Imagine Otherwise: Fantasy, Fairytale, Fiction (Slavic Film Series) – Mermaid

Mermaid (dir. Anna Melikyan, 2007, 115 min)

Loosely based on The Little Mermaid, this film tells the story of Alisa, a young girl who has discovered that she has a magical power to grant any wish she desires. After wishing to move to Moscow, her seaside home burns down, forcing her mother to obey Alisa’s desires. In the city, she falls in love with Sasha, a conman who sells people property on the Moon, Venus, and Mars. The couple embark on a fairytale-like three-day adventure, with Sasha repeating his erratic behavior every day, introducing Alisa to the chaotic monotony of capitalist Russia.

Mermaid represents an attempt to interpretively stabilize an uninterpretable post-Soviet Russia. However, this is not a fairytale with a happy ending. If the earlier films in this series aim include a utopian desire for reimagination and reinvention, it is difficult to find such positive readings in Melikyan’s lively, exciting, but nonetheless incredibly dark vision of capitalism heading toward disaster.

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The Soviet project was characterized by a utopian drive that stretched far beyond the material means at their disposal. Such a desire, uninhibited by ontological strictures, finds some of its clearest manifestations in film, a medium that Siegfried Kracauer once called “the daydream of society.” Consequently, this film series explores the way in which the social imaginary developed in Soviet (and Post-Soviet) cinema, particularly through the lens of fantasy, fairytale and science fiction. The aim of the series, however, is not to expose the incommensurable distance between a fallacious imagination and empirical reality, but rather to focus on the discourses of the possible – and not the factual – which have made cinema a privileged site for imagining how our world could be radically otherwise.

The series has been organized into four sub-series which allow us to explore different facets of this social imaginary. The first three films in the series (Aelita, Moscow-Cassiopeia, and First on the Moon) probe the Soviet Union’s cosmic imagination. Long before the Soviet Space Program, Nikolai Fyodorov’s biocosmism had captured the imagination of many radical thinkers. Aelita, one of the first full-length films depicting space travel, gave concrete imagery to these thinkers’ theories with Isaac Rabinovich and Victor Simov’s constructivist set designs of Martian society. The following films in this sub-series show the diachronic development of the sci-fi aesthetic, through the years following the Space Race (Moscow-Cassiopeia) and into the retrofitting historicization of the post-soviet perspective (First on the Moon).

The second sub-series (Amphibian Man and Professor Dowell’s Testament) focuses on the concept of the New Human in the new Soviet society. These films construct a laboratory – inhabited by animal-human hybrids and reanimated human heads – to think past the human and explore the potential consequences of such a posthumanist leap.

The third sub-series (New Gulliver, Alice in Wonderland, and Tale of Tales) centers on animation as another method of thinking beyond the real. This sub-series also articulates temporal and geo-spatial adaptations as two distinct ways of creating the new – while New Gulliver and Alice in Wonderland both represent the Soviet Union’s attempt to translate Western tales to Soviet contexts, Tale of Tales is an attempt to treat the Soviet past as material for fairytale narrativization.

Land of Oz and Mermaid, the films which constitute the last sub-series, similarly narrativize the real world through the epistemological framework of the fairytale. Here, however, the ideological explanatory functions of the Soviet Union have already faded away, and one must cling to the fairytale not to tell stories about the past, but to interpret the chaos of the present post-Soviet space. Events:

October 9th
Amphibian Man (dir. Vladimir Chebotaryov,1962, 82 min)

October 23rd
Professor Dowell’s Testament (dir. Leonid Menaker, 1984, 91 min)

October 30th
New Gulliver (dir. Aleksandr Ptushko, 1935, 75 min)

November 6th
Alice in Wonderland (dir. Efrem Pruzhanskiy, 1981, 31 min) & Tale of Tales (dir. Yuri Norstein, 1979, 29 min)

November 13th
Land of Oz (dir. Vasily Sigarev, 2015, 100 min)

December 4th
Mermaid (dir. Anna Melikyan, 2007, 115 min)