338 — 339
Voyage through Space,
Time and Utopian Modernism
in Ikarie XB 1001
Markéta Uhlířová
for Oriole Cullen
At the very beginning Thomas More designated utopia as a place,
an island in the distant South Seas. This designation underwent
changes later so that it left space and entered time. Indeed, the
Utopians, especially those of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,
transposed the wishland more into the future.
--Ernst Bloch002
In 1963, Chris Marker’s experimental film La Jetée won the Grand Prix at
the newly instituted Science Fiction Film Festival in Trieste. The award, evocatively
titled “Golden Spaceship”, was shared with the Czechoslovak film Ikarie XB 1
(Ikarus XB 1), directed by Jindřich Polák. Marker’s hauntingly enigmatic featurette
has since come to be recognised as one of cinema’s great masterpieces, which has
influenced filmmakers as well as visual artists, and inspired countless philosophical
and critical reflections.003
In contrast, Ikarie XB 1, one of the very few Czechoslovak
science fiction films to enjoy considerable export success, has largely been
forgotten and has only recently become the subject of renewed interest both within
and without the science fiction community. With recent DVD releases for the Czech
and international markets, Ikarie XB 1 is now gaining something of a following. It is
001 With grateful thanks to Eliška Malečková at NFA Prague and Matěj Kadlec at Barrandov Studios for
their patient assistance with my research.
002 Bloch cited in: Something’s Missing. A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor Adorno on the
Contradictions of Utopian Longing’ (with moderator Horst Krüger, 1964). In: Ernst Bloch, The Utopian
Function of Art and Literature. Selected Essays. Cambridge, MA – London: MIT Press 1988, p. 3.
003 For an account of La Jetée’s legacy, see Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker. Memories of the Future.
London: Reaktion Books 2004, p. 87.
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being appreciated as a remarkable example of socialist utopia,004
and is regularly
mentioned on blogs in connection with another science fiction cinema icon, Stanley
Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), which it possibly informed in more than
one way.005
On the face of it, the joint festival award thrust together an unlikely pair
of films. Marker’s is a personal ciné-roman aligned with the progressive artistic and
intellectual milieu of the French New Wave. In contrast, Ikarie XB 1 is an expensively
produced, state-sponsored space opera that has all the makings of soft communist
propaganda.006
Where La Jetée is mournful in its tone, Ikarie XB 1 is serenely
optimistic. In form and content, La Jetée sits on the margins of conventional science
fiction: told almost exclusively through still photographs, its means are almost
iconoclastic. Ikarie XB 1, on the other hand, is a genre film that gives free rein to
picturing tomorrow’s world as a fully-formed reality.
And yet, despite all their differences, the “chance encounter” between
these two films made in the middle of the Cold War, throws up a surprising correspondence.
Both use science fiction fantasy to conjure multiple futures to ultimately
speak about the desires and fears of the present. As the imagined time zones collide
against each other, their utopian and dystopian visions intersect in fascinating
ways. In this chapter I focus on Polák’s film alone, and for the most part examine
what Marker demonstrably turns away from: a fashioning of the future as a world
to live in and a world to look at. It is the people, their environments and objects in
004 For recent analyses of Ikarie, see for example Ivan Adamovič, Stříbrné komety filmového plátna.
In: Ivan Adamovič – Tomáš Pospiszyl (eds.), Planeta Eden. Svět zítřka v socialistickém Československu
1948–1978. Prague: Arbor Vitae 2010, pp. 174–193; Otto Beneš’s BA Dissertation
Ikarie XB 1. Svět zítřka v socialistickém Československu. Neoformalistická analýza filmu Ikarie XB 1.
Brno: Teorie a dějiny filmu a audiovizuální kultury, Filozofická fakulta, Masaryk University 2013;
the essay “Ikarie XB-1” and video “appreciation” by Michael Brooke and Kim Newman respectively,
published in conjunction with the release of Second Run’s DVD in 2013. For examples of comprehensive
web magazine entries and blogs devoted to the film see also Glenn Erickson’s review on
http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s1867ikar.html [accessed 10. 6. 2016] and Todd Stadtman’s
thoughtful analysis from 2013: http://teleport-city.com/2013/02/26/ikarie-xb-1/ [accessed 10.
