{"id":1451,"date":"2011-09-07T10:59:54","date_gmt":"2011-09-07T10:59:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=1451"},"modified":"2021-06-15T15:07:32","modified_gmt":"2021-06-15T14:07:32","slug":"kosmos-at-the-bfi-soviet-history-through-an-sf-lens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=1451","title":{"rendered":"KOSMOS AT THE BFI: SOVIET HISTORY THROUGH AN SF LENS"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It is a clich\u00e9 to argue that science fiction is never about the future but always about the time in which it is made. Yet, as with many a clich\u00e9, there is often a nugget of truth beneath the grimy accumulation of lazy associations. So it was hard to watch the range of films that the British Film Institute put together as part of its Kosmos season \u2013 a celebration of (mostly) Russian (mostly) SF that ran through July & August 2011 \u2013 and not see them as marking out the ebbs and flows of the history of Eastern Europe\u2019s and particularly Russia’s last century. In one sense this was all familiar ground to any fan of sf cinema. The screens were full of spaceships and heroes and aliens and there were lots of beautifully realised special effects to admire. Individually some of the films were even familiar either as arthouse classics like Solaris<\/em> or through cheesy, recut American incarnations like First Spaceship on Venus (The Silent Star<\/em><\/em>). And yet taken together there was something quite distinctive here \u2013 a cinema about a people’s hopes and fears for the future that has developed its own conventions and conducts its own conversations with its past and present.<\/p>\n

It is always potentially misleading to see history as narrative but it is difficult to look at these films and not see an arc that rises to a peak of confidence and courage at the time of Sputnik, Gagarin’s first orbit and Kruschev’s interlude as leader of the USSR that gave birth to a cinema that was bright, outward-looking and hopeful. And then came the long retreat. The grim decline of the Breshnev decades created its own sf aesthetic \u2013 one with a focus that was increasingly internal and that seemed driven to the point of madness as the Soviet experiment collapsed into chaos.\u00a0 And then, in the aftermath \u2013 for it turns out that the end of Russian communism wasn’t the end of history \u2013\u00a0 came attempts to make sense of it all, the suffering and the glory.<\/p>\n

Here, then, were monuments that marked the birth, brief flowering, long decline and legacy of the Soviet experiment.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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Aelita: Queen of Mars<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Aelita: Queen of Mars<\/em> (1924) is a curious film. Not a science fiction movie at all (though it features some strikingly designed sequences set on Mars) but rather a rejection of whimsical speculation as a betrayal of the hard work necessary to build a nation in the aftermath of revolution. Daydreaming of other worlds is a threat as great as any posed by the counter-revolutionaries waiting for the opportunity to betray the state or to lead decent folk astray. Aelita<\/em> begins with the receipt of a message that perplexes scientists of every nation except the dedicated Russian engineer Los and his colleague Spirindinov who, eventually, recognise it as a message from Mars. Los dreams of visiting that distant world and, on Mars, Aelita, daughter of the tyrant Tuskub, watches Los with growing desire. There follows a great deal of back-and-forth involving Los\u2019s wife Natasha and the no-good White, Ehrlich \u2013 a thief and scoundrel \u2013 and the inept investigations of Kravtsov, a comedy detective. This all, eventually, leads to Los believing that he has killed his wife, disguising himself as the recently fled Spirindinov, building a rocket and flying to Mars. Once there he leads a workers\u2019 revolution but it is (predictably) betrayed by the aristocratic Aelita, who encourages the revolt but then, having disposed of her father, installs herself as the supreme ruler of Mars. But it all works out, Los was merely daydreaming about his Martian exploits, his wife survived his murder attempt and forgives him and he vows to give up his silly space fixation and concentrate on building a better Soviet in the here and now.<\/p>\n

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Cosmic Voyage<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

