ABSTRACT
Film and manned flight are almost exact contemporaries, and both are frequently represented as key manifestations of early twentieth-century modernity.2 It is therefore unsurprising to see aeroplanes in early films, in Russia as in other countries. Accordingly, I begin by surveying early Russian and Soviet film to identify those major concerns that have surfaced in recent film, analyzed in the main section of this chapter. As early as in Eduard Puchalski’s 1916 comedy, Antosha Ruined by a Corset [Antoshu korset pogubil], for example, the sudden appearance of a plane overhead causes a rapt crowd to gather in admiration of the pilot’s prowess. Aviation, after all, was deemed a masculine endeavor in both the late-tsarist and the Soviet era, its riskiness and challenge to nature and traditions of envisioned human possibility accounting for its dramatic appeal and, subsequently, for its political significance. For the unheroic Antosha (Anton Fertner), on the other hand, the crowd’s upwardly distracted gaze provides an opportunity to rid himself, at least temporarily, of the eponymous article of incriminating female clothing.
