"We are all Martians"

August 13, 2021 3:29 PM

Natalija Majsova (06/09/2020, Strelka Mag; also in a video lecture for the Canadian Centre for Architecture), "Soviet Sci-Fi Film and Different Modalities of Future Ecosystems": "Irina Povolotskaia's 1967 debut The Mysterious Wall [75 mins.] pioneered in offering an alternative approach. This production, stylistically influenced by the French New Wave, ... used the overarching theme of encountering outer space to interrogate the human capacity to ever really engage with otherness, such as aliens. In this case, the aliens take on the form of a mysterious wall that appears at regular intervals in the nowhere of the taiga." Previously mentioned in #WomenMakeSF.
posted by Wobbuffet (3 comments total)

Thanks for posting this. I've enjoyed a few of the Soviet space films mentioned in the article, but have never even heard of The Mysterious Wall and it looks to be really really interesting.
posted by gamera at 11:03 PM on August 13, 2021 [1 favorite]

Ooh, thanks for the link to the article and the video, I look forward to watching it and the other videos mentioned on the channel. The article was great, Soviet sci-fi films are an interest of mine so I appreciated it for what it was looking at regarding the ideologies being explored within the movies, but it doesn't really capture the pleasure involved in watching them, which wasn't the point of the essay, so no complaints, just something that might be helpful to know for people coming in fresh to the subject. There is ample and wild excess of pleasure to be had in something like Miss Mend, for example, almost regardless of context, while some of the other movies are maybe best appreciated as a contrast to US sci-fi rather than providing the same kinds of pleasure, something Majsova suggests in her comparisons between Corman's revised versions of the Soviet originals, but which could perhaps stand a bit more reassurance the Soviet versions, while less sensationalistic, are still quite pleasing in their own way without needing to focus on ideological context.
posted by gusottertrout at 12:39 AM on August 14, 2021 [1 favorite]

Heh. Loved this little exchange from The Mysterious Wall when the group of main characters are at the checkpoint and forced to recite the safety protocols from Form 17 as proof they've read them, in order to satisfy the man in charge before he would allow them to proceed to the site of the wall:

"You're a bureaucrat?"
"I am. That's my value"

That's such a perfect Soviet film moment that doesn't much exist elsewhere.
posted by gusottertrout at 6:16 PM on August 14, 2021 [1 favorite]