The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago Illinois, is presenting “From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema” from 5 May to 30 May. The series consists of thirteen films (which range in length from 70 to 165 minutes) that “span almost a hundred years, encompassing pre-Revolutionary Russia, the Stalin era, the Cold War, the Sputnik-spurred space race, the glasnost period, and, finally, an ironic look back from a post-Soviet perspective. The series’ variety is as broad as its chronology, ranging from folklore to fairytale to animation to commercial blockbuster to art cinema. Many of the films have never been shown before in the US, or shown only in hacked-up, English-dubbed versions.”
The main emphasis of the films is scienced fiction, “although the series contains excursions into other forms covered by the broad Russian term fantastika.” The Center’s publicity for the program says “One could say that the Soviet Union itself was science fiction—speculative fiction written as a political system, emerging at around the same time as the literary genre and passing from the utopian to the dystopian to the entropic. Now, since the demise of the USSR, it has become the mythic… a Lost Continent evoking nostalgia, camp, and retro-fantasy. This dimension is shrewdly mined in the most recent film in the series, the 2005 mockumentary First on the Moon, which recycles the tropes of Stalinist ideology while imagining a 1938 trip to the Moon.”
Unlike western science fiction films, the Soviet films are “concocted from a mixture of the mystical, technocratic, propagandistic, philosophical, and just plain goofy. That last quality should not be underestimated—a touch (or more) of the absurd runs through most of the films in this series, more self-aware in some than in others. Russian fantastik cinema may often be didactic, but it is rarely less than enchanting.”
The Gene Siskel Film Center calls itself “the Loop’s contemporary alternative for special events.” It has two theaters and a café, and is located at 164 North State Street, Chicago, Illinois 60601. Their phone number is 312-846-2600. For more information or tickets, call the movie hotline at 312-846-2800, or see the web site.
The films showing in this series include:
The Amphibian Man (1962)
Cosmic Voyage (1936)
Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (1961)
First on the Moon (2005)
The Heavens Call (1959)
Planet of Storms (1961)
Ruslan and Ludmila (1972)
Solaris (1971)
Stalker (1979)
To the Stars by Hard Ways [also known as The Thorny Way to the Stars] (1981)
Zero City (1988)
All the films are in Russian with English subtitles.