Remembering the Space Age. - Black Vault Radio Network (BVRN)

268 reMeMBerING the SpaCe aGe
the bulk of the flm contains interviews with those who knew or saw
him. the materials that the NKVd agents salvaged include psychiatric footage
of the administration of electroshock and insulin therapy that bear a remarkable
resemblance to the fight-test footage. agents also interview his wife after he
leaves the psychiatric hospital. they later interview Fattakhov and the midget.
the interviews with Fattakhov about Kharlamov’s background are particularly
instructive. Fattakhov has become a builder of giant mechanical insects
for children’s museums. his profession makes the analogy to Franz Kafka’s
Metamorphosis obvious, especially because the insects are always on their backs
except for one fnal scene with Fattakhov at a museum.
the NKVd’s trail of Kharlamov goes cold after they tracked down the
midget who returned to his original profession—a circus performer. at one
point, Kharlamov joins him where, for a while, he plays the part of a circus
version of aleksandr Nevskii, repelling the teutonic invaders. 35 although the
NKVd gives up pursuit of Kharlamov at this point and eventually opts to
destroy all evidence of the lunar program, they neglect one thing. there is one
remaining source of evidence that they cannot destroy. In the closing scenes,
the movie takes the viewer to the natural history museum in Chile, near where
the peasants had seen the freball in 1938. this museum retains the footage
from Kharlamov’s lunar mission and the hardware from his fight. the movie
closes with flm footage of a lunar landscape and a lone, silent cosmonaut sitting
inside his spacecraft (see illustration).
Pervye na lune goes far to dissolve the links between the hero cosmonaut
and the Soviet state. Kharlamov was loyal to his country to the end, returning
even after his existence had been denied. even his fnal known role was that
of the legendary and publicly manipulated Nevskii. his reward for all this had
been pursuit and abuse by the system that created him.
Both uchitel and Fëdorchenko drew on the traditions of realistic science
fction in their flms. In each case, spacefight is technically accurate and not
metaphysical. these flms refer to the traditions that Zhuravlev and Klushantsev
had pioneered. the diference between these post-Soviet flmmakers and their
predecessors is that they have portrayed Soviet cosmonauts stripped of the
either implicit (Kosmicheskii reis) or explicit (Planeta Bur) ideological discipline.
uchitel’s Gagarin lived in morally reprehensible system that only the hapless can
ignore. Fodorchenko’s Kharlamov returned to a country whose state apparatus
is determined to remove all evidence of his existence.
35. this scene was clearly homage to Sergei eisenshtein’s flm version of the Nevskii story,
completed in 1938 and withdrawn in 1939. In Fedorchenko’s flm, the invading midget
teutonic Knights bear the swastika-like crosses that eisenshtein’s attackers on Novgorod did.
Sergei eisenshtein, Aleksandr Nevskii, Cherkasov, Nikolai; Okhlopkov, Nikolai; abrikosov,
andrei; Orlov, dmitri; Novikov, Vasili (Mosflm, 1938), 1:37. this is one of many allusions
to Soviet flms in the movie. at one point, the cosmonauts go to see Zhuravlev’s Kosmicheskii
reis during the course of their training.