After Aelita<\/em> there were no Soviet sf films for more than a decade. Then came another oddity, Cosmic Voyage<\/em> (1935). Based on a novel by one of the father\u2019s of the Russian space programme \u2013 Konstantin Tsoilkovsky (who was also a consultant on the film) \u2013 it anticipates later American efforts (such as Destination Moon<\/em>, George Pal\u2019s collaboration with Robert A Heinlein) by applying a relatively high degree of scientific rigour to a story about a journey to the moon. What really marks Cosmic Voyage<\/em> out as an unusual and, perhaps, a brave film is the central character. While most Soviet sf highlights the collective nature of science and the space effort, Professor Pavel Ivanovich Sedikh is as wily and as determinedly anti-establishment figure as any character in contemporary American sf. The conflict in this movie comes not from the flight to the moon \u2013 though there are the obligatory in-flight crises and a cat to be rescued \u2013 but from Sedikh\u2019s battle with the bureaucrats seeking to stop his flight. Given that the film was made in a nation of the verge of the Great Purge (1937-8) in which hundreds of thousands of \u201cenemies of the state\u201d were eliminated, there is something a little subversive about Cosmic Voyage<\/em>, even if the spaceship is called Joseph Stalin<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The later years of Stalin\u2019s rule were not fertile ground for science fiction. There was a Russian adaptation of Jules Verne\u2019s Mysterious Island <\/em>in 1941 but beyond that, there was almost nothing. There were perhaps just three major pieces of Soviet science fiction cinema made between the revolution and the death of Stalin in 1953. One can guess why the Stalinist regime didn\u2019t like the idea of people imagining that a better world might be possible \u2013 after all, actually existing communism was building the perfect society on Russian soil. To imply that the future might be different \u2013 or better \u2013 implied that the existing regime was somehow flawed. And, in any case, who would be crazy enough to speculate about the future in a country where the past kept changing.<\/p>\n

It took the coincidence of Kruschev\u2019s less repressive reign (1956-1964) with the launch of Sputnik 1<\/em> and Yuri Gagarin\u2019s great adventure aboard Vostok 1<\/em> to create a sudden, colourful explosion of science fiction in the Soviet Union.<\/p>\n

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Planet of Storms<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Kosmos season included some of the wonderful films of Pavel Klushantev \u2013 his beautifully realised documentary\/speculative meditation Road to the Stars<\/em> (1958), his purely sf feature Planet of Storms<\/em> (1962) and a number of his short films as well as the interesting, but politically one-dimensional and chronologically suspect, Danish documentary about his work: The Star Dreamer<\/em> (2002). Klushantev\u2019s films are marked out by spectacular models and excellent special effects but also a seriousness of intent and their emphasis on scientific rigour. For all the visual flash and wonder, there\u2019s always a thread of philosophical musing not far below the surface. So, in Planet of Storms<\/em>, with its improbable flight to Venus, alien vegetable monsters and a momentary glimpse of mysterious, beautiful, alien women, the action is interspersed with digressions in which the cosmonauts pause to consider the implications of biological theory and the inevitable colonisation of space by races who value peace and rationalism.<\/p>\n

In The Star Dreamer<\/em> Klushantev is portrayed as a victim of the Soviet regime \u2013 their refusal to back an earlier feature film, Moonstone<\/em>, the Soviet culture secretary\u2019s criticisms of Planet of Storms <\/em>(for having the female cosmonaut cry in a moment of crisis) and the eventual removal of his short documentary Moon<\/em> from Soviet theatres after the Apollo landings are all cited as evidence of the difficulties he faced and which eventually led to his sacking by the studio. But the actual history of things appears more complex. Moonstone<\/em> may have been a work of genius (we\u2019ll never know) but Klushantev was hardly the only filmmaker to have a cherished project rejected by a studio, whatever the political system. The makers of The Star Dreamer<\/em> suggest that Moonstone<\/em> was rejected because it featured a plot in which American and Soviet explorers work together after an accident on the Moon \u2013 stating that a film that featured cooperation between the two competing nations was out of the question. But, as we shall see, Russians working as part of a multi-national crews \u2013 often alongside Americans \u2013 was a recurring themes in the Soviet sf of this era. The idea that Moonstone<\/em> was blocked because of this one point seems unlikely.<\/p>\n