6. 2016]. An interesting creative response to the film was the art installation “Report on the
Construction of a Spaceship Module”, organised by a group of Transit curators at the New Museum
in New York (01/22/14 - 04/13/14). Available online; http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/
view/report-on-the-construction-of-a-spaceship-module [accessed 10. 6. 2016]. See also Brenda
Byrne’s article Ikarie XB 1 and the Socialist Sci-fi Spaceship. Available online; https://rhizome.
org/editorial/2014/jan/23/Ikarie-socialist-spaceship/ [accessed 10. 6. 2016].
005 Kubrick’s assistant Anthony Frewin claims that the director saw the film in preparation for 2001,
though he stresses he wasn’t “inspired” by it: see BFI’s web-exclusive article by Nick Wrigley
Stanley Kubrick, cinephile, available online http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/stanley-kubrick-cinephile
[accessed 10. 6.02016]. Although there is no further
evidence, Frewin’s memory is likely to be true. Kubrick was famously a voracious researcher
and it is documented in his archives he requested copies of little-known science fiction films.
For a comparison between the two films, see for example Pablo Kjolseth’s 2011 post on http://
moviemorlocks.com/2011/08/14/star-childs-from-soviet-union-era-czechoslovakia-to-kubrick/
[accessed 10. 6. 2016]. Thanks also to Simone Odino of @Kubrickmeets group for sharing with me
his thoughts on the subject.
006 As Ivan Adamovič stresses, the scriptwriter Pavel Juráček himself described the film as a political
“commission”: I. Adamovič, op. cit., p. 184. See also Pavel Taussig’s commentary in Slovo Historika,
in “Bonusové materiály”, DVD Ikarie XB 1 (Filmexport Home Video 2011).
their everyday context that form the core of my analysis here. But in the final part
I adopt La Jetée as a lens through which to look at the less visible, though no less
significant, aspects of Ikarie XB 1 that are to do with its figuration of time. Though
thematically less vital than in La Jetée, time in Ikarie XB 1 too becomes a prominent
and recurrent motif which, similarly, serves as a means of posing questions of the
human condition.
From Outer Space to Inner Space
The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness
of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out
of the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could
Laika possibly be looking at?
--Haruki Murakami, Sputnik Sweetheart
Ikarie XB 1 was loosely adapted from Polish author Stanisław Lem’s novel
Obłok Magellana (The Magellan Nebula), published in 1955 and translated into
Czech in 1956. Lem was at this time a rising star of science fiction literature, especially
popular in Eastern Europe, and would eventually gain international notoriety
during the 1960s with the translations of his novel Solaris and its subsequent
film adaption by Andrei Tarkovsky. Set in the thirty-second century, Obłok Magellana
envisages an idealised communist civilisation whose yearning for knowledge
spurs them to travel into previously unimaginable reaches of the universe. Over 200
people board the gigantic space ship Gea in the hope of finding extra-terrestrial
intelligence in the star system of Alpha Centauri thousands of light years away. The
lengthy novel ends with the discovery of an inhabited planet.
At a first glance, Polák’s film shares much with Lem’s novel: the basics of
the plot, including its optimistic ending, its faith in humanity’s evolution for the
better and its technocracy. It also pursues the philosophical perspective that defines
Lem’s early work, what Andrzej Stoff described as a belief in the “permanence
of human nature [as] the last reference point in a world of constant change”.007
However, at a closer look, there are important differences in the two. With the crew
reduced to 40, the ship (called Ikarie) less colossal in its proportions and the timeframe
compressed, the film portrays space, time and human interactions within them
on a much more modest scale. It adds new personal and inter-personal conflicts and
for the most part eliminates the book’s expansive reflections on science, politics,
history and man’s aesthetic experience.008
There is also a shift in the overall ideo-
007 Andrzej Stoff, Stanisław Lem. In: Bernard A. Cock (ed.), Europe Since 1945: An Encyclopedia. New
York – London: Garland Publishing Inc. 2001, p. 778.
