Fantasy presented fewer conundrums, and so the Soviet era is famous for its big-budget fairy tales, like Alexander Rou’s EVENINGS ON A FARM NEAR DIKANKA (1961; December 5, 7 pm), a charming devil-and-witch Ukrainian-folktale adaptation of Gogol’s “Christmas Eve,” and famed animator Alexander Ptushko’s live-action epic RUSLAN AND LUDMILA (1972; December 5, 8:30 pm), turgidly using Pushkin’s poem as dialogue but tricked out with eye-popping storybook F/X. The pioneering effort here hails from the tsarist era, when Russian film was barely out of diapers but the stop-motion animation of Ladislaw Starewicz nevertheless laid down the tracks for the next 90-odd years of idiosyncratic frame-by-frame creation, leading to Jan Svankmajer, Henry Selick, and the Quays. One of his first films, The Cameraman’s Revenge (1912), is a farce conducted entirely with the rewired bodies of insects; that his creatures were only barely anthropomorphized — insofar as they might wear hats and carry violins — is Starewicz’s lingering legacy. They’re still dead beetles (black jaws permanently opened to the sky), dead grasshoppers (folded wings passing as dinner jackets), and dead frogs (standing on their hind legs, their faces pointing forever upward). No matter how lighthearted the tale, his films play like ghoulish pantomimes for entomophobes.
After the Revolution, the national cinema became a vehicle for politburo-approved agitprop, and a distinctive flavor took hold: ambitious-but-chintzy visual trickery mated with folkloric-yet-ideological narratives. Vladimir Gardin’s A SPECTRE HAUNTS EUROPE (1922; December 3, 7 pm) is a Crimean adaptation of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” with a title borrowed from Marx, but in the Stalinist version the encroaching plague that compels the foolish sovereign into isolation isn’t viral but socialist, and his demise is merely cosmic justice. One piece of science fiction — Yakov Protazanov’s Suprematist-design Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924), mysteriously absent from the retro — was so popular it prompted an immediate cartoon satire, Interplanetary Revolution (1924), which tempered the previous film’s Martian-uprising story with yucks. The culture ministers were picky enough about space operas to let a dozen years pass before allowing another, Vasili Zhuravlev’s COSMIC VOYAGE (1936; December 3, 9:15 pm); for their troubles they got a moon-trip adventure (designed by famed cosmonautician Konstantin Tsiolkovsky) motivated by anti-establishment individualism.
During the Khrushchev thaw, the films grew somehow less transgressive. The infamous Venus-voyage PLANET OF STORMS (1961; December 4, 7 pm) is an ornately geographic film that, once bought by Corman, was re-edited, augmented, and released twice, under different titles, by film brats Curtis Harrington and Peter Bogdanovich. The rarer freak is THE AMPHIBIAN MAN (1961; December 4, 9 pm), a dizzy, tropical morph from a Creature from the BlackLagoon template to a forecast of Edward Scissorhands, all shot in rich moldy greens (seemingly in Cuba, but probably in a well-faked Crimea), and fueled by mad-scientist ideas of a class-free “underwater republic.” A big hit at home, it’s endured as a beloved family classic into the video age.
