Kosmicheskiy reys is generally said to be a silent film, but the version I viewed has a music track that is sufficiently low-fi and scratchy as to convince me that it has been with the film for decades—although not necessarily from the very first. (I understand that a Region 2 DVD with updated music exists, but I have not seen it.) The Russian credits carry listings for a music compiler and a sound engineer, although differences in the background of the credits frames in question from the others suggest that two new cards may have been substituted in order to add the sound-related credits. An article by the American Glenn Erickson indicates that the version on actual film that he saw in Los Angeles in 2006 bore physical evidence of being an originally silent film reprocessed to incorporate a musical sound track. The question remains as to whether the reprocessing was done before the picture’s theatrical release or at some later point. The premiere of the film took place on January 21, 1936. Clearly there had been an earlier screening for critics since several reviews had appeared earlier in January. However, the film carries a production date of 1935, and the dedication to Tsiolkovsky fails to enclose his name in the mourning frame customary in Russia, or otherwise to indicate that he had already died (in September 1935). To me, this all raises the possibility that the film might have been complete in 1935 but then held up to add a music track. It is possible that, because of the special effects, it took so long to finish Kosmicheskiy reys that, as a silent film, it seemed obsolete by the time it was done. The first Soviet talkie had been shown in 1931, and at least one Soviet talkie sf movie appeared in 1935 (the awful Gibel’ sensatsii, literally something like “The Death of a Nine-Day Wonder,” retitled Robots of Ripley in English). It was obviously too late to add voiced dialog to Kosmicheskiy reys, but attaching a music track would have been technically simpler.
The issue evokes particular interest because of the heavy use made in Kosmicheskiy reys’s music track of Liszst’s “Les Préludes,” which also provides much of the background music for the Flash Gordon serial. Although Kosmicheskiy reys was not distributed in the U.S., it is conceivable that Hollywood representatives could have seen a sample copy sent in hopes of gaining American distribution. (The U.S. market was a genuine possibility for a Soviet speculative-fiction film—the 1935 Soviet animated fantasy film, The New Gulliver, played in the U.S. and even got a review from the New York Times.) But there was not much of an interval during which Kosmicheskiy reys could have influenced the music selection for Flash Gordon, which premiered on April 6, 1936. Accordingly, if the music track is original, the dual use of “Les Préludes” was probably a coincidence. Of course, if, on the other hand, the music track was added to Kosmicheskiy reys in later years, the musical influence likely ran in the opposite direction.
Kosmicheskiy reys generates interesting resonances with Heinlein’s story “Requiem” (1940), whose plot takes the opposite tack from the Soviet film. Like Sedykh, D.D. Harriman heads the program for the first crewed Moon flight and is regarded by his associates as too valuable to the enterprise to risk in space flight. Sedykh successfully shakes off the opposition to his travel, but Harriman bows to it and reaches the Moon only decades later, when the trip costs him his life. Fritz Lang had emigrated to Los Angeles in 1934. In the U.S., he was not fated to continue the strong involvement with sf and fantasy films that had characterized his European directing career, but Lang likely did not know this in his first American years, so it is plausible that he might have kept up with European sf cinema as best he could. Heinlein was friendly with Lang (although possibly not as early as the writing of “Requiem”). For that matter, Heinlein knew other Hollywood people, and even Heinlein’s then-wife Leslyn had worked in the motion picture industry. Through one industry contact or another, Heinlein conceivably could have seen a private screening of Kosmicheskiy reys or at least been provided with a plot summary of it. On the other hand, Heinlein’s plot is a reasonably obvious one (Moses heads up the journey to the Promised Land but is forbidden entry), and the author easily could have come up with it independently. Ten years after “Requiem,” when Heinlein wrote the prequel “The Man Who Sold the Moon” (1950), one of the threats that Harriman raises in order to attract funding for his lunar project is that if the Soviets get there first, they may not only set up a missile base, but may even use pyrotechnic rockets spraying carbon black to draw a huge hammer and sickle on the Moon’s disc for propaganda purposes. This resonates with the flash-powder “cccp” in Kosmicheskiy reys.