008 For a fuller comparison of Lem’s The Magellan Nebula and Polák’s Ikarie XB 1 see Krzystof Loska,
Lem on Film. In: Peter Swirski (ed.), The Art and Science of Stanisław Lem. Montréal – London:
McGill-Queen’s University Press 2006, pp. 153–8.
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logical tone. In transposing the book into a changed historical context, the film only
reproduces some of Lem’s soc-realist convictions while ostensibly modifying others.
Ikarie XB 1 was created at a particularly loaded historical moment. The
years that separate its 1963 release from the novel’s publication coincided with an
increased frenzy in the “space race”, as the Soviets and the Americans began to
score their significant “firsts” in a quest for cosmic dominance. In 1955, the U.S.
president Eisenhower announced plans to put into space the first artificial satellite,
almost immediately followed by the Soviets’ pledge to beat them to it. The work
on the script began in 1958, in the wake of the launch of Sputnik 1 and Sputnik 2
(carrying Laika as the first living being in space) the previous year, and its preproduction
at Prague’s Barrandov Studios commenced only months after the first man
in space, Yuri Gagarin, completed an orbit of the Earth in April 1961. This was a period
that witnessed almost fantastical achievements of science and technology, one
that in the words of a contemporary Czechoslovak documentary achieved a “breaking-through
of cosmic frontiers”.009
It was in this heady atmosphere of awe and anticipation
that Polák and co-author of Ikarie’s script Pavel Juráček presumably felt
justified to move the temporal setting of Lem’s future back by a whole millennium, to
the twenty-second century, only 200 years away from their own present.
Literary tales of space travel containing elaborate accounts of science
(or quasi-science) go back to Jules Verne’s novel De la Terre à la Lune (From the
Earth to the Moon, 1865). An interesting cinematic example of a “realistic” space
excursion is the Danish silent film Himmelskibet (Trip to Mars, 1918) about a trip
to Mars.010
Turning the flight itself into an adventure, Himmelskibet is also considered
to be an early cinematic space opera, a sub-genre of science fiction that in
literature didn’t establish itself until the 1920s, most notably with Edward E. “Doc”
Smith’s early interstellar novel The Skylark of Space (written by 1919 and published
in 1928). Fiction pre-dated, and greatly stimulated, scientific research. At times,
the two would meaningfully intersect, as for example in Fritz Lang’s 1929 film Die
Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon).011
But the space programme of the 1950s
ushered in a radically new era of intensified scientific activity, in which dreams were
being turned into reality in a sustained manner. This only further inflamed the pub-
lic’s imagination and appetite for discovery.
A golden age of science fiction cinema, the 1950s gave birth to an extraordinary
array of space exploration films, both fictional and documentary (and occasionally
mixed). Some of these openly proclaimed that in the future space travel
009 Před startem do vesmíru (1960).
010 Brian Clegg, Final Frontier: The Pioneering Science and Technology of Exploring the Universe. New
York: St. Martin’s Press 2014, p. 16.
011 See Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew, Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever. Rediscovering Woman in
the Moon. In: Joe McElhaney (ed.), A Companion to Fritz Lang. Chichester: Wiley 2015, pp. 554–
586. See also Glenn Erikson’s review of Vasili Zhuravlyov’s Kosmicheskiy reys: Fantasticheskaya
novella (1935) on http://www.dvdtalk.com/dvdsavant/s2151reis.html [accessed 10. 6. 2016].
would become commonplace. Hollywood was the leading producer of thrilling space
extravaganzas, many of which were in colour (Destination Moon, 1950, Flight to Mars,
1950, Conquest of Space, 1955, This Island Earth, 1955, Forbidden Planet, 1956).
