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The Forty-First is a tragic love story about a Bolshevik sniper and the czarist officer who was to have been her forty-first kill. Instead, the pair embark on a doomed romance. A beautiful deconstructed fairy tale, the story was made once in 1927 and once in 1956. Both versions are faithful to the book, though they take opposite approaches to the material. My review of both.
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Protazanov - 2013 08 24 - Aelita
AELITA: QUEEN OF MARS Soviet Union 1924 Directed by Yakov Protazanov Running time: 113 minutes
Forgive me this auteurist detour. Instead of concentrating on Protazanov and his relatively simple constructivist tale, let me direct your attention to the dazzling work of Aleksandra Ekstra. Her set and costume design are really what lend this film its lasting impact. Feudal life on the red planet is all flow and ripple for the nobles (known as “The Elders”). Handsome asymmetries and geometric figures range from the Cubo-Futurist to the Suprematist. Musicality seems embedded in Ekstra’s surfaces. There is a visual tactility to the thousand harp strings suspended from the red heavens. Our eyes arpeggiate a tune as our focus sweeps across those glistening guts. To me, it sounds something like the triangulated arithmetic of Philip Glass’ Einstein on the Beach, even though I know that comes about fifty years later. Meanwhile, back on Earth, the lines are vertical and angular. Where empty space hung cold in the Martian skies, on Earth there are people. Workers. Soldiers. Backsliding, deluded imperialists. At times, and without speaking from the vantage of history, it feels like aliens have already made contact there. Vacuum tubes, headsets and comrades whose foreheads are pressed deep into the sex of some radio-powered machine. Back on Mars. I’m reminded of the great French comic artist, Jean Giraud, nom de plume Moebius. Organic matter and the purity of artistic feeling intermingle. A Martian door opens like a dragon’s wing unfolding or the bellows of an accordion contracting its pleats. Aelita, The Queen of Mars is a kind of troika-chested Cleopatra decked out in ‘20s alien Vogue. The look of her time is Art Deco Ideal. And while the tranquility of the Agora suggests all is well on Mars, it is not. The red planet proletariat are being herded and thrashed, shuffled and stacked. Consumed for energy. The ideal is a veneer and any good communist knows veneers are for scraping. To expose the rotten wood beneath is to set the conditions for revolution. Tabula rasa. Now seems like a good time to quote an American review of AELITA published in 1924:
In Moscow they are devoting 75,000 feet of motion-picture films to the portrayal of life in a newer, redder world. The story of "Aelita," prepared by a degenerate scion of the Tolstoi stock, depicts a cubistic, futuristic and geometric sphere in which Communists have it all their own way – as if it were their heaven…that it may spread the revolutionary propaganda and confirm the hold of the terrorist regime. -Author Unknown, New Worlds for the Reds
Terrorist… 1924…
Switching pace, let me issue this challenge to you tonight: watch this film from the inside. RiffTrax is great, but it’s not the only way to experience the past. If your feet are planted in 2013, you might be tempted to come to this film with the defensive scorn of hindsight. You might laugh when the film is not saying something funny. Y’know, because we’ve learned so much since 1924. Haven’t we? Then again, our strongest enemies are still terrorists. Maybe not everything’s changed.
KURTISS HARE 24 August 2013
OTETS SERGIY / FATHER SERGIUS (1919)
Dir: Yakov Protazanov, Alexandre Volkoff
Russia, 112m
IMDb
MOMENTS BEFORE EISENSTEIN
It is my view that we need more efficient ways of documenting film. Emotional response is fine but fickle and, to me, untrustworthy. Film history educates but is really dry and boring. Talking about technique is simple navel-gazing complacency. The point is that film flows from actual life that is immensely complex and inviting. Make no mistake, it is the pinnacle of the arts at this point and for a long time now. We can use it to both invigorate sense of the world and our own reasoning tools.