The English Wikipedia (when consulted in both September 2013 and July 2014) states that Kosmicheskiy reys had an unusually short theatrical run. It cites thin evidence, namely a U.S. blog entry that now has to be retrieved from a web archive and that itself gives no specific source for the assertion. I have not encountered Russian online sources that make the same claim, but it is fairly plausible: although the publication numbers of written Soviet sf had in fact started to recover by 1935 from the very low levels of 1931–34, there remained a good deal of prejudice against science fiction among the masters of Soviet culture. Moreover, as already noted, the film demanded of the viewer considerable astronautical background knowledge, and it is not easy to imagine how it would strike a viewer or critic who could not understand why things were shown the way they were. In any case, after the film’s original theatrical run, it largely disappeared from public memory although not quite completely. Reportedly, the 1953 animated Polet na lunu [Moon Flight] is essentially a compressed remake aimed narrowly at children. Zhuravlev’s 1954 article speaks of Kosmicheskiy reys as something from the distant past now purely of historical interest, but he urges that additional Soviet space-fiction films be made, utilizing the improved special-effects technology available by that date. (By 1954, the Western 1950s boom in sf movies was well under way.) Zhuravlev continued to have a successful directing career, but he never made another sf film. A still of the spaceship Stalin (stern-on, with its name not showing) appeared in a 1963 biography of Tsiolkovsky, but the book seems to make no mention of the film other than in the caption for the still. The movie rated one sentence in the “Cinéma” article of Versins’s Swiss-published sf Encyclopédie, 1972. The actual footage was not to resurface until nearly 50 years after the movie’s premiere. In September 1984, large segments of the film were shown on Soviet television along with a commentary by participants including a cosmonaut and Zhuravlev himself, who had just turned 80. The first appearance of the complete, restored film came in January 1985, when it ran on television. By that time the motion picture had ceased to be seen as obsolete and instead had become a significant period piece. Even so, it took the advent of DVDs and of broadband Internet technology before the film began to gain some traction in specialist circles in the Anglosphere. Kosmicheskiy reys is well worth seeking out by anyone who appreciates sf faithful to the science of the time of its creation.
Patrick McGuire is a frequent contributor to NYRSF.
Acknowledgements
J.J. Pierce first brought the resurfacing of Kosmicheskiy reys to my attention—it evidently had been posted on YouTube for a while, although, per a later article on Pierce’s blog, it was taken down eventually for copyright reasons. Being a Luddite holdout against broadband, I was able to view the film only when Kyle McAbee independently mentioned it to me and kindly made me a long-term loan of his American-issued DVD of it so that I could alternate between viewings of the film and doing research about it as, with many delays, this article slowly took shape.
Major Sources
Arlazorov, Mikhail. Tsiolkovskiy. Second edition, corrected and expanded. Moscow: Molodaya gvardiya, 1963 (year as per the title page, but signed to press in 1964 per the publication data in the back).
Cosmic Voyage. Medford, Oregon: Sinister Cinema, 2011. (Has the Russian music track and captions, with summary English captions, occasionally inaccurate, added at wide intervals.)
Dolgopolov, Mikh. “Zhyul’ Verny sovetskogo kino,” Komsomolskaya pravda, May 24, 1934 (online).
Erickson,
Glenn. “Savant Revival Review Notes: Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya novella / ‘Cosmic Voyage,’“ n.d., but identified as “a slight reformatting” of the version of October 20, 2006.
Mettavant, Claude. “La genèse du film ‘Raid cosmique’,” copyright 2006.
Versins, Pierre. “Cinéma” in his Encyclopédie de l’Utopie, des Voyages extraordinaires et de la Science Fiction. Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1972. Oddly, in Versins, the film title is given as Vaisseau cosmique (“Cosmic Vessel”), but the year and director are correct.