Soon enough, other countries outside of America also got in on the act, most notably
Britain (Spaceways, 1953, The Quatermass Xperiment, 1955) and Japan 宇宙大戦争
(Battle in Outer Space, 1959). Towards the end of the decade, Eastern bloc countries
began to trade on the Soviets’ victorious position in the space race, with films
including the Soviet Дорога к звёздам (Road to The Stars, 1958) and Небо зовёт
(Battle Beyond the Sun, 1959), the GDR-Polish co-production Der schweigende Stern
(The Silent Star, 1960), and Muž z prvního století (Man from the First Century, 1962),
Czechoslovakia’s first science fiction film featuring space travel.012
With these films, the Moon, Mars and Venus became well-trodden territories
of the big screen.013
In comparison, Ikarie XB 1’s journey was far more ambi-
tious – the film was among the first to realise a mission beyond the boundaries of
the Solar System.014
Ironically, when American International Pictures released the
film in the United States in 1964, under the title Voyage to the End of the Universe,
it was given a new ending, swapping shots of Ikarie’s destination, the “White Planet”,
with those of Manhattan (the mysterious “Green Planet” of the U.S. version).015
This absurd scene of homecoming, which stripped Czechoslovakia of a symbolic cosmic
triumph, nevertheless points to the film’s own unusual approach to the genre. In
contrast to most space operas which emphasise conquest though visual spectacle,
Ikarie’s epic odyssey, despite its heroic narrative, is largely a pretext for turning
the gaze back at man – his own anxious response to the future, manifest though his
everyday, earthly concerns.
Indeed, for the duration of the voyage, Ikarie XB 1 demonstrates a remarkable
lack of interest in the universe as a place. There are no planets with barren
or picturesque landscapes to behold, no awe-inspiring arrays of flying saucers or
alien beings. Beyond such attractions, the universe itself, much like the sea, is not
a space in which the trajectory of movement can be clearly marked cinematographically;
there is no path to follow, no visible trace to leave behind. Thus, with the
exception of several brief “exterior” shots that punctuate the narrative, the universe
figures largely within an iconography of longing: it is gazed at from inside,
through an enormous observatory window, a sublime image of a star-studded black
void. Instead of outwards, the camera is directed inwards, into the “inner space” of
012 See Gary Westfahl’s comprehensive study of this genre prior to, and during this period: The Spacesuit
Film. A History, 1918–1969. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 2012.
013 At around the same time all these destinations were being reached off-screen, by Soviet unmanned
probes.
014 G. Westfahl, op. cit., p. 240.
015 For a brief comparison between the Czechoslovak and American releases see M. Brooke, op. cit.,
p. 12; for a discussion of the U.S. promotion of the film, see Jindřiška Bláhová, “They’ve Seen the
Impossible... They’ve Lived the Incredible...” Repackaging Czechoslovak Films for the US Market
during the Cold War. Iluminace 24, 2012, no. 3, pp. 138–145.
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the spaceship and the human mind that dwells within. It is here that Polák stages
a spectacle of a technologically and aesthetically perfected world.016
In this respect, Ikarie XB 1 is a symptomatic product of the so-called Cold
War “thaw”, an era marked by a “peaceful coexistence” between the East and the
West, accompanied by an intense cultural and economic competition. In an effort
to match the West, newly image-conscious countries of the Eastern bloc began to
encourage highly visible displays of home-grown art, design and mass commodities
that were to represent the socialist way of life on the international scene. In addition
to technological and industrial innovation, the new political weapon became
the more “innocent” domain of lifestyle.017
Following a host of international exhibitions
that encouraged a culture of comparison and exchange, Ikarie XB 1 began its
life immediately in the wake of the most important of them in recent history – the
Brussels EXPO of 1958. Here socialist countries surprised the world by exhibiting
architecturally progressive pavilions, among which the Czechoslovakian one was
crowned with the Grand Prix.
016 Nota bene – the change of the title from Lem’s Magellan Nebula to “Silver Comet” of the first
scripts, and finally, via several other titles, to Ikarie XB 1 reflects the film’s own focus.
017 For an excellent account of this cultural competition see David Crowley and Jane Pavitt, Cold War
Modern: Design 1945–1970. London: V&A Publishing 2008.
With a widescreen format and a staggering budget of five million Crowns,
which was to guarantee the film’s exceptional production value, Ikarie XB 1 was
undoubtedly conceived in this logic of international competition. It was to be a representative
showcase of Czechoslovakia’s capability of impressive cultural (and, in
cinematic terms, technological) achievements. Film, with its huge popular appeal,
was in a privileged position to confidently assert an image of a small socialist coun-
try’s modernity. Like Oldřich Lipský’s earlier science fiction comedy Muž z prvního
století, Ikarie presents cutting-edge technological wonders and futuristic objects
of desire among visually striking modernist spaces. But its vision is more grown-up
and sophisticated, promising to elevate the science fiction genre from its low-brow
status.
