Hijack at the Cosmodrome

Cosmic Voyage: Fantasy novella (1936)

Saturday, July 28, 7 & 8:30 p. m., Northwest Film Forum

Taken from the printed page and splashed across the big screen, science fiction flourished in early cinema. Beginning with Georges Méliès’ Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon 1902) and Gaston Velle’s Voyage autour d'une étoile (A Voyage Around a Star 1906), moviegoers indulged in vicarious space flight for the price of a theater ticket. The People’s Revolution became an inter-planetary struggle in Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), and Metropolis (1927) envisioned a beautiful, terrifying utopian nightmare.

A major link in the development of science fiction, Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella (Cosmic Voyage: Fantasy novella 1936) was produced as a silent film to enable the widest possible distribution within the Soviet Union. Director Vasili Zhuravlov wrote his first scenario involving exploration of the moon in 1924. In 1932 the Komsomol (Communist Union of Youth) requested the creation of youth oriented film as a primary goal of the industry. Zhuravlov re-visited his earlier idea, this time, with generous state support and the technical assistance of imminent scientific scholar Konstantin Tsiolkovsky. The resulting Mosfilm production utilized an extensive team of art directors, writers, technicians and actors to create an impressive blend of incredibly intricate miniature sets, and visually exhilarating, fast paced action in a propagandist but surprisingly unexpected story.

Much of the scientific authenticity and accuracy of technological predictions were due to seventy-eight-year-old Tsiolkovsky’s insistence on several points of theoretical realism used in the film. The Aleksandr Filimonov screenplay was based on Tsiolkovsky’s novel Outside the Earth. Sadly, he died four months before the film’s release.

The story begins with a thorough examination of the massive Palace of the Soviets (an actual planned structure that was never built) and the Institute of Space Flight, surrounded by Moscow, circa 1946. Professor Pavel Ivanovich Sedikh (Sergei Komarov), who bears a strong resemblance to Tsiolkovsky, arrives and is greeted by Professor Karin (Vasili Kovrigin), the stuffy bureaucrat and administrator of the Institute. Sedikh is instructed not to interfere with the impending launch.

The old man meets an admiring boy, Andryusha Orlov (Vassili Gaponenki) who conspires to help Sedikh pilot the flight with beautiful young Professor Marina (Ksenia Moskalenko, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Bridgette Helm), in place of the assigned cosmonauts. Just as the plan has succeeded the boy jumps through the closing door, becoming a last second stow-away. This symbolic casting would seem to represent the old guard, the image of Soviet vitality, and the future. So much for the modern woman of the proletariat, when Marina is seen on her hands and knees, scrubbing the floor of the spacecraft!
Generous offerings of floral bouquets for the slightest cause and the nervous obsession over a pair of winter boots by the old professor’s wife are cultural conventions a non-Russian audience might easily overlook.

Cosmic Voyage enjoyed great popularity among all ages in January 1936. The British production of H. G. Wells’ Things to Come, released one month later, used remarkably similar special effects, but as with Aelita, it pales in comparison to Zhuravlov’s film. When party officials interpreted animated scenes of the cosmonauts hopping from place to place on the lunar surface as frivolous and contrary to the spirit of "socialist realism," the film was abruptly pulled from circulation, the responsible animator’s name was stricken from the credits, and Cosmic Voyage was virtually forgotten until a revival screening in 1984.

Special thanks to Valeri & Maryna Ajaja for tea, translation and cultural insight.