Science Fiction in the Russian Avant-garde Cinema of the 1920s and Anarchism

Abstract

By creating an existential recombination of objects and by deforming accepted standards of art convention (Yury Lotman), science fiction is, during an era of an avant-garde is, "shock of bases of the existing order" and an “inversion of urgent knowledge of human nature" (Renatе Lachmann). Not only in literature, but also in the cinema of the 1920s the concept of "fantastic" is far beyond only one process of imagination; it breaks creative and receptive "experience of borders" (Tzvetan Todorov). The science fiction of the Russian avant-garde is related to anarchism. The fantastic – the sphere of maximum freedom of creative imagination – is a special world, in which, with the help of the power of imagination, one intrudes into time and space, into the real and unreal, the past and the future, the human and the divine.
Burenina analyzes the Science-fiction in the Russian avant-garde cinema of the 1920s. She zooms in on movies by, among others, Nikolay Petrov ("Aero NT-54"), Lev Kuleshov, Vsevolod Pudovkin ("Death beam"), Vladimir Gardin ("An iron heel" and "Steel cranes"), Nikolay Hodatayev ("Interplanetary revolution"). Furthermore, she will discuss the futurology of novels of Herbert Wells, the Russian fantasts (consider for example Ivan Morsky, Alexander Bogdanov, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and many more), and anarchist skepticism in relation to the state.