So I have been surveying the early days of the medium looking for interesting threads that weave together the evolution of entire worlds. One such I have found in Japan, that is documented elsewhere. The other is right here. And because the technique now seems primitive, and the emotional response is likewise hampered by having refined our own selves and viewing habits further than these films operated on, we can focus on this one aspect; film as forging of soul. 1917 Russia. Civil unrest on-and-off goes back several decades. One-third of the world is at the brink of cataclysmic change. So at this point comes a film where the czar is portrayed as having an amorous, extra-marital affair. In order to obscure the matter, he frames a young military officer to marry this woman, a brilliant man we're told, save for his rash temper, scion of an aristocratic family and groomed to lead, the future of this ruling elite about to be destroyed we can presume. Our man finds out about the plot and outraged at worldly hypocrisy, he disavows rank and status and becomes a monk. But this corrupt world catches up with him again in the monastery, it should not be missed that the abbot maintains friendly relations with the military aristocracy, so our man exiles himself even further and becomes a hermit. All through the film we are treated to very impressive transformations of our character, from young impertinent cadet to old decrepit hermit, on par with anything Lon Chaney accomplished and without any of the caricature. No, we're watching a natural actor at work here, an early Daniel Day-Lewis, one who does not attack the role from outside but rather embodies the sullen, mortified look. He makes even the heavy makeup around of the eyes seem natural and as though it has slowly crept in from decades of bitterness and resentment. This was going to be Ivan Mozzhukhin's last film in his own country, soon after completion he was going to be forced into exile along with the filmmakers and most of the cast shown here. They would make the next film on the trail, the Ermolief trail leading from Yalta into Paris. He would surface again in the time of the first great French school. He would have the chance to be immortalized as Napoleon in Abel Gance's historic production, but opted instead to be Casanova for Volkoff, one of the filmmakers who filmed him in this. This is very much what the film is about, an aristocract who no longer has a place in the world and has to disappear. The hermit is gaunt and half-mad in his cabin, but at least safe and far from what he would have nothing to do with. Except temptation visits him one last time. Another amorous woman, very much like the one he courted and had to flee from, who once again taunts him, promises sex, and the old man now has to cut off his finger to fight the urge. This prompts the local populace to celebrate him as a saint and make pilgrimages to his place to get his blessing. But this is the thing, the karmic dynamics at work shaping destiny in and out of the film. This is what I'm talking about. We know that our man was never a spiritual person. We know that he's never, even during his long ascetic years, managed to find a center for himself. Even as a hermit, he has the same rash temper as years ago the cadet and the merest flicker of turbulent life sends him reeling. And he has so many fingers to cut before he succumbs to temptation. In the end, he's merely swept aside by authorities as one more vagabond en route to Siberia. Nevertheless, the dynamics of this world at the time were such, I assume, that the narrative must have registered in the national heart on the level of tragic Russian hero broken by a lawless, cruel system, and the protagonist who starts off as 'one of them', is eventually washed up in the lowest class and cast out. Religion is shown to offer no shelter. Yet no responsibility over one's own actions is ever really asserted. So of course these dynamics would erupt in violent revolution against the characters portrayed here, that same year, but see, including the actual actors, Mozzhukhin most notably, why else, because they had been unlucky to be celebrated by the populace and amass a fortune. Father Sergiy, blind to the mechanisms that control his suffering and constantly fleeing from himself, really is Russian soul at the crossroads.
PIKOVAYA DAMA / THE QUEEN OF SPADES (1916)
Dir: Yakov Protazanov
Russia, 63m
IMDb
MOMENTS BEFORE EISENSTEIN
Here's an interesting film from the days before tireless proles dominated the Russian screens; army officers in impeccable attire gamble and drink and tell stories, pampered aristocrats stroll and saunter about in upscale establishments in Paris, and the only hint of poverty is that the poor young maid is dissatisfied by having to serve the old countess. It is important to appreciate the significance of this apart from the screen, I feel. These characters and their decadent, opulent world are months away from actually being swept away from life, as are the filmmakers and actors seen here. Both the type of character shown here and the people portraying them, different kinds of aristocracy, would be forced to go on the trail and into exile in France or Germany, and for a lot of the same reasons. And this is what our film is partially about. A complacent upper class who gambles away its fortunes because there is nothing else to pass the time with, whose biggest worry is how to keep the husband count from getting to find out, or how to steal the secret way of quickly making easy money. Of course, how a countess can be in the position to have so much money to idly lose on the turn of a card is strategically absent from the film. No, that is suffering the likes of Pudovkin would show us. The games of cards as fate left to chance, transient life where playing your cards in certain order does not ensure control of the outcome, and karmic retribution on the closing end of this cycle. For the most part, this is ordinary stuff right down to the supernatural visitation of guilt, except perhaps for two things. Ordinarily, the young army officer eager to learn the secret of the cards would be portrayed in ways that immediately signalled to the audience the right distance to keep from him and a karmic downfall in the works. Mozzhukhin portrays him instead as a blank slate of pensive introversion, a folded card waiting its turn and perhaps bluffing. Kuleshov would make a lot of this once Mozzhukhin had been swept away to France and Soviets had taken control of images to build reality - including Mozzhukhin's. The other is that this is not theatric, even though it seems so at first glance. Tchaikovksy had adapted the same story for the opera, and we may presume this derives from that stage. The camera is static, yes, but notice some very cinematic framing going on - a shot of the secret being whispered in flashback cuts to match the present time telling of the story among the officers. Also notice a second-hand narrator of the story and later an unreliable mind with unsure footing in the world, both these we encounter again in the films of Epstein - who, no doubt, would have come into contact with the Russian emigres in Paris, himself one. This is far from Proletkult's radical space for the eye, but as with Bauer, it has a certain stately finesse.which, no doubt, comes from a foot in the complacent life shown here.
★★★☆☆
