From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema

8/10/07 to 8/31/07

This compendium of rare works showcases the startling imagination and agitprop fascination of Russian science fiction and fantasy cinema. "An uncommonly bold blend of curatorial adventurousness and cultural excavation . . . sure to expand even the most hard-core avant-geek's horizons."-Time Out New York. "This is why we have retro houses-to unleash . . . the secret cinemas of the global past."-Village Voice

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Ruslan and Ludmila, August 19|

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Past Films

Planet of Storms
Friday, August 10 7:00 pm
Pavel Klushantsev's tale of a voyage to Venus is rich in poetic effects. With Ladislaw Starewicz animation The Cameraman's Revenge. Greg Goodman on Piano.
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The Amphibian Man
Friday, August 10 9:00pm
"A dizzy morph from a Creature from the Black Lagoon template to a forecast of Edward Scissorhands, all shot in rich tropical greens . . . and fueled by mad-scientist ideas of a class-free 'underwater republic.'"-Village Voice
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Aelita, Queen of Mars
Sunday, August 12 4:45 pm
Judith Rosenberg on Piano. Class warfare extends to outer space in this silent saga, famed for its outlandish Constructivist production design.
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Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka
Sunday, August 12 7:00pm
A glorious excursion into Technicolor fantasy, based on a story by Gogol. With Vertov short Soviet Toys. Musical Accompaniment by Damon Smith, Double Bass.
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Stalker
Tuesday, August 14 7pm
In Andrei Tarkovsky's last Soviet film, a writer, a scientist, and their "stalker" guide venture into a mysterious wasteland known as the Zone. "A dense, complex, often contradictory, and endlessly pliable allegory about human consciousness, the necessity for faith in an increasingly secular, rational world, and the ugly, unpleasant dreams and desires that reside in the hearts of men."-Slant
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Ruslan and Ludmila
Sunday, August 19 6:00pm
Aleksandr Ptushko's epic fantasy transforms a Pushkin poem into a mad, enchanted combination of The Wizard of Oz, Die Nibelungen, and The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T.
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First on the Moon
Friday, August 24 7:00pm
"Alexei Fedorchenko combines artfully distressed 'documentary' footage and actual Stalin-era propaganda to tell the tale of a lost 1938 space flight. . . . Eccentric and wistful."-Village Voice. With short Interplanetary Revolution. Soundscape by Robbie Crabtree.
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To the Stars by Hard Ways
Friday, August 24 8:45 pm
Cosmonauts discover a female humanoid on an abandoned spacecraft, the sole survivor of a civilization devastated by ecological disaster (and the evils of capitalism), in Richard Viktorov's visually ravishing film.
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Solaris
Sunday, August 26 6:00pm
In Andrei Tarkovsky's influential 1972 masterwork, based on a famous novel by Stanislaw Lem, "the alien world is one immense ocean, the ocean is a brain, and the brain may be our own."-Village Voice
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The Heavens Call
Friday, August 31 7:00pm
This tale of two rival space probes that crash-land on an asteroid features spectacular spacescapes, as well as a prescient visualization of Earth's orbit cluttered by man-made satellites.
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Zero City
Friday, August 31 8:45pm
Karen Shakhnazarov's Perestroika-era fantasy is a "deliciously cheerful satire about the legacy of Stalin, personal identity, and the political importance of rock-and-roll."-N.Y. Times
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From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema

8/10/07 to 8/31/07

Wind demons and crystal palaces . . . Shimmering aquatic gill-men and limitless vistas of outer space . . . For over eight decades Russian cinema has had an inspired filmmaking tradition that encompasses science fiction, folkloric fantasy, and absurdist humor, producing wildly entertaining movies that are only now being seen by American audiences.

Beginning with the pioneering animation of Ladislaw Starewicz, through the silent classic Aelita: Queen of Mars, and on to the astonishing visions of Aleksandr Ptushko and Pavel Klushantsev, Russian genre cinema was amazingly colorful, technologically advanced, and thematically ambitious. Mega-master Andrei Tarkovsky took this trend further, fashioning the highly philosophical and feverishly cinematic sci-fi epics Solaris and Stalker. Still other films, such as Karen Shakhnazarov's Zero City and Alexei Fedorchenko's First on the Moon, are sly...

Years before 2001: A Space Odyssey, Soviet visual-effects artists were creating breathtaking visions of man's voyage to outer space. In retrospect, an added fascination of these films is the Soviet party line suffusing fictive space exploration with a real-world mission-to bring the revolution, at least figuratively, to the solar system and beyond.

When many of these astonishing works did end up on Western screens, they were mauled almost beyond recognition. At the height of the Cold War, enterprising U.S. producers like Roger Corman purchased Soviet sci-fi films at bargain prices and gave them to up-and-coming directors, including Francis Ford Coppola and Peter Bogdanovich, to dumb down for drive-ins. From the Tsars to the Stars features new English-subtitled prints of these legendary Russian productions, finally in their original form.

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Except where noted, program notes are adapted from notes by Robert Skotak, Kent Jones, and Dennis Bartok.

This series was curated by Alla Verlotsky, Robert Skotak, and Dennis Bartok. From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema is presented by Seagull Films, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, and the American Cinematheque in collaboration with Concern Mosfilm, Russian State Archive Gosfilmofond, and M-Film Studio. Presentation of the series at PFA is coordinated by Steve Seid, and is supported by the Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.