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A spaceship docks with a space station in Road to the Stars<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The fact that Planet of Storms<\/em> was made after the rejection of Moonstone<\/em> doesn\u2019t suggest that Klushantev had been placed on anyone\u2019s blacklist. It may well be true that Moon<\/em>, made in 1965, wasn\u2019t shown in Soviet cinemas after Armstrong landed at Tranquility Base in 1969 but it was already four years old and, given that it posits Russian victory in the race to the moon, some of its credibility as documentary would have been badly damaged. And much of the scientific speculation in Moon<\/em> (about the surface of the satellite or the means by which the landings would be made) was rendered obsolete by the Apollo mission. Audiences had seen real men bob around on the surface of the Moon, it\u2019s hardly surprising that Klushantev\u2019s speculation about how such events might look would no longer seem relevant. Nor was Moon<\/em> Klushantev\u2019s last film \u2013 another documentary, Mars<\/em>, followed in 1968 (The Star Dreamer<\/em> doesn\u2019t mention this at all) while the letter sacking him from the studio (for the poor quality of his work \u2013 which does seem terribly harsh) is clearly dated 1972. None of this suggests that he was immediately hounded from his position and there\u2019s no indication that Klusantev\u2019s films were in any sense anti-establishment. There\u2019s no denying that the Soviet regime was guilty of many acts of repression, but the case for Klushantev as a victim of unusually harsh treatment seems sparse.<\/p>\n

Perhaps Klushantev would have been more successful had Breshnev\u2019s Russia been as free as Nixon\u2019s America but The Star Dreamer<\/em> is too slapdash and too one-sided make the case convincingly. Perhaps, in America, Klushantev would have been forced to compromise in different ways \u2013 chasing audiences in the schlocky style of contemporaries like Roger Corman or Irwin Allen, for example. For all its failings as a serious documentary, however, The Star Dreamer<\/em> does feature some beautiful clips of Klushantev\u2019s work that will stun those who haven\u2019t seen his films.<\/p>\n

Klushantev, in The Star Dreamer<\/em> is quoted as saying that he wanted \u201cto create a utopia. A dream of the future with a friendly society, a new race of people… People should be able to see that life can be changed radically.\u201d There\u2019s no doubt that such talk would have landed him in serious trouble under Stalin\u2019s reign but, in the brief era of relative freedom allowed by the Kruschev Thaw, Klushantev was far from alone in imagining a better world. For a moment something radical seemed possible and the Soviet Union and its people discovered the joy of science fiction cinema.<\/p>\n

Other films from this era in the BFI Kosmos season included The Call of the Heavens <\/em>(1959) in which rash Americans rushing to be the first on Mars have to be rescued by the steady, courageous Russians who demonstrate the superiority of cooperation and international brotherhood. The Call of the Heavens<\/em> features some stunning special effects sequences, wonderfully designed spaceships and futuristic interiors but it is most remarkable for the way it characterises the relationship between America and Russia. The Americans are driven to take risks by the greed and recklessness of their financial backers but the film stresses the common bond and between the ordinary Soviet and US pilots. The directors can’t resist a scene in which the humiliated Americans must watch their dead spaceship drift away through the windows of their Soviet rescue craft and the Americans learn their lesson – that cooperation is better than competition – but the film doesn’t demonise the Americans, there are no villians or evil plots to create paranoia about a geo-political competitor. Which can hardly be said of most contemporary American SF movies.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Towards Meeting A Dream<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Towards Meeting A Dream<\/em> (1962) the sensible Russians convince the world that the mysterious message from the planet Centuria, coming from an intelligent and advanced species, can only be represent peaceful intentions and enlist a global effort to rescue the Centurian emissaries when they crash land on Mars. The aliens are friendly and America\u2019s militarism and fear of the other are discredited. As with so many of these films, Towards Meeting a Dream<\/em> features beautifully detailed models and cinematography but as a film it is ruined by an abrupt and confusing ending.<\/p>\n

The East German\/Polish production The Silent Star<\/em> (1960) once again sees the short-sighted Americans proved wrong when a mysterious message leads a genuinely multinational crew (including an African and Chinese man and a Japanese woman as well as a token American) to Venus to discover that the warmongering tendencies of the Venusians have destroyed their once mighty civilisation and now threaten Earth. The Silent Star<\/em> is a technical marvel and a luscious film to look at, with deep reds and rich oranges that glow like neon, visually it is the equal of anything produced in Hollywood in this era and it remains an entertaining if slight film.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Funky dance routines in Ikarie XB-1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

There was also Ikarie XB-1<\/em> (1963), a Czech film, and one of my favourites discoveries of the BFI season. It tells the story of a far-future expedition to the \u201cWhite Planet\u201d in orbit around Alpha Centauri. Beautifully shot in pin-sharp black and white it is instantly recognisable as a product of the 1960s, with funky costumes and some way-out<\/em> dance routines but it is also a serious film with building tension, neatly defined characters and excellent writing. There\u2019s also the obligatory dig at American militarism when the crew of the Ikarie<\/em> discover a wrecked 20th<\/sup> Century spacecraft filled with dead capitalists \u2013 killed by their own greed \u2013 and sitting on a stock poorly stored and disturbingly easy-to-detonate nuclear weapons.<\/p>\n

The propaganda in these films is often crude to the point of silliness \u2013 eliciting giggles from the audiences at the BFI screenings \u2013 but it is worth remembering the times in which they were made and that heavy-handed propaganda was not the province of Soviet cinema alone. Voyage to the End of the Universe<\/em>, as Ikarie XB-1<\/em> was called on its release in America, recuts the original (removing much of the role for women) and replaces the final shot of an alien world with an image of the Statue of Liberty \u2013 welcoming the now alien space travellers to the \u201cland of the free\u201d. The Call of the Heavens<\/em> was butchered by Roger Corman to remove any trace of the film\u2019s internationalism or any criticism of America and released (with added vaginal monster) as Battle Beyond the Sun<\/em> and much the same thing happened to The Silent Star<\/em> (released in the West as First Spaceship on Venus<\/em>) and Planet of Storms<\/em> (under the name Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet<\/em>) is very nearly unrecognisable in its American incarnation with scantily clad Venusian ladies lounging on a beach and dinosaurs cut in from an entirely different film. Most crucially, though, all remnants of the serious intent of Klushantev\u2019s film are removed.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A trip to a 20th Century spaceship ends badly in Ikarie XB-1<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Soviet films of this era are notably different from their American contemporaries in a number of ways. Perhaps most obviously there tend to be more women on the screen who are expected to be more than just the love interest for the dashing hero (although they\u2019re often that too) but the thematic differences are also striking. The default setting of American B movies of this era tends to be a barely suppressed terror of the enemy within and horror at the loss of individuality \u2013 obvious responses to the threat of communism. The Russian movies don\u2019t display the same deep-seated psychological dysfunction. There aren\u2019t monsters coming to shatter Soviet communities. American militarism and paranoia are frequently mocked \u2013 the Americans never get to win an argument \u2013 but they are never simply demonised either. Instead they tend to be treated with a pity that borders on condescension. The dropping of the atomic bombs in World War II is a recurring example of the greatest act of human cruelty and stupidity but, on the whole, the individual Americans who appear are shown to be victims of a system that is driven by greed and fear. \u00a0The Soviet\u2019s can afford to be magnanimous. They know America has already been left behind by superior Soviet know-how and scientific achievement and, in any case, the inevitable tide of history means that American capitalism is doomed to historical irrelevance. Again and again the rash, wrong-headed Americans have to be rescued from their own stupidity by the stoic, infinitely patient and good-hearted pioneers of the Soviet space programme or prevented from causing disaster through their propensity for violence by peace-loving and decent communists.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hardly surprising that 1960s America wasn\u2019t ready to swallow these films in the raw.<\/p>\n

