Next stop: the moon.

Vladimir Motyl's 1970 "Beloe solntse pustyni" (White Sun of the Desert) may be an artistic failure, but the Okudzhava soundtrack and now-famous one-liners have turned it into a cult classic. Soviet astronauts, rumor has it, used to watch the film before take-off. A curious choice, particularly given the space voyages they had to choose from. Tarkovsky's brooding 1972 "Solaris" may have been inappropriate to the mood, but why not Protazanov's 1924 "Aelita, Queen of Mars"? The heroic exploits of captain Sukhov (Anatoly Kuznetsov), a Red Army officer who must fight counter-Revolutionary warriors and protect a harem in the Central Asian desert, must have evoked, for a superstitious cosmonaut, distance and adventure far more than the familiar martians of science fiction. The cheerful Sukhov, comforted by visions of his blond, red-scarved country wife, cannot bring himself to return home until he has rescued every last peasant he finds buried in the sand. Quite accidentally, the name given to Sukhov's greatest "Eastern" allie, Sayid (Spartak Mishulin), may recall, for more recent viewers, Edward Said's definition of Orientalism as "the corporate institution for dealing with the Orient--dealing with it by making statements about it, authorizing views of it, describing it, by teaching it, settling it, ruling over it: in short, Orientalism as a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient." (3) Of course, Orientalism, hardly a Soviet invention, was at least as important to literary and cultural self-formation in Russia as it was in Western Europe. Pushkin's 1823 "Bakhchisaraiskii fontan" (The fountain of Bakhchisarai) tells of a Tatar khan who kidnaps a Polish noblewoman, sparking envy in his harem. The poem was adapted into a ballet by Afasev and Zakharov in the 1930s. I am struck by certain similarities between the harem scenes in the ballet and in "Beloe Solntse" (scroll to 1:28 above). Below is a clip from a 1953 performance (danced by Maia Plisetskaia and Galina Ulanova). The Eastern woman's body, seductive and bare-waisted, provides important ornamentation; the Western woman, be she Polish or Russian, is the faithful (and faith-meriting) bride.