Owen Hatherley’s book Militant Modernism touches on Cold War paranoia and alien worlds and alien visitors. Hatherley adds to the well-known proposal that the plethora of American 1950s space B-movies egged on by McCarthyist Hollywood, were a response to the perception of Soviet/ Communist threat.
Interestingly, early Russian communists and avante-garde found great sympathy with the notion of otherworldly, alien societies and utopian extra-terrestrial cultures, as Hatherly calls it, Martian Marxism. This was also depicted in Soviet writing and films from Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star (1908)- Socialist utopia on Mars – to Yakov Protazanov’s 1924 film, “Aelita, Queen of Mars”. Or the novel Roadside Picnic (Strugatsky Brothers, 1972) filmed as Stalker by Tarkovsky in 1979, which tells of the Zone – an area of contaminated wasteland and industrial ruins following an extra-terrestrial visit. The notion of such a contaminated Zone of course, is a central part of the post-Rendlesham sightings, with the ground still ‘different’ and growth stilted some 10 or 15 years after the event.
Hatherley points out that HG Wells’ early Martians (perhaps our own visual prototype?) were “a fantasy of anti-imperialist revenge” (Militant Modernism 2008:43) as Wells was disgusted with the extermination of the aboriginal population of Tasmania. War of the Worlds, was perhaps a way of showing the same treatment meted out to the West. Wells’ Martian war cry – “ULL-AA” – was used in 1919 for Viktor Shklovsky’s “manifesto for the alienation effect, ‘Ullya, Ullya, Martians’.” (Militant Modernism 2008:44)
Aelita excerpt:http://youtu.be/qL6hG1erfFo
Tangentially, See also: http://tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/?s=ufo
Dominique Rey