And yet, despite the crudeness of the Cold War polarisation that seeps through in regular doses, there is still something refreshing in a collection of films in which the heroes don\u2019t instantly respond to encounters with the strange or the alien by resorting to violence or shuddering in repulsion and for whom contact with the unknown is an opportunity for discovery not the precursor to disaster. What remains memorable about this clutch of films is their openness and optimism. Their faith in both humanity and in the possibility of a better world may seem na\u00efve now but only the most curmudgeonly of viewers would deny that the sentiments seem heartfelt and that the message is affecting. The peaceful, forward-looking, successful Soviets that these films predict only ever existed in the imagination of filmmakers, propagandists and a handful of optimistic intellectuals but the possibility of them remains seductively appealing. The moment when it seemed that the Soviet experiment really was outpacing the capitalist bloc and that the future belonged to the kindly, scientifically advanced and honest peoples of the Soviet Union was, it turned out, a collective hallucination, but that doesn\u2019t mean that these glimpses of a world that might have been aren\u2019t still appealing. As the product of an unfulfilled moment these films remain a heady, hopeful, draught.<\/p>\n

However, as is often the case with powerfully mind-altering substances, the effects of binging on hope and optimism were short-lived and the hangover that followed wrought a terrible vengeance.<\/p>\n

The Breshnev era did produce two familiar but still striking pieces of science-fictional cinematic genius \u2013 Tarkovsky\u2019s Solaris<\/em> (1970) and Stalker<\/em> (1980). And, as part of the Kosmos, season the BFI presented two other films from this period of tightening control and spiralling decline that echo very precisely the themes of Tarkovsky\u2019s masterpieces \u2013 Mark Piestrak\u2019s Pilot Pirx\u2019s Inquest <\/em>(1979) and Luposhanksy\u2019s A Visitor to the Museum<\/em> (1989).<\/p>\n

There could hardly be a more brutal contrast between this crop of Soviet sf and those that had gone before.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Pilot Pirx’s Inquest<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Solaris<\/em> and Pilot Pirx\u2019s Inquest<\/em>, both adapted from the work of Stanislaw Lem, ask the same question: \u201cWhat does it means to be human?\u201d And both come to similar conclusions. Piestrak\u2019s film may have the aesthetic appeal of an episode of The New Avengers<\/em> or The Professionals<\/em> but in plot and theme it can be seen as an effective prequel to Blade Runner.<\/em> Pirx, the space hero with a reputation for honesty, is hired to take a ship on a routine mission to the rings of Saturn to report on the effectiveness of the crew \u2013 some of whom are experimental androids that the United Nations are seeking to evaluate as replacements for human crews. Pirx\u2019s problem becomes both practical and philosophical. Someone is trying to stop him making his report. He survives a preposterously over-complicated assassination attempt (featuring a big remote control truck, a robot driver and a mountain road) but once the mission starts it quickly becomes apparent that there is a saboteur aboard his ship, The Goliath,<\/em> and they are willing do anything to prevent Pirx\u2019s return to Earth. At the same time, however, Pirx becomes obsessed with finding a way to discover who aboard his crew is a real<\/em> human and who is a simulacrum<\/em>. Tarkovsky\u2019s Solaris <\/em>approaches the same issue with greater flair and more emotional depth, but both stories come to the same conclusions: humanity is defined by our failures. Aboard The Goliath<\/em> the deranged android is revealed and destroys itself when Pirx freezes in the face of overwhelming danger. The logical machine cannot grasp that Pirx\u2019s inability to act might be the result of simple human failure. In Solaris<\/em> the characters on the battered space station above the ineffably strange alien world are a broken lot, all of them are trapped and crushed by their pasts. They are all both horrified and fascinated by the things they\u2019ve done \u2013 ashamed but unable to abandon what they have created. Even Hari, a creation of the vast cool mind that inhabits \u2013 or perhaps is \u2013 the churning ocean below, is unable to escape the burden of her human form and is dragged back into the desperate, recurring patterns of her template\u2019s past failures. It is Hari\u2019s tragedy that as she reclaims the memories that define her human existence she is also bound to inherit the damage that will lead to her second annihilation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Visitor To A Museum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

By the time of Stalker<\/em> and A Visitor to the Museum<\/em> the hopes of the Kruschev-era space operas have entirely evaporated. These are post-apocalyptic films in which men wander hopelessly through ravaged landscapes. The universe has ceased to be something that we reach towards in the hope of conquering. Indeed, even the prospect of understanding the world has passed beyond reach. Instead, nature has become our interrogator and we are the object of its forensic and unwavering gaze. Once the heroes of the Soviet Union looked into the mysterious universe for answers, now the universe looks into our souls and reveals our rotten cores. Events are inexplicable. Faith is beyond reach. The stalker can never achieve his desires, the tourist never reaches the museum, but both wander through blasted landscapes picking over the detritus of a shattered civilisation. Religious imagery features prominently in both films, as do passages from the bible. But there is no redemption or comfort to be found in this universe and, if there is a god in these films, it is an Old Testament bringer of trials, tribulation and terror.<\/p>\n

Luposhansky \u2013 an acolyte of Tarkovsky and a director who has made a career of taking the great man\u2019s themes and pushing them to the edge of madness \u2013 drives home (perhaps overdoes) the religious imagery in A Visitor to the Museum<\/em> \u2013 including bizarre, terrifying, rituals and an excursion via Golgotha \u2013 but as the hordes of mutants bash their skulls against the wall and call out \u201cLet us out of here! Let us out of here!\u201d it\u2019s not hard to see a reflection of the plight of the Soviet people as madness engulfs the final days of the USSR.<\/p>\n

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Kin-Dza-Dza<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the midst of this chaos \u2013 as old orders teeter on the edge of collapse and past hopes seem to mock the present \u2013 it is perhaps not surprising that Soviet sf should respond with a farce. Kin-Dza-Dza<\/em> (1986) is a bewildering film in which two hapless Muscovites find themselves transported to a distant universe and the desert world of Pluke where they encounter a strange civilisation. They find themelves amongst a technologically advanced but socially repressed people who are ruled by lazy aristocrats and bound by ludicrously complex rules which divide the world into two castes \u2013 the privileged and their slaves (whose position are interchangeable depending on circumstances). Communication is made almost impossible because most conversations consist almost entirely of repetition of the word \u201cKoo!\u201d and matches are worth more than gold. Kin-Dza-Dza<\/em> is both an absurd comedy and a deeply bitter film that makes few concessions to foreign audiences (I felt many of the references rushing straight over my head). Even so, its anger and frustration at the unfairness and stupidity of the world is impossible to miss. Perhaps the only tenable response to a world that is falling apart is to surrender to the insanity and to laugh at the absurdity.<\/p>\n

There is a certain magnificence in these late Soviet sf films, but it is the magnificence of desolation. There is euphoria too, but it is the euphoria that comes when the final shred of hope is abandoned and we surrender to fate. These are films drenched in paranoia, torment, isolation and loss.<\/p>\n