Just Imagine… The New Man
In his 1905 novel A Modern Utopia, H.G. Wells provides a detailed account
of an imaginary, more perfect society living in a parallel world similar to ours. In the
first chapter, he outlines “very definite artistic limitations” to narrating utopia:
There must always be a certain effect of hardness and thinness
about utopian speculations. Their common fault is to be comprehensively
jejune. That which is the blood and warmth of reality of
life is largely absent; there are no individualities, but only generalised
people. In almost every utopia […] one sees handsome
but characterless buildings, symmetrical and perfect cultivations,
and a multitude of people, healthy, happy, beautifully dressed, but
without any personal distinction whatever […] The thing that is
merely proposed […] however rational, however necessary, seems
strange and inhuman in its clear, hard, uncompromising lines, its
unqualified angles and surfaces.018
The passage suggests that the utopian paradigm is in itself inherently vexed. And,
as if to prove the point, Wells then proceeds to introduce precisely the kind of
schematically virtuous, generalised characters in the book.019
His later utopian novels
Men Like Gods (1923) and The Shape of Things to Come (1933) are similarly
populated by perfected human species.
Like Wells, Pavel Juráček was keenly aware of the pitfalls of formulaic utopian
imaginings. While working on the script, he made a point in his diary that he
knew better than to imitate the “stupid”, overly virtuous ideals of the communist
018 H.G. Wells, A Modern Utopia [New York]: Sheba Blake Publishing 2013, p. 11.
019 For more on this point, and a broader discussion of utopian writing, see Christopher S. Ferns, Narrating
Utopia. Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press
1999, pp. 5–7.
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man, as had been outlined by earlier socialist films including Der schweigende Stern
and Небо зовёт.020
Years later, however, the chronically self-doubting Juráček acknowledged
his defeat, issuing a particularly damning remark on Ikarie XB 1:
[It is] stuck in a future which is awfully sterile. When I remember
what rubbish I wrote in the dialogues of those noble puppets racing
through the universe in a shoebox with five-point stars, I turn red
and feel like hiding under the bed.021
Juráček, it seems, felt particularly embarrassed at the instrumentalist use of the
“noble human” within the context of Socialist Realism. Perhaps with a degree of personal
and historical bias, Juráček saw what Lem saw when he too distanced himself
from Obłok Magellana, rejecting it as “too sweet” an “extract of Socialist Realism”.022
The central premise of both the novel and the film was indeed one of Marxist-Leninist
doctrine: in the future, capitalism will be eradicated and hand in hand
with advances in science and technology, a communist society will become more enlightened.
There will be equality and order, better material provision for all, and
people will be generally happier, enjoying a better quality of life. Although ideas of
scientific and human progress were essentially an inheritance of a broader myth of
modernity, and shared by both socialist and capitalist regimes,023
they gained specific
contours within the communist ideology. Communism identified itself with a radically
new phase of history that had to be constructed from scratch while overcoming
both the past and the present. In such a worldview, utopias became useful – not,
however, for pure speculation but instead for fast-forwarding humanity into a more
desired space and time. The opposing notions of utopianism and realism did not seem
contradictory but, rather, more compatible than ever. Utopias offered themselves as
a testing ground for possible iterations of the future in the process of its building.
So who are Ikarie’s utopians? Like the spaceship itself, the crew signifies
an idealised world in miniature: it is multi-national, multi-generational and has
a traditional gender divide. Its foreign-sounding names posit the future society
as a community “built around international co-operation and notions of universal
brother- and sisterhood”.024
This recurrent trope in socialist cinema of the time
was already present in earlier science fiction films, including Kurt Maetzig’s Der
schweigende Stern and Lipský’s Muž z prvního století, in which the world unites
020 Pavel Juráček, Deník (1959–1974). Prague: Národní filmový archiv 2003, p. 260. This passage is
also cited in I. Adamovič, op. cit., p. 184.
