MOVIE REVIEW : The Rescue of ‘Aelita: Queen of Mars’

Yakov Protazanov’s “Aelita: Queen of Mars” (1924), one of the earliest and most rarely seen of the silent cinema’s science-fiction fantasies, screens today and Saturday at 8 p.m. at LACMA’s Bing Theater as part of the “Restorations, Rarities and Requests” series. It will be accompanied by the Theremin Trio, led by Dennis James, who has composed a new score, incorporating fragments of the original, and utilizing the theremin, the world’s first electronic synthesizer, invented in the Soviet Union in 1920.

Echoing “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” in the boldly geometric design of the sets and costumes in its Martian sequences and anticipating “Metropolis” in its social protest, “Aelita” is nevertheless a highly idiosyncratic work, its deliberately choppy narrative probably intensified by a reported paring down of its original running time to its current 87 minutes.

Very loosely adapted from Alexei Tolstoi’s novel by Fyodor Oztep and Alexei Faiko, “Aelita” plunges us into the chaotic aftermath of the Russian Revolution--a desperate time of food shortages, illegal profiteering and mass evacuations that has inescapable parallels to the present-day Soviet Union.

The film’s central figures are Los (Nikolai M. Tsereteli), an intense Moscow radio engineer and his attractive wife Natasha (Valentina Kuinzhi), a refugee worker. The plot swiftly becomes all but impenetrable, but it reflects the moral and economic chaos of the era. It turns upon Los imagining a curious code picked up at Radio Moscow to be a message from Mars, coupled with his fascination with space travel and his chronic jealousy in regard to his wife.

As an escape from his increasing anxiety, Los envisions a trip to Mars, where he falls in love with its exotic princess Aelita (Yuliya Solnitseva)--the “Queen” in the film’s English title is a misnomer. Mars, however, is no Utopia but a cruel fascist state ruled by Aelita’s father and his key inventor. It is a society of privileged elitists and of worker slaves, who live entirely underground and who are subject to being frozen for future use. In short, it is ripe for revolution and the establishment of a United Soviet Socialist Republic of Mars.

“Aelita” offers a jolting contrast to the Russian silent classics with their celebrated use of montage and is a brisk plunge into the hardships and uncertainties of the fledgling communist state. Yet in its overstated “emoting” and in the spectacular aura of its Martian sequences, it recalls the silents of C.B. DeMille.

The design of Mars, principally the work of Viktor Kozlovsky (sets) and Alexandra Ekster, (costumes), has been described variously as Cubist, Futurist and Constructivist, but whatever the correct label, its key motif is the triangle.

The costumes bring to mind those of Erte and also those of Natasha Rambova for Nazimova’s “Salome.” The razor-sharp print reveals in full measure the dexterity and spontaneity of cinematographers Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky and E. Schoneman, who would have been right at home in the cinema of the French New Wave. The resurfacing of “Aelita: Queen of Mars” (Times-rated Mature for its extremely complicated narrative), a popular success widely disparaged upon its original release, should ensure its rightful place in the Soviet cinema.