And, powerful though these films are in their own right, in the context of the Kruschev-era\u2019s bursting forth of hope and imagination, it is what is missing from the films of the 1970s and 1980s that is most interesting and, in a way, most distressing. The spaceships disappear (along with the roles for women) and with them goes any faith in common humanity and any sense of collective endeavour or common purpose in which human ingenuity might triumph over adversity. In place of optimism and ambition come scatterings of lonely, confused and often unstable men, overwhelmed by their fate, at the mercy of nature and driven by forces they cannot control. \u00a0The universe has become unknowable. Science and technology cease to be a path to truth or to a better world and become a trap, a threat to our survival.<\/p>\n

These films retreat from any hope of understanding. We will never understand and therefore can never hope to communicate with or control the universe and the alien creatures it might contain. But it gets worse. For not only can we never hope to understand what is \u201cout there\u201d beyond the world we take for granted \u2013 we cannot even hope to understand our fellow humans or our own minds.<\/p>\n

There is nothing to be done.<\/p>\n

And then the Soviet Union was gone and there was only Russia. But cinema remained and cinema\u2019s fascination with space continued, though now transformed. Once space adventures had fed Soviet dreams of glorious futures but now they were the subject of recollections of a moment that had been lost. The new mood is not nostalgic precisely, because awareness of the price paid for those moments of hope remains raw, but it is tinged with a sense of something that has been lost. The BFI\u2019s Kosmos season offered three examples of modern Russian cinema that looked back upon the \u201cglory days\u201d of the space era.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
First On The Moon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Perhaps the most straightforward is First on the Moon<\/em> (2005), a fake documentary that purports to uncover a Stalin-era mission to the moon and the fate of those who contributed to it. The film highlights the casual cruelty of the Soviet regime, its paranoid secrecy and the pervasive surveillance of the population but as a film it is slight \u2013 failing to allow us to get close to any of the central characters or offering a human face to their suffering. It is hobbled by its pseudo-documentary form though there are chilling moments \u2013 such as the gassing of the neophyte cosmonauts \u2013 and there are places where it uses the surveillance footage to good effect<\/p>\n

In Dreaming of Space<\/em> (2005) and Paper Soldier<\/em> (2008) the moments in which the Soviet space programme first leapt into the skies form the background to more personal stories that cast light on the price paid by ordinary Russians while their leaders were reaching for the stars.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Dreaming of Space<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Dreaming of Space<\/em> the dream is always about escape \u2013 whether it is into orbit or a doomed attempt to seek asylum in the West or finding a new love and a new life in Moscow. The events of Dreaming of Space<\/em> are bookended by the launch of Sputnik and the return of Gagarin, in triumph, to Moscow. Horsey, an easy-going, likeable young cook, meets German, a mysterious figure who variously claims to be a spy and a cosmonaut in secret training. Set in an icy north Russian port (Murmansk?) director Uchitel\u2019s effective use of a muted white and blue palette chills the blood throughout and against a background laced with reminders of Soviet-era repression \u2013 there\u2019s an illicit transistor radio bringing Western music, the casually violent local militia stamping on \u201cmisbehaviour\u201d and German\u2019s doomed attempt at seeking asylum \u2013 Horsey loses and finds love and discovers a talent that offers him a route out of his current life. His journey involves a brush with a young pilot called Yuri and the appropriation of a famous piece of newsreel footage. Dreaming of Space<\/em> is hard-headed about the failures of the Soviet era but there\u2019s also an element of wistful desire for a moment that mixes up the vigour of youth with the discovery of space. It\u2019s not an entirely satisfying film \u2013 the plot isn\u2019t always coherent and the characters actions don\u2019t always seem to have convincing motivations \u2013 but it does seem to neatly encompass the mixed feelings some Russians have about their recent history, a blend of pride and revulsion.<\/p>\n

In Paper Soldier<\/em> Daniel is a young medical officer working to prepare the first group of cosmonauts for their mission. The world-shaking events of Russia\u2019s first manned spaceflights provide a backdrop for the young doctor\u2019s personal dramas and for his growing unease at the ethics of the work he is doing. As the weeks count down to the first launch, Baikonur is revealed as a vast, bleak, mud-stuck wasteland where cattle and camels roam and where the feats of Yuri Gagarin and Gherman Titov remain firmly in the distant background. It could hardly be less like the magnificent, modernist star cities of the Kruschev-era imaginations.<\/p>\n