021 P. Juráček, op. cit., pp. 870–1.
022 “Lem’s Opinion” available on: http://archive-pl-2013.com/open-archive/2682730/2013-08-22/79
766616d7268a8f40d17f614cb27fba [accessed 10. 6. 2016].
023 Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe. The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West.
Cambridge, Mass. – London: MIT Press 2000.
024 M. Brooke, op. cit., p. 4.
via a spectacular multi-screen video-wall conference (putting to “good use” Josef
Svoboda’s award-winning projection system, Polyecran). However, in contrast to
the multi-racial communities in both of these earlier films, Ikarie XB 1 is uniformly
white. And despite its manifest egalitarianism, it is not a world without its internal
hierarchy. The old and the young, men and women may all be equal partners in professional
matters, but the old are gently patronised (astrologist Anthony is called
“the granddad” and mocked for his sentimental relationship with his robot Patrik)
and women’s roles are largely confined to supporting, if not “decorative”, ones, with
little opportunity to face up to adversity, go astray or carry any decision-making
responsibility. Thus the most “heroic” female character ends up being the pregnant
Štefa, whom we see very little but who gives birth just before the film’s ending, in
what is a vital, and near-mystical event, and one of the film’s two climaxes.
The group on board of the Ikarie is an elite one of highly educated, cultivated
individuals – the scientist was, after all, the social ideal of the time. But it
is impossible to ignore that this group is also one of predominantly youthful, gymnastic
and good-looking bodies, flaunted in scenes showing exercise, showering
and dances (Polák hired fashion models and other good-looking non-actors to play
the extras).025
Though the emphasis on young, perfectly svelte bodies echoes the
classical and traditional utopian bodily ideal, it should also be seen as the filmmakers’
re-focussing on the young generation (as subjects and audience), in a gesture
of distancing from the previous era. The key concern for socialist utopias was the
new man – his moral, rational, emotional and physical dimensions, and, above all,
his relation to the wider collective. Thus Juráček and Polák’s script begins with
a forward, in which the authors emphasize that it is a search for this new man that
motivates their endeavour. Not only that, it gives their project a unique character
within the science fiction genre:
What will people be like in fifty years? And what about later, in
a hundred, or two hundred years? Our story won’t and can’t provide
a full answer. It does nevertheless attempt to capture some of
the characteristics of the people who will live in a classless communist
society of the future. We deliberately didn’t foreground
technologies as is the convention in science fiction.’026
As is evident from the critical reception of Ikarie XB 1 and especially Muž z prvního
století, Czechoslovak commentators felt current science fiction productions were
too obsessed with new technologies at the expense of re-drawing man. These foreign
films were not, the critics felt, pushing the boundary of the human enough,
025 I. Adamovič, op. cit., p. 186.
026 Barrandov Studio a.s., archive collection: Scripts and Production Documents, Pavel Juráček and
Jindřich Polák, “Stříbrná kometa”, screenplay, february 1961, p. 2.
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348 — 349
portraying him instead too conservatively, as a product of the present. A more transcendental
approach was needed that would re-imagine man beyond the limited
horizons of today.
To some, Muž z prvního století provided the answer. Pitched as a satirical
comedy, the film derives its humour from a confrontation between a more mature society
500 years into the future and a self-centred, corrupted antihero who travels there
from the present, only to expose his inadequacy. The critics received the film’s exaggerated
polarisation with surprising earnestness, interpreting it, tendentiously,
as a biting attack on surviving remnants of bourgeois frivolity and vice. The director
Oldřich Lipský was all too happy to confirm this was his intention, stressing the film
was no attempt to predict the future.027
Still, the future man had to be given specific
features, and Muž z prvního století shows him as a superior being – highly rational,
cerebral and blissfully unaware of envy or self-indulgence. When asked about this,
027 See Jozef Vagadaj, Okolo Muža z prvého storočia. Smena, 1962, (12/4), p. 13. For further such
readings see Ivan Bonko, Veselo o budúcnosti. Predvoj, 1962 (15/3), p. 18; I. Vlha, Súčasný film
z budúcnosti. Pravda, 1962 (24/4), p. 2.
