Filed under: Macht Spass | Tags: aelita, cem yilmaz, everyone loves the wild west, futurism, history in films, russian constructivism, russian history, science fiction, turkish
Sometimes I do things other than read books. This past week I watched two movies, both of which reflect continuing preoccupations of mine.
First was Yahşi Batı, a Turkish film about–wait for it–the WILD WEST.
In the film, two of the sultan’s agents come from the Ottoman Empire to deliver a diamond to President James Garfield, but of course, in the first fifteen minutes the diamond is stolen by a group of outlaw cowboys! Hilarity ensues.
Turkish Circle sponsored the film viewing, and we watched it in Turkish with English subtitles. I think I would have gotten a lot more of the jokes if I understood Turkish better, but as it was, the film was still pretty hilarious–we learn that Coca-Cola was actually invented by Turks, that Turkish men love strong-willed lesbians, and that Native Americans are actually Turks–or are Turks Native Americans?
It was a profoundly silly comedy, yes, but ever since watching this movie I have been spending far too much time deliriously imagining the possibility of a Turkish-German Wild West film and the amazing paper I would surely write about it.
The second movie I saw this week was Aelita, Queen of Mars, a silent Russian film from 1924 and the world’s first full-length feature about space travel. I watched it in the University chapel with live organ accompaniment.
The film is actually available on YouTube in its entirety, in what appears to be Russian, Finnish, and English:
Do you like it when individuals resolve their personal psychosexual complexes by fantasizing about traveling to an aesthetically constructivist Mars to foment ultimately unsuccessful proletarian revolution under a tyrannical Martian regime?
Because if that sounds at all appealing, you should watch this film.
(Although you should be warned that by “psychosexual complexes” I do mean “tendency to beat and occasionally try to kill their wives.” Modernism: it continues to be about naturalizing violence against women.)
Aelita and her favorite maid. Sexy, right?
I’m not going to go into great depth about the plot, because you actually may want to watch this film, but it’s always worth repeating that history and science fiction are great bedfellows, and that science fiction is often a vehicle for political argument.
The narrative structure of the film justifies Lenin’s New Economic Policy and the work of rebuilding Russia while telling us that the time for revolutionary vanguardism is over: when our protagonist goes to Mars, he foments revolution, but that revolution ultimately fails. The oppressed Martian workers (and they are really oppressed–a third of them get put into cold storage during the film) do not actually have class consciousness and therefore can’t sustain their own revolution, so the revolution gets hijacked by the titular Aelita.
Aelita's maid, at the center, has awesome pants--when she walks they make these neat jumping spider motions.
And yet because Mars is so darn seductive, there’s some ambiguity here: I recognize that the revolution on Mars is doomed to fail and that much better work is to be done constructing giant dams and steam engines at home, but look at those pants! Look at those haircuts! Look at those twisty staircases! How could I not want to go?
It’s perhaps not surprising that the film was wildly popular among the Soviet public (evidently a lot of babies were named ‘Aelita’ in 1924), but criticized by the authorities, and that it later fell majorly out of favor with Stalinist censors, by which time a new generation of science fiction writers were coming up with their own ways to sneak subversive messages into novels that looked regime-friendly on the surface.
I own some of those books in Esperanto, and someday I promise to tell you about them. Right now, it’s back to my reading for class.
Ĝis revido! Görüşürüz! À bientôt!
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