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Paper Soldier<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Amidst all this, Daniel prevaricates hopelessly. He is married to Nina, also a doctor and every bit his equal, who lives in Moscow but he cannot resist Baikonur\u2019s Vera who is, frankly, a bit of a doormat. But he is also unable to decide about anything else \u2013 the worth of his own work, the path he should take in the future, what the space race means for Russia and the world. There is a jagged criticism here of the Thaw Era intellectuals who enjoyed the freedoms of their time but did nothing to secure them for the long term and capitulated when Breshnev reasserted the state\u2019s control.<\/p>\n

At the heart of Paper Soldier<\/em>, therefore, is a sense of impending doom. Even as Daniel dreams of space liners travelling to Jupiter the shattering desolation of the landscape and the coughing, spluttering incipient illness of all the characters tells the viewer that this is not a world where great dreams are fulfilled. And while the little circle of Daniel\u2019s friends enjoy their sense of intellectual liberation they are plagued by doubts about their contribution to the world and the foundations upon which their freedom has been built. They are right to be concerned.\u00a0 Daniel has not long to live. Gagarin, will be dead by the time of the film\u2019s coda. Their brief moment of (relative) freedom, achievement and aspiration will come to nothing. 1968 will sweep all this away and the shattered survivors, gathering again in 1971, don\u2019t look back on the period as a missed opportunity so much as a moment of delusion \u2013 a time when they fooled themselves into believing that the impossible might have been made real. Paper Soldier<\/em> is a stark film that doesn\u2019t just regret the momentary hopes of the 1960s but that chastises those who were suckered into believing that the inevitable fate of the Soviet experiment could ever have been anything other than hardship, oppression and failure.<\/p>\n

So, Kosmos presented almost a century of \u201cSoviet\u201d history through the lens of filmmakers who were, at least some of the time, looking up to the stars or out through the lens of the future. And all of it \u2013 at least through the filter of the choices made by those putting together the BFI\u2019s season \u2013 seems to pivot around that one short decade when politics and science came together to create a flash of Technicolor (or whatever the Soviet equivalent was called) hope.<\/p>\n

It all ended in tears, of course, but then almost everything does and the price that had to be paid, especially by the Russian people, was too high to ever justify.<\/p>\n

And yet the dreams remain alluring.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
A cosmonaut and his spacesuited dog watch the sunset over Klushantev’s Mars<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Who wouldn\u2019t want to fly in one of Tsoilkovsky\u2019s enormous, beautiful spaceships and visit the space stations built in Klusantev\u2019s imagination? Who wouldn\u2019t want to live in a better world that valued universal brotherhood, peace and cooperation? \u00a0Who wouldn\u2019t want to live in a world where there was someone patient and benevolent to rescue us from the mistakes made by Americans?<\/p>\n

Okay, so it was all a dream. Okay, so, like Los in Aelita<\/em>, perhaps dreaming has distracted us from the work that needs to be done here and now. But if we\u2019re not dreaming, and if we\u2019re not dreaming in Technicolor, then what\u2019s the point of anything? If I have to define my humanity by my flaws, then I want those flaws to be too much ambition and too much hope, not fear and dread.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It is a clich\u00e9 to argue that science fiction is never about the future but always about the time in which it is made. Yet, as with many a clich\u00e9, there is often a nugget of truth beneath the grimy accumulation of lazy associations. So it was hard to watch the range of films that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1473,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22,12,11],"tags":[51,47,46],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/09\/BFI-Kosmos.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p27AP7-np","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1451"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3092,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1451\/revisions\/3092"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1451"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1451"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1451"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}