Dreams and waking

I watched Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 silent feature Aelita, Queen of Mars for the first time the other night and found it productively boring. It’s one of an increasingly rare species of film: one that you know through reading and stills but have no opportunity to see, such that the strong mental image of it, held for years, ends up substituting for its actual form. Chris Marker made Aelita one of the central examples of such a film in The Last Bolshevik (1993), a memorial to Soviet cinema that conspicuously and deliberately buried the achievements of the tradition most beloved by the 20th century avant-garde—Eisenstein’s montage practice, the cinema of everyday life practiced by Vertov and Dovzhenko and so on. Along with Medvedkin’s Happiness, he recalls—I haven’t seen the film itself either in years, so I’m relying on my own hazy memory—seeing it as a child and reserving the memory as an example of what cinema could do, in its missed encounter with the history of revolution. Marker’s childhood saw the collapse of communist internationalism into socialism-in-one-country and the (occasionally literal) extinction of the Russian avant-garde. Like Soviet montage itself, the astonishing Martian sets of Aelita—designed by Constructivists Isaac Rabinovich and Victor Simov, with costumes by Alexandra Exter, an associate of Picasso and Braque during her time in Paris—could be detached from their political context, like the details of a dream only just recalled on waking.

But I knew it from another context as well, one that reversed some of those meanings. Along with a few other choice works—Dušan Makavejev’s WR: Mysteries of the Organism, Leontine Sagan’s Mädchen in Uniform, Slatan Dudow and Bertolt Brecht’s Kuhle Wampe and Marker’s Grin without a Cat —it was a frequent reference point for several bloggers I read and knew remotely in the mid-00s. While the description of blogging in the UK in that period as a form of subculture can rightly seem farfetched—5-10 writers meeting in greasy spoons, half of whom were academics in some capacity, don’t make a new Bloomsbury—but before the widespread availability of public domain and bootlegged films on Youtube it did serve a function of generating a reproducible taste in opposition to what appeared, in the estranging light of that taste, to be the depoliticised “reflexive impotence” of the Extras/Lost/Arctic Monkeys era. For me at least, in my late teens in a distinctly non-subcultural south coast town, these gestures towards a past that combined aesthetic radicalism, communist militancy and an anti-ascetic approach to art—the allowance of pleasure, ornamentation, luxury in artworks, in contrast to what Mark Fisher later called the “Harsh Leninist Superego”—was inspiring, knowing about it the kind of minor distinction you can later dine out on as a Russell Group undergraduate. But if it was available on DVD then, I never found it amid the self-education of puzzling over Tartan and Artificial Eye discs of Bela Tarr or Cristi Piui borrowed from Amazon Rental. This second act of imagining was also one of detachment, dreaming up a lived alternative to consumerism that nonetheless saw the experience of the early 20th century avant-garde as inescapably belated, accessible only through acts of critical renovation—as in Owen Hatherley’s criticism of the “Ikea modernism” of the period—or some imagined future break in capitalist realism. I could thus, in the adaptive fervour of provincial late teen romanticism, file the costumes from Aelita alongside the photos of Jordan in her Kings’ Road days in Jon Savage’s England’s Dreaming.

The reality of Aelita, in the light of 2020 lockdown streaming life, is both flatter and more interesting. The Mars sets are a minor part of the film, which focuses mostly on the everyday lives of a few people in early 20s Moscow, with a baffling number of plot strands intersecting between characters who aren’t sufficiently distinguished between each other, and that often go nowhere. The 113 minutes of runtime drag. People go to work, buy groceries, engage in the petty scams permitted by the informal economy of post-Civil War Russia. Moscow looks like what it was, the functional but run-down capital of a former empire on the provincial edge of Europe. Its central subject is in fact boredom and frustration: the engineer Los feels stifled in his work and jealous of his wife, whom he’s staying in this role to be with; he can’t give her the goods that Erikh, an ex-White and now minor official and black marketeer who sets his sights on her, can; their friends Gussev, a demobbed Red Army soldier, and his wife Masha, can’t make ends meet and Gussev feels at a loss without the activity of war. Los, catching on to a cryptic phrase from the radio, dreams about Mars. But the Mars scenes, with their elaborate social hierarchy and fully realised decorative detail, are never explicitly flagged as dream sequences or waking fantasies; there are a few moments where the action transitions from Los in unsatisfied thought to the power struggles of the Martian court, but mostly the action is elaborated in parallel. Aelita spies on Earth, picking out Los as her lover as if using her new telescope like an interplanetary dating app, but he doesn’t return her gaze. After shooting Natasha in a fit of envy and attempting to flee Moscow, he finishes building his rocket in secret (though the film never gives any exegesis that this is what he’s doing, and Los is confusingly disguised as his poet friend Spiridnov, played in earlier episodes by the same actor) and leaves Earth, meeting Aelita and rousing the Martian masses to socialist revolution before deposing her as she quickly turns despotic. Except that this never happens: it turns out he was merely cogitating on the platform at the Moscow station. The mysterious phrase is revealed retrospectively as a tire advert. Erikh is arrested. Natasha, rather implausibly, forgives Los for trying to ventilate her. He burns his rocket blueprints and they turn away from dreams: “A different, real world is awaiting all of us!”

