Aelita

Aelita, Yakov Protazanov, Soviet Union, 1924, 120’ 

This screening was an experiment. On the one hand, the film presented is a true Russian classic of the silent era, and one of the first science fiction features in the history of the cinema. Los is a young man who travels to Mars in a rocket and becomes the leader, along with queen Aelita, of a popular uprising against the king. The analogy of this fable with Russian history is clear and the political reading that can be made of it is one of the clear features of this film. But Aelita stands out for its overwhelming imagination and visual solutions: the costumes and scenery are authentic “Martian” constructivism. Done by Aleksanndra Ekster, they foreshadowed and strongly influenced the futurism of Fritz Lang in Metrópolis (1927), and the expressionist currents of German cinema of the late 1920s. 

Now the second part of all this: we were in the second part of our season on artist portraits and we gave carte blanche to San Sebastian artist Andres Nagel, with one sole condition: that he had to choose a film in the history of cinema that, for whatever reason, he considers important to his biography and professional career. The “game” behind this offering revolved around checking/demonstrating that a film chosen by an artist could also be a form of biography and self-portrait. And so it did prove. The correspondence between those characters/sculptures of the Russian film, their impossible geometries and expressionist architecture with the figures and spaces of Naguel’s sculptural and pictorial work was clear. This screening is therefore billed as Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita , chosen and presented by Andrés Nagel.