Lipský explained: “To portray these characters I consulted scientists. According to
them the brain will in the future be more dominant than the emotions. People’s interpersonal
relations will be colder. This was the departure point for our script.”028
Science could of course be mobilised to legitimise such thoroughly speculative thinking
but, despite such official utterances, Lipský’s future perfect man was evidently
conceived in a light-hearted spirit, as a caricature of futuristic stereotypes.
Critics were less forgiving when commenting on Ikarie XB 1, which to many
revealed in a very concrete form the contrived nature and sheer banality of utopiacome-true.
Concerns were raised already in “peer reviews” commissioned by the
producers at Barrandov Studios to comment on various stages of the script. As
one of their authors pointed out, Ikarie’s future man gives little opportunity for any
development, rendering him effectively static (and thus non-cinematic): “everyone
is essentially the same at the end of the story as they were at its beginning.”029
Later, several reviewers felt Ikarie’s characters were portrayed as lacking in depth,
as overly pathetic, moralising and naïve.030
Unlike Muž z prvního století, Ikarie, with
its earnest and “honest” approach, could not hide behind satire and hyperbole. To
a degree, the critics had a point. The film plot contains little internally-motivated
conflict, and the crew’s pervasive self-discipline and sobriety seems to preclude
any interesting expressions of disobedience or deviance. Instead, it instils an almost
inhuman sense of decorum where even amorous pursuits are conducted in
a calm, chaste, sex-less spirit. Svenson’s and Michal’s momentary disease (and
madness) are readily cured and suppressed, only to reinforce the idea that the future
has eliminated any mental or physical blemishes.
Interestingly, critics internationally did not see this as an issue; it may have
been the specificity of the Czechoslovak milieu at the time that local commentators
were growing sensitive to anything that smacked of schematism, didacticism or
preachy worthiness. And it did not help that Ikarie XB 1 did considerably more than
its predecessor to re-focus attention from future technological marvels to human
concerns, and portray men and women as subjects with “real” problems, emotions,
and occasionally even humour. After all, not everything is sterile on the Ikarie. Many
of the crew tackle their anxieties, restlessness, alienation and boredom, faced as
they are with the confines of an artificial environment and limited social interaction.
Human nature is tested face to face with extreme conditions and external dangers.
There are bouts of anger and moments of disappointment. Some fall in love, others
seek comfort in classical music, yet others worry about “avitaminosis”. Above all,
there is all the time in the world to reflect on one’s condition. What the local jour-
028 J. Vagadaj, op. cit., p. 13.
029 Dramaturgical Analysis of Draft Screenplay Ikarie XB 1 by Pavel Juráček and Jindřich Polák,
Assessment Signed by Jiří Procházka, 27/7/1961.Národní filmový archiv, prosim doplnit slozku/
signaturu, Jiří Procházka, ‘Odborný posudek’, 27/07/1961:1.
030 See, for example, Jaroslav Boček, Malá česká sci-fi. Kulturní tvorba 1, 1963, no. 28, p. 13, or
Vladimír Bystov, Mezi slepými jednooký králem. Film a divadlo 7, 1963, no. 18, pp. 9, 18.
