk about answers to the film’s guide questions

Since we’ve watched the film and taken a quiz on it, let’s focus our discussion on elements in the plot that introduce complexity and that maybe could be read more symbolically. We can/should also explore question 5 here.

1.  Who is Los and who is Aelita—and how do they know each other?

2.  What happens on Mars? What happens to Aelita?

3.  How does the film end?

4.  What are the SF elements in this film?

5.  How does this work fit into Suvin’s framework for SF as cognitive estrangement?

How does the film fit the Suvinian SF framework?

We do want to be gentle here in our assessment for a number of reasons!

 

We do have estrangement and we have nova, but…

 

 

Yet we could make an argument that the SF dream-sequence is central to the film in a symbolic way (Horton) and also offers us insight into the cultural history of the time (Schwartz and Banerjee).

What exactly is the Soviet project and how do we promote it in art?

It has a practical/pragmatic side to it as well as an element of adventure (Gusev).

But idealism is also involved, and the film promotes that on Mars, but then undermines it.

 

 

Maybe Aelita really is “space opera”!

Why might we say that the Soviet project is SF and how does Aelita fit in?

The Soviet project’s goal was ultimately to establish a utopian society—a socialist or communist one—on Earth. This was to entail a full transformation of sociocultural and socioeconomic norms across the planet. It was to be linked to technological innovation.

Marxist theory itself, after all, was thought of as an objective scientific analysis of socioeconomic conditions and human progress.

One scholar of early Soviet cultural history has referred to the Soviet project as a kind of “technological utopianism,” and this is at least partially endorsed in the film. Lenin himself was obsessed with technological development. The British SF writer H. G. Wells interviewed Lenin in 1920 and he wrote: “Lenin, who like a good orthodox Marxist, denounces all ‘Utopians,” has succumbed at last to Utopia, the Utopia of electricians.”

Space achievements eventually became an important marker of Soviet progress

This was true in relation to the West: the “Space Race.”

One scholar of the topic has characterized this as spreading the message of “Marx to Mars,” which is also the subject of the film—so the film previews this later idea, but not in an entirely coherent way.

Cultural historians have noted the fascination with both aviation and spaceflight in 1920s Russia. Aviation represented a kind of “kinetic liberation” and served as a symbol of Soviet technological idealism. Like aviation, spaceflight was about liberation but “it pushed the physical limits of emancipation beyond conception, past the boundaries of the visible skies.”

Space topics were a big slice of popular-science literature in the 1920s

One scholar collected data on non-fiction about spaceflight between 1923-1932: he found 250 articles and 30 books. In the US during this time, only 2 monographs on spaceflight appeared.

 

So Aelita was part of a broader cultural fascination with the idea of space travel. The release of the film occurred in the same year as the “Great Mars Opposition” in 1924: Mars and Earth were closer to each other than they had been in centuries.