This socialist marriage-plot of a happy ending leaves the film burdened with guilt and resignation. The end title music blares in triumph as the narrative resolves in favour of the boredom and immovable unhappiness elaborated throughout its early passages. It aligns revolution with the reality principle and disavows the most tantalising parts of itself. Politics, it tells us, is far from a dream, and it can’t be achieved by the fiat of spontaneism, let alone the irreducible detachment of art. Los’s misery stems from his unrealistic expectations and overworked imagination, which summons into being the archaic drama of court intrigue on Mars, one that Brecht would no doubt have censured for its reliance on central figures that invite spectator identification. And yet, even this is too pat a message for the film to really believe in. The compressed final sequence of revolution->despotism->revolt depicts the spark of permanent revolution leaping, in an elaborately symbolic montage that borrows from the techniques of Eisenstein and propanganda images of Lenin’s speeches, from the USSR to the new “Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics of Mars”. It’s the only resolution the film’s narrative can permit itself except Los’s suicide: personal tragedy and callousness eventually aiding the spread of social revolt, revolution redeeming fallen reality as an escape route into a new world. Revolution’s unresolved status in the work, as alternately dream or genre story, finds an analogue in Walter Benjamin’s writing. In The Arcades Project, he likens the “prehistory” of capitalist society—the early phase of bourgeois life, preserved in the 1920s only in the backwaters of the Paris arcades—to sleep, the fantastic shapes of consumer culture and iron-and-glass construction its dream-guardians. Susan Buck-Morss, in her commentary on the Arcades, quotes Benjamin:

In the dialectical image, the past of a particular epoch […] appears before the eyes of [a particular, present epoch] in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes precisely this dream as a dream. It is in this moment that the historian takes upon himself the task of dream interpretation.

Awakening, which Benjamin identified with an emergent proletarian revolution, wasn’t a disenchanted, dreamless state of consciousness, but one that realised dreams in the movement out of sleep. As Buck-Morss comments, “[d]ialectical images were to draw dream images into an awakened state, and awakening was synonymous with historical knowledge”. If the first part of the film trusts in the unwholesome content of dreams—Aelita’s vanity and greed, Los’s disappointment, hubris and self-hatred, the brutal hierarchy of Martian society— the final section performs a demystification that reveals it as just another sci-fi story, and leaves the subject amid the new sleep of socialist realism—consumerism by other means. The separately established reality of Mars doesn’t disappear through this sleight of hand, but lingers as a dream that never finally coincides with that of communism, to be recovered by Marker and others, through the decay of cinema across the 20th century.

The reality or otherwise of interplanetary revolution depends, in the film’s narrative structure, on the technical details of rocketry—and thus, in turn, on that of imperialist war. Los explains that his rocket plan is hindered by the lack of a fuel that could allow it to reach escape velocity. But such a fuel of course already existed, in nascent form. By the end of the Russian civil war, Standard Oil had been in business for 50 years and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company already had a modicum of political control over the affairs of Middle Eastern governments. Los lacks only liquid oxygen, first used in rocket propulsion in 1926, to get beyond the Earth sphere. Of course he finds a fuel solution, which goes unexplained in the film, to get to Mars, until that too is rendered moot. Two historical paths open up here. The real history of space exploration that the film’s finale resigns itself to, entwined with socialist duty and romantic love, is twinned with that of Western political control of oil production, totalised aerial warfare against civilians and, at the far end of the Cold War, the dawning reality of climate change. The meanings that the retrospective looks at the text, fastening on the dream-structures of Mars, find can be seen then as the recovery of a damaged dream the text itself can’t make real. Communism, in its derealisation, must defend the dream against narrative. Capitalism, outside of the narrative frame, will go on to make dreams real, in the disastrous lifeworld of consumption.