New Maps of Heaven →
It’s 2006—do you know where your planets are? In the same August week that saw the International Astronomical Union reopen our solar system’s boundaries, the Film Society of Lincoln Center unfurled the apposite series “From the Tsars to the Stars: A Journey Through Russian Fantastik Cinema,” perhaps the most venturesome attraction yet to fill the dog-days repertory slot long consecrated to sci-fi, fantasy, and horror. Demarcating the strain of “fantastika” in Russian and Soviet film—a hybrid of lineal Slavic occultism, technological boosterism, revolutionary utopian forecasting, and sui generis influences like the cosmist guru Nikolai Fedorov—the shapely survey stretched from the silent Aelita, Queen of Mars (1924) to Alexei Fedorchenko’s pristine First on the Moon (2005).