Zhuravlev, Nikolay. “‘Kosmicheskiy reys’—skazka moyego detstva,” Tekhnika—molodezhy, No. 10, 1987.
Zhuravlev, V[asiliy]. “Kak sozdavalsya fil’m ‘Kosmicheskiy reys’,” Znaniye—sila, No. 11a, 1954.
Ursula Pflug
Around the Gyre: Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being
Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being recently won the Kitschie Red Tentacle, which rewards “the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic.” A UK award, its aim is to “encourage and elevate the tone of the discussion of genre literature in its many forms.” Ozeki was unable to attend the February award ceremony, lamenting that “When I wrote myself into my novel, as the character Ruth, I failed to anticipate the consequences, and now, like Ruth, I find myself marooned on a remote island in Desolation Sound, trapped in a fictional world of my own creation, unable to get away. It is a conundrum that you, at the Kitschies, will no doubt understand.”
Critic Edward Fowler in his 1988 study, The Rhetoric of Confession, discusses shishōsetsu, the early twentieth century Japanese novel form, and Ozeki quotes from his introduction:
The shishōsetsu (more formally watakushi shōsetsu; commonly translated as “I-novel”) [is] an autobiographical form that flourished in Taishō Japan (1912–26). The shishōsetsu, narrated in the first or third person in such a way as to represent with utter conviction the author’s personal experience, is riddled with paradoxes. Supposedly a fictional narrative, it often reads more like a private journal. It has a reputation of being true, to a fault, to “real life”; yet it frequently strays from the author’s experience it allegedly portrays so faithfully. Its personal orientation makes it a thoroughly modern form; yet it is the product of an indigenous intellectual tradition quite disparate from western individualism. Progressive critics have ridiculed it over the decades as a failed adaptation of the western novel, while traditionalists have reveled in its difference.
A Tale for the Time Being’s point-of-view characters are Ruth, a writer, and Naoko Yasutani, a depressed Tokyo schoolgirl. Nao’s diary washes up on the beach on Cortes Island in British Columbia, where both Ruth Ozeki and the character Ruth live.
The character Ruth becomes obsessed by Naoku, whose diary she finds sealed in a ziplock bag tucked inside a Hello Kitty lunchbox, flotsam that crossed the Pacific on tsunami drift. Nao’s diary is an SOS, a message in a bottle. The girl is abject following her family’s plunge into poverty after her father loses his Silicon Valley job, precipitating a move back to Tokyo. After the move, she is additionally challenged by extreme bullying at her new school and her father’s multiple suicide attempts.
In an interview with Jessica Doyle for Abebooks, Ozeki tells us that after the 2011 tsunami she decided she needed to be the reader of Nao’s diaries, and that if she created a version of herself as a POV character, she must also write her husband, the artist Oliver Kelhammer, into the book. He agreed, and the description of their life on Cortes carries so much verisimilitude that we wonder whether in this section Ozeki is attempting a shishōsetsu or whether she only wishes to draw our attention to this important Japanese genre.
Nao’s life is harsh but she has a fairy godmother—or a great-grandmother, anyway. Jiko Yasutani is an anarchist, a feminist, an ordained Zen Buddhist nun, and, it turns out, a novelist as well. We are a little intimidated, but being a nun mainly means presiding over traditional rituals for the local community and spending days on end fermenting the summer’s daikon harvest. When she is given an old computer by a parish member, she has a new activity: writing cryptic but supportive messages to her traumatized granddaughter in Tokyo.
At some earlier point in her life Jiko also wrote a shishōsetsu. We don’t hear much more about this I-novel, and I wondered whether we weren’t being winked at by Ozeki, who is also a feminist, possibly an anarchist, certainly an ordained Zen Buddhist nun, and a novelist (A Tale is her third). Is Jiko Yasutani an alter ego? Is her life a life Ozeki could be leading in a forest temple on a mountain in Japan? Are these the kinds of question a reader of shishōsetsu is supposed to ask?
