A 20-odd minute “review” of 1924 Soviet blockbuster ‘Aelita: Queen of Mars’, with the most musically vibrant part cut out + put here as a sample.

Yup, that’s ‘Laviin’ by Sven Grünberg, not as loud as I’d like it to be [probably].

Some of my voiceover recordings are still a bit off, or suicidally-toned at worst; I figure I’ll get it right eventually. As a master of accents, I’ve done a Soviet era one for some sections of this vid. It’s very good. Might even surpass Viggo’s in ‘Eastern Promises.’

Why Aelita?

Cos it’s hard to pin down, a kind of semi-modernist [SPOILERS: Los, the protagonist, is dreaming up pretty much everything, apart from when he tries to murder his wife], sci-fi, that may just be the writer of the original novel, An Other Tolstoy, trying to reconcile his Russian nationalism [for the old Tsarist days] with a hatred of the Bolsheviks who he would come to slobber over for the remainder of his life cos they let him live in a nice big house on the outskirts of Moscow.

Videos/Music used:

Aelita, ‘Tenderness’/Maya Kristalinskaya, Solaris, Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel, Deep Red, ‘Laviin’/Sven Grünberg, Lenin’s funeral, A Lenin Speech, L’atelier Faiminette, The House of Usher, Tenebrae, Possession, The Mystery of the Third Planet…I think that’s everything.