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350 — 351
nalists may not have fully appreciated – and what the Trieste festival’s highbrow
jury (of prominent figures including Kingsley Amis and Umberto Eco) did recognise –
was that a humanistic approach such as Ikarie XB 1’s was until that point unusual
within science fiction cinema, and perhaps even ahead of its time.031
A (Credible) Voyage through a Spaceship’s Interior
Any visualisation of the future involves a leap of imagination, a speculation
about what the future will be like, and what it will look like. Such leap is an
act of crossing the limits of the familiar world while at the same time never fully
abandoning it. For it to speak to us, we must be able to recognise ourselves in the
future; it has to show itself as an unfamiliar version of the present. Thus science
fiction films are principally composites of already known elements, brought together
in a manner that appears not so much new as strange. In the first blossoming of
science fiction cinema during the 1920s and 1930s, production design famously
derived much from – and ultimately, exposed to a wide audience – modern American
architecture and European art modernisms, most notably cubism, futurism, expressionism,
constructivism, Art Deco and Bauhaus style. The visually striking sets of
films like Аэлита (Aelita: Queen of Mars, 1924), Metropolis (1927), High Treason
(1929), Just Imagine (1930) or Things to Come (1936) translated for film some of
these movements’ most forward-looking formal features, while adding to these new
fantastic elements of architectural, urbanistic and technological utopias.032
These
films featured radical, but recognisable, visual idioms such as skyscrapers, expressionistic
diagonals, stark geometric forms and shiny industrial surfaces, all of which
had the requisite feel of futuristic otherness. Utopian or dystopian, they typically
asserted a “modernist, masculinist and technocratic” vision of tomorrow’s world.033
Especially William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come became an influential template
for designing an optimistic, rationalised future in what Juan Antonio Ramirez
has called a “Streamline Moderne” style.034
In an apparent shift, science fiction films of the 1950s began to turn away
from exotic avant-gardisms and other overtly fantastical elements. Coinciding with
the American and Soviet space programmes (though the latter was notoriously se-
031 Writing a report on the Trieste festival, for example, a British journalist wrote about Ikaria XB
1: “Directed with great sensitivity, it is the most believable and dignified science fiction made
anywhere since the war, and the only film on record in which passengers on a spaceship behave
like adult, intelligent and sophisticated beings.”Elliott Stein, Saucers Awe the Adriatic. Financial
Times, 9. 9. 1963, p. 12.
032 Donald Albrecht, Designing Dreams: Modern Architecture in the Movies. New York: Harper & Row
1986, pp. 52–68, 153–174; David T. Fortin, Architecture and Science-Fiction Film: Philip K. Dick
and the Spectacle of Home. Farnham: Ashgate 2011, p. 31.
033 Tim Bergfelder – Sue Harris – Sarah Street, Film Architecture and the Transnational Imagination:
Set Design in 1930s European Cinema. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2007, p. 113.
034 Juan Antonio Ramírez, Architecture for the Screen: A Critical Study of Set Design in Hollywood’s
Golden Age. Jefferson, N.C. – London: McFarland & Co. 2004, p. 192.
cretive) was a new demand for verisimilitude and “authenticity” within the genre.
Future-ness had to be not only believable but also convincing. An apparent contradiction
thus arose: designers were attempting to envision dwellings, machines and
gadgets that could function, while continuing to capture the “out of this world” moment
of magic. Spaceship design especially was now routinely discussed with scientists
and engineers, a tendency that culminated with Stanley Kubrick’s art director
Harry Lange engaging NASA in a direct collaboration for 2001.035
In this regard,
Ikarie was no exception, with a team of scientific advisors036
and with art director
Jan Zázvorka and Polák dispatched to Moscow with a suitcase of sketches, seeking
approval from yet more experts there.037
It was later reported that Ikarie XB 1’s vision
of the future was so well executed it “bordered on probability” and was taken
to be “documentary”038
footage of the future. As Ivan Adamovič notes, “it is telling
that Ikarie XB 1 was not perceived as a work of art but, rather, a view of what life
would be in a distant communist society.”039
Yet, with all the talk about “realism”,
futuristic sets continued to rely on cutting-edge art movements and technologies
for their raw material, especially where the two intersected.
During pre-production, Polák and Juráček visited Stanisław Lem in Poland,
seeking detailed visual clues directly at the source. They saw the disparity between
a book, which can work with abstraction or rough sketching, and cinema, a medium
with closely established audio-visual links to reality. Whereas a book can rely on the
imagination, cinema gives concrete form; it describes. As Polák later said: “In film
even the greatest fiction is completely realistic. Something simply has to be placed
in front of the camera.”040
Armed with a list of questions about the look of future
fabrics and furniture, Polák and Juráček nevertheless met with a complete lack of
interest on the part of the writer.041
Ikarie’s spaceship was conceived not merely as a vehicle travelling from
place A to B (or from time A to B) but also, and primarily, as a living space. Its exterior,
a speedboat-like vessel equipped with three detachable explorer shuttles in
the shape of flying saucers, is seen only in a handful of brief special effect shots.
In contrast, its lavish interior is given ample exposure. It is fashioned as a self-contained
world and a “total” scenographic experience of the future, in which an array
of visual and aural expressions is synthesised in the manner of a Gesamtkunstwerk.
035 Christopher Frayling, The 2001 File: Harry Lange and