movies

It’s unusual for a movie to have inspired creations as diverse as Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Roland Emmerich's Independence Day, but a movie celebrating its 100th birthday today can claim just such an accomplishment. Loosely based on a 1923 novel by Alexei Tolstoy, Yakov Protazanov's 1924 silent film Aelita: Queen of Mars is, in fact, secretly one of the most influential sci-fi movies of all time.

Set in 1921, the film follows a group of people in post-civil war Soviet Russia as they reckon with their place in a rebuilding society. The movie begins with people worldwide attempting to understand a mysterious radio message, and the scene immediately makes Queen of Mars’ influence obvious. Seventy years later, its visuals were echoed by Emmerich as countries around the globe received transmissions from Independence Day’s invaders, then later used Morse code to coordinate a united counter-offensive.

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It’s in these Martian sequences that Aelita’s impact on sci-fi film can really be observed. The Mars of Los' dreams is filled with constructivist sets and extravagant costumes, the latter designed by Cubo-Futurist artist Aleksandra Ekster, a Ukrainian colleague of Pablo Picasso. The costume’s oblique shapes, born of industrial materials like aluminum, acrylics, and steel, provided modern aesthetics that later appeared in the sets and costumes of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Woman in the Moon. Both were produced at Germany’s UFA Studios, where Protazanov had worked in the early 1920s before returning to Russia after the revolution.

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Protazanov's unique style continued to influence films well into the 1980s, from a space opera revival of Flash Gordon to the low-budget queer sci-fi Liquid Sky, which New York Times writer J. Hoberman suggested had “a particularly Soviet quality,” noting that its “costumes, makeup, hairstyles, production design, and even the herky-jerky dances are also highly suggestive of Russia’s 1920s Constructivist avant-garde." He called it a "true ancestor" to Aelita.