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aelita, the queen of mars is a socialist science fiction spectacle and in 1924 was the first big-budget movie from soviet russia. a year and a half in the making, it was intended as ideologically correct mass entertainment which could compete both in russia and abroad with the hollywood films that dominated soviet and world screens while also earning plaudits for artistic innovation such as had greeted the cabinet of dr. caligari and other german expressionist films.
aelita is a fantastic adventure about los, an engineer living in moscow, who dreams of aelita, the queen of mars, and builds a spaceship to take him to her. they fall in love, but los soon finds himself embroiled in a proletarian uprising to establish a martian union of soviet socialist republics! this story is based loosely upon a novella by alexei tolstoy, a distant relative of lev tolstoy, who had established a reputation for popular novels, poetry and drama before 1917 and who had just returned to moscow after emigrating during the revolution. the director, yakov protazanov, was a pre-revolutionary russian film giant who was persuaded to give up a successful new career in france and germany to offer his skill and prestige to the untried soviet film industry.
the return of the artist whom denise youngblood has called "the king of russian silent cinema" energized protazanov's collaborators and many others who were trying to build a new film industry out of practically nothing. "work on the screenplay was neither fast nor smooth," recalled co-writer alexei faiko. "protazanov had all sorts of demands... always searching and striving for something new and more interesting."
the most interesting element in this film - the basis for ists enduring fame - is its design: amazing "martian" costumes and sets by the distinguished abstract painter alexandra exter and her accomplished protégé, isaak rabinovich. informed by cubism and other design trends in france, italy and germany, they are executed in the distinctively russian avant-garde style of the day, known as "constructivism." the producers struggled to provide scarce resources: 70000 feet of negative film that had to be purchased abroad for precious hard currency, aluminum and celluloid to build mars, a cast and crew which ms. youngblood calls "one of the most impressive ever assembled in the 1920s for a single picture," and literally thousands of extras.
Yulia Solntseva