This Summer I worked with Professors Firtich and Ungurianu on a research project which explored Russian Science Fiction Cinema. The project’s ultimate goal was to assist in the initial stages of gathering research for a book that the professors have begun writing on the topic, and exploring the trajectory scifi took from the Revolution in 1917 all the way through to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Additionally, I helped the Professors in developing course materials for a class on Russian Sci-fi Cinema that Professor Ungurianu plans to teach in the future.

A still from Andrei Tarkovsky’s sci-fi masterpiece, Solaris

While Russian Science-fiction cinema is a very deep field (in my research I discovered well over a hundred films which belong to that category) the majority of its riches, beyond perhaps Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris which has an ardent following in Europe and the States, remain almost wholly unknown outside of the former Soviet bloc. Throughout my time working on the project, I created a comprehensive spreadsheet of all science-fiction films made in the Soviet Union/Russia. I was also tasked with making a comprehensive bibliography of all academic texts and scholarly works written about the field, as well as bibliographies of major texts about Russian Science-fiction literature (a field with its own plethora of important and highly influential works, such as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s phenomenal We – a precursor and almost certain inspiration to George Orwell’s 1984) and Western Science-fiction. Through these assignments, I was able to get a good sense of just how much research and effort goes into the creation of an academic work while simultaneously having the opportunity to discover many new films, some of which I now hold among my very favorite.
The research ultimately culminated with a project looking at the trajectory of space exploration in Soviet science-fiction cinema. Beginning with Yakov Protazanov’s Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), generally considered the first Soviet science-fiction film ever made, and going all the way through to Georgiy Daneliya’s Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986), the project broke down Soviet space exploration on screen into 5 distinct phases: Revolutionary, Heroic, Philosophical and Metaphysical, Consequeces of Human Action, and Dystopian. Coupled with each of these phases was a film used as a mini-case study of that unique category. Having this as the final part of my Ford Scholarship, allowed me to put all of the research I had done over the course of the Summer into practice and can hopefully be used by others as a brief introduction into this fascinating, little known genre of cinema.

A still from Kin-Dza-Dza!, one of the best scifi films to come out of the Soviet Union (and, unfortunately, one that remains almost wholly unknown in the United States)