Aelita: Queen of Mars is a 1924 Soviet silent science fiction film directed by Yakov Protazanov and produced at the Mezhrabpom-Rus film studio.
Screenings: Saturday 12 April 2025, 3.00pm
Introduced by Katherine Waugh
Programmed by Katherine Waugh in response to the questions posed by artist Mark Cullen in his RCC exhibition (Prototypes for Cyborgs – A Space Opera), a post-humanist cyborgian opera/exhibition: “What futures do we build when the lines between human, machine, and myth dissolve? And who—or what—will inherit the stars?”
Messages from outer space were a surprisingly common preoccupation of the 1920s, from Edgar Varese’s failed Opera L’Astronome about messages from the star Sirius (a collaboration with Antonin Artaud as librettist) to the more natural territory of early sci-fi novels.
Aelita (Yakov Protazanov, 1924), arguably the most important full-length early sci-fi film, joined the ranks with its story of messages being sent from Mars, and an engineer who dreams of Aelita, Queen of Mars, and who builds a spaceship to take him to her, only to be drawn into a proletarian uprising.
Leo Tolstoy’s second cousin Alexei wrote the novel Aelita as a kind of cosmist mystical fantasy, very different to other early sci-fi being written in early 20th century Russia.
Adapted for film in 1924, though with substantial alterations, Aelita was a big budget commercial film for western audiences, and was enthusiastically received at the time, yet its revolutionary subject matter and cosmist influence remain, primarily in the constructivist costume and set design for the Martian scenes.
Along with its hugely influential design and futurist/constructivist aesthetic (it’s worth noting that it was a precursor to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, 1927), Aelita had an extraordinary marketing campaign that anticipated Orson Welles ‘War of the Worlds’ bravura performance 14 years later in 1938. ‘Pravda’ newspaper began publishing cryptic messages that needed decoding, followed by a notice published in the ‘Kinogazeta’ film publication reading: “The signals that are being received constantly by radio stations around the world – Anta… Odeli… Uta… – have at last been deciphered! What do they mean? You will find out on 30 September at the Ars Cinema.” The Ars Cinema which hosted the gala premiere was decorated in the manner of the constructivist, egypto-cubist Martian Palace designed for the film by Aleksandra Ekster and Isaak Rabinovich.
Much has been written about how the cultural imaginaries of Mars and space exploration itself have been naturalized as some form of ideological necessity within the aggressively colonizing framework of western capitalism.
Anton Vidokle’s ambitious wide-ranging Cosmism project, manifested through films, exhibitions and publications over the last few years, has drawn attention to a very different, more esoteric, utopian vision of man’s relationship with the cosmos drawn from the work of 19th century Nikolai Fedorov, who in turn was influenced by Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.
The horrors of Elon Musk’s Martian fantasy involving the servitude of the majority has provoked even more urgent questions about what alternative imaginaries there might be for ‘outer space”.
As Jonas Staal has written in ‘Exo-Ecologies’:
“Musk himself is a chief cause of the extinction event from which he is fleeing. One could even say that extinction is a marketing tool to pitch new electric cars, geo-engineering industries, and martian settlement projects. In other words, this extractive model is the extinction event, a culmination of the slow violence manifesting across five hundred years of colonial extermination and empire-building on earth, and now beyond.”
Aelita draws us back to what seems like an uncannily prophetic vision, now a century old, of space exploration, technology and the human struggle with the politics of conquest.
Programme notes by Katherine Waugh
Runtime: 111 minutes
Katherine Waugh is a filmmaker, writer and curator whose trans-disciplinary practice includes film essays co-directed with Fergus Daly such as ‘I See a Darkness‘ (2023) which examines the complex historical relationship between photography, cinema and science, with a focus on atomic culture and animality. The film screened with an exhibition in Photo Museum Ireland, in New York, Cork Film Festival, Docs Ireland Belfast, and was the opening film for Fronteira Film Festival in Brazil . A previous film essay The Art of Time, on the complex temporalities in contemporary art, film and architecture also screened internationally.