Near the end of the novel, Ruth and her husband Oliver discuss whether or not she has actually brought a World War II–era diary from the present to the past, or, perhaps, from one dimension to another. Oliver, more the science head of the two, points out that neither of them has the math skills to really understand quantum theory, and for them, it must remain a poetic kind of game, rife with paradox and hence similar in some ways to the Zen Buddhism which both Ruth-in-the-book and Ruth-in-real-life practice.
In “Shishōsetsu and the Myth of Sincerity,” blogger Jonathan Delacour wonders why he finds the form so fascinating. He too quotes from The Rhetoric of Confession, telling us it uses, as Fowler has it, “the techniques of essay, diary, confession, and other non-fictional forms to present the fiction of a faithfully recorded experience.” Hence, Delacour writes, it “collapses genres that are commonly regarded in the Western tradition as quite separate and exploits the tension between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation.”
Edward Fowler continues:
By far the most common approach to the shishōsetsu has been the nonfictional one, for the general critical perception has been that it is resistant by definition to analysis as an autonomous text. Unlike “pure literature” in the west, which calls to mind an author aloof from his writing after the manner of Flaubert or Joyce, “pure literature” in Japan (a category to which the shishōsetsu belongs) is considered inherently referential in nature: its meaning derives from an extra-literary source, namely, the author’s life. The Japanese as readers of shishōsetsu have tended to regard the author’s life, and not the written work, as the definitive “text” on which critical judgment ultimately rests and to see the work as meaningful only insofar as it illuminates the life.
From Fowler and his interpreter Delacour we learn that shishōsetsu is primarily a naturalistic form and is measured by how closely it mirrors the author’s life. If we do not learn true things about him or her, it’s not a proper specimen; the main reason the genre is read is to gain a window into the author’s personal experience, both exterior in the sense of life events and interior, meaning emotions and thought processes.
Why a novel then? Why not an autobiography? Am I too Western to understand the difference?
Well, for starters, in autobiography a shape-shifting crow doesn’t appear to lead the protagonist on a mystical, dangerous quest to save the second POV character, because such things don’t happen in “real life.” But they shouldn’t happen in shishōsetsu either, since the form expects the author to paint a rigidly realistic picture.
In Japan there is a mythical being, the jishin namazu, or Earthquake Catfish. He punishes human transgressors to his realm by causing earthquakes and is only held in check by a large stone wielded by a minor deity, who pins the kanmae-ishi
or stone to the catfish’s head. Following this thread of story, we might surmise that the earthquake which caused the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant happened because the caretaker deity of the shrine had taken a nap or left for a meeting. The meltdown occurred because the stone was understaffed.
The catfish has a relative or alter ego or some such, the way these things go in myth, called the yobaoshi namazu or World Rectifying Catfish. Ozeki tells us that
belief in the world rectifying catfish was especially prevalent during the early nineteenth century, a period characterized by a weak, ineffective government and a powerful business class, as well as extreme and anomalous weather patterns, crop failures, famine, hoarding, urban riots, and mass religious pilgrimages, which often ended in mob violence. The world rectifying catfish targeted the business class, the 1 percent, whose rampant practices of price-fixing, hoarding, and graft had led to economic stagnation and political corruption. The angry catfish would cause an earthquake, wreaking havoc and destruction, and in order to rebuild, the wealthy would have to let go their assets, which would create jobs in salvage, rubble clearing, and construction.
Which catfish caused the accident, the “jishin namazu” or the “yobaoshi namazu”? Is it true, as a December 2013 Reuters article tells us, that homeless men in Sendai are being “recruited” off the streets by yakuza gangsters and coerced to work for minimum wage, on the largest nuclear cleanup in history?
Magazine - The New York Review of Science Fiction - 313 - 2014-09 Page 8