In an age of digital backlots and billion-dollar effects budgets, it’s easy to forget that some of the most radical visual experiments in cinema happened a century ago using cardboard, lighting, and ideology.
One of the most visually ambitious films of the silent era, Aelita: Queen of Mars (1924), didn’t just invent a cinematic Mars. It turned production design into political theory, costumes into class commentary, and architecture into allegory. For young filmmakers exploring how to tell deeper stories through visuals, Aelita is a forgotten masterclass.
How Aelita Uses Visual Design to Communicate Ideology
Directed by Yakov Protazanov and released during the Soviet Union’s New Economic Policy (NEP) period, Aelita is a product of both post-revolutionary optimism and ideological tension. It blends a sci-fi narrative about a Martian rebellion with a psychological portrait of obsession and alienation. But what truly sets the film apart is its visual language, a bold, Constructivist aesthetic that doesn’t just decorate the story, but embodies it.
For all its fantastical settings, Aelita is not a film about aliens; it’s a film about power. And every element of its design is loaded with political meaning. Long before “production design” was a common term, Aelita showed that how a world looks is what it means.
Constructivism as Cinematic Ideology
The Martian world in Aelita is constructed entirely through the lens of Constructivism, an early Soviet art movement that rejected decorative excess in favor of industrial functionality, geometry, and abstraction. But on Mars, those ideals are taken to dystopian extremes. Massive angular structures and spiral staircases lead to nowhere. Characters are dwarfed by vast mechanical backdrops, trapped in a world that reflects authoritarian control and dehumanization.
By contrast, the Earth scenes are filmed in a more naturalistic, documentary style, creating a visual binary. Earth is chaotic and flawed, but real. Mars is precise, controlled, and artificial, an ideological mirage.
Costumes as Class Codes
Aelita’s Martian aristocracy is dressed in sculptural, geometric costumes, some more like metal armor than clothing. Designed by Aleksandra Ekster, these outfits turn bodies into architectural forms, visually reinforcing social hierarchies. The elite are angular, polished, untouchable. The workers, in contrast, wear minimalist, utilitarian outfits that are anonymous and replaceable.
This isn’t just fashion, it’s storytelling. The divide is immediate and wordless, showing how class and identity are encoded in visual form.
The Frame as a Political Tool
Camera work reinforces the divide. Elites are often framed in isolation, elevated on high platforms, or seen from low angles, giving them power and mystique. Workers appear in tightly packed group shots, often framed from above, suggesting control, surveillance, and vulnerability. Even the composition mirrors Soviet class theory.
Political and Psychological Themes Reflected Visually
On the surface, Aelita tells the story of a Martian queen who falls for a Soviet engineer and joins a revolution. But beneath that, it’s a film about projection, disillusionment, and the psychological weight of ideology. And again, it’s the visuals, not the dialogue, that make this clear.
Revolution as Fantasy and Escape
The film’s protagonist, Los, is torn between his grim reality on Earth and an imagined romance with Aelita. His Earthly life is filled with surveillance, suspicion, and emotional distance. Domestic scenes are filmed in tight, shadowy interiors, where even mirrors reflect doubt rather than clarity.
Mars, in contrast, is a dreamscape. Clean lines, open space, and dazzling costumes suggest not just another world, but a mental escape, a place where Los can act out fantasies of power, freedom, and even ideological clarity.
In that way, Mars becomes a visual metaphor for both utopia and delusion.
Aelita: From Symbol to Subject
Aelita herself begins as a kind of idealized icon seated in high spaces, bathed in ethereal light, gazing down from afar. Her design is intentionally alien, exaggerated, and static. She’s not a person but a projection.
But as the story progresses, and as she engages with revolutionary ideals, her visual presence shifts. She moves, descends, speaks, and acts. Her costumes become more utilitarian. The lighting grows more natural. The transformation from icon to agent is told not in dialogue but in visual evolution mirroring the political awakening the film wants to dramatize.
Visual Dualism: Earth vs. Mars
The contrast between Earth and Mars isn’t just about locations, it’s about psychological states. Earth is messy, unstable, and caught in the tensions of post-revolutionary society. Mars is stylized, static, and rigid a visual manifestation of ideological absolutism.
This dualism reflects a core tension: revolution as hope vs. revolution as control. The visuals make this conflict tactile, showing how even utopias can become prisons when built on abstraction.
The Constructivist Aesthetic of the Martian World
The Martian world in Aelita isn’t just a setting, it’s a philosophical argument rendered in steel and shadow. Designed at the height of the Constructivist movement, the film’s sets and spatial logic embody a bold Soviet experiment: turning ideology into design.
What is Constructivism?
Constructivism was an avant-garde Soviet art movement born in the wake of the 1917 Revolution. It rejected traditional ornament and romanticism in favor of functional, industrial design rooted in geometry, utility, and futurism. Art was no longer for private contemplation; it was to serve the masses and reflect a modern, mechanized society.
In Aelita, this ethos is taken to its most radical cinematic form.
Architecture of Oppression
The Martian environments, created by Isaac Rabinovich and Viktor Simov, are filled with impossible staircases, spiral ramps, and mechanical control panels that dwarf the human body. Characters move through towering doorways and stand in echoing halls, visual metaphors for their lack of agency within a vast, mechanized system.
Martian elites operate within sleek, impersonal chambers that suggest both order and surveillance. The workers, by contrast, exist in tight, anonymous zones or are literally stored in cold storage prisons. These design choices create a spatial hierarchy that visually enforces class division.
Machine Metaphors and Meaning
Throughout the film, machines are not tools; they are symbols. Levers, dials, and conveyor-like platforms aren’t used functionally; they exist to suggest a system that runs people, not the other way around.
This kind of design anticipates later dystopias in cinema, like Metropolis (1927) and 1984 (1984), where architecture becomes an instrument of power, a silent, omnipresent enforcer.
Style as Ideological Statement
By applying Constructivist principles to an alien world, Aelita proposes a radical idea: ideology doesn’t just live in speeches or manifestos, it’s built into walls, costumes, and even light. The Martian sets make that idea visible, physical, and cinematic.
For young filmmakers, this is a key takeaway: if you want to convey systems of power, control, freedom, or rebellion, start with space, shape, and scale.
Aelita’s Influence on Sci-Fi Cinema
Though Aelita: Queen of Mars wasn’t widely seen outside the Soviet Union during its initial release, its visual DNA runs deep through the evolution of science fiction film. Its bold experimentation with design, architecture, and political allegory shaped a lineage of genre-defining works from Metropolis to Blade Runner and continues to influence how we visualize the future.
Metropolis (1927): A Direct Descendant
Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, released just three years later, shares striking thematic and visual similarities with Aelita:
- Class Struggle in Futuristic Cities: Both films depict tiered societies, a pampered elite above, and oppressed workers below.
- Feminine Figures as Symbols: Aelita and Metropolis’ Maria are both idealized, visualized as icons of revolution or transformation.
- Visual Design as Ideology: Lang’s monumental cityscapes echo Aelita’s Constructivist verticality and mechanical obsession.
While Metropolis has become the more famous of the two, many film historians argue it was Aelita that laid the visual groundwork for dystopian sci-fi’s most enduring aesthetic.
Blade Runner (1982) and the Brutalist Future
Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner may seem a world apart, drenched in noir rain, not Martian dust, but its visual logic shares key traits with Aelita:
- Architecture as Emotion: In both films, buildings are not just structures; they embody systems of control and alienation.
- Designing Alienation: Blade Runner’s cold, angular interiors mirror the psychological distancing seen in Aelita’s Martian world.
- The Outsider’s Gaze: Both films use visual language to explore what it means to be alien in society, in identity, in consciousness.
The lineage is indirect, but unmistakable: Aelita introduced the idea that world-building isn’t background, it’s character, it’s politics, it’s theme.
Beyond Film: Fashion, Art, and Pop Culture
- Fashion designers like Pierre Cardin and André Courrèges cited early Soviet sci-fi as inspiration for their futuristic collections. The influence of Aelita’s geometric costumes is clear in the sleek, space-age fashion of the 1960s.
- Early Star Trek uniforms, with their bold simplicity and utilitarian cuts, echo the visual ideology of Aelita, where function and symbol are fused.
- In avant-garde theater and experimental music videos, the film’s legacy pops up wherever creators seek to visualize alienation, control, or utopia.
Why Aelita Still Matters for Young Filmmakers
It’s easy to see Aelita as a relic of a black-and-white silent film about a fantasy Mars made a hundred years ago by a Soviet studio. But for today’s emerging filmmakers, especially those working with limited resources or bold ideas, Aelita offers a toolkit for something more timeless: how to tell a complex story through design.
Visuals That Think
Aelita doesn’t just imagine the future; it interrogates it. Every costume, set, and frame poses questions about power, freedom, and identity. This is a lesson young filmmakers can take to heart: cinema is a visual language, and your design choices can speak louder than dialogue.
When you don’t have a giant budget, use what Aelita had: symbolism, contrast, and ambition. The Martian world was made of wood and canvas, but its geometry still resonates because it was designed with intention.
Design as Ideological Engine
Want to critique capitalism? Explore surveillance culture? Reflect on climate anxiety or digital alienation? Start with the space your characters move through. Aelita shows that production design isn’t aesthetic frosting, it’s ideological architecture.
If the elites in your story live above the clouds while the workers toil below, how will you visualize that divide? If your character feels trapped by a system, how does their environment reflect their inner state?
Aelita did all this with no CGI, no sync sound, and no global release. Just vision.
🎬 Conclusion: The Future is Designed
For young filmmakers, Aelita is more than film history; it’s a reminder that cinema can be both revolutionary and beautiful, both abstract and deeply personal. It teaches us that storytelling happens not only in scripts or performances, but in shapes, spaces, shadows, and silhouettes.
A century later, Aelita still whispers to the dreamers and designers among us:
