- Screen shot from Tarkovsky’s ‘Stalker’
In 1920, during Russia’s civil war, Vladimir Lenin brought a high-ranking audience to the Kremlin, intent on demonstrating how electrification would transform their nascent Soviet state. The Bolshevik leader was drawn to technology in general, but particularly obsessed with this energy source, and the invitees arrived to find an enormous map glowing with lightbulbs. It was an incandescent promise of modernity to the future USSR’s semi-feudal rural areas. When Lenin made his demonstration, however, the display could only be powered by cutting off all the other wattage in Moscow.
Decades before any cosmonauts reached space, people below them longed for new technologies and science fictions, a utopian tendency often undercut by material desperation and totalitarian bureaucracy. The British author Owen Hatherley once argued that “a history of the Soviet avant–garde could be written through its aspirations to the interstellar,” from Constructivist architecture to a 1916 manifesto called “Trumpet of the Martians.” The masses shared those urges: as Richard Stites documents in Revolutionary Dreams, literally hundreds of Marxist SF novels emerged from Eastern Europe during the early 20th century (there were red detective thrillers, too), while an extraterrestrial allegory called Aelita, Queen of Mars became the first Bolshevik blockbuster. When the experimental chaos of the Soviet Union’s first decade congealed into tyranny, marginalizing iconoclasts like Dziga Vertov,Alexandra Kollontai and Vladimir Mayakovsky, genre pulp became a way to covertly dissent from the official line.
Considering that history, the galactic breadth and complicated politics of TIFF Cinematheque’s latest series are unsurprising. Attack the Bloc: Cold War Science Fiction from Behind the Iron Curtain, which began at the Lightbox last week and continues sporadically until April 6, features comics-turned-humans, high-tech Estonian noir, evil blood-sluicing cars and something called Adolescents in the Universe, along with a few Cinema Studies mainstays. The two most famous films in the program were both made by the late Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky; Solaris (1972) and Stalker (1979) present disquieting futuristic enigmas in his slow, reflective style, achieving a kind of protracted hypnosis.
Attack the Bloc‘s remaining entries are far more obscure over here, populist-minded as their directors may have been. If a selected film did receive a North American release, it was probably in mutilated and mocking form: 1982’s To the Stars by Hard Ways, the adventures of a high-cheekboned cyborg vying to liberate her planet from a diminutive capitalist dictator, got chopped up and dubbed over into Humanoid Woman. But why ruin a perfectly strange thing? Forget the heroic banality of socialist realism — with that platinum-blonde buzz cut, robotic Niya could have called the ‘70s East Village her homeworld.
It’s hardly the only ideological ambiguity in the program, whether inspired by active subversion or that other transcendent artistic impulse, titillation. Though East Germany’s In the Dust of the Stars was already screened, devastating every filmgoer who wants to see just about anything with “decadent space tyrant” in its synopsis, the trailer alone implies that its condemnation of sexy capitalist extravagance may not be entirely genuine. Even genre boundaries become fluid: the cheerfully titled Who Wants to Kill Jessie? would escape an exacting definition of “hard SF,” but Attack the Bloc gives this postmodern, purposefully cartoonish film a more suggestive context, aligning it with subtler departures from orthodoxy. The flashes of impurity amidst propaganda recall that first revolutionary anticipation in the new Soviet Union, melancholic components of a future that never happened.
Herz’s Ferat Vampire (Jan. 27@9:30pm)
Kromanov’s Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (Mar 23@9:00pm)
Piestrak’s Test Pilot Pirxa (Jan. 24 @9:15pm)
Selivanov’s The Great Space Voyage (Jan. 31@8:15pm)
Tarkovsky’s Solaris (Jan. 19 @9:30pm, Jan. 29 @2:30pm, Feb. 2 @8:45pm)
Tarkovsky’s Stalker (Jan. 29 @8:30pm, Feb 11@3:00pm)
And many more here.
Chris Randle is a reformed geek and the culture editor at Toronto Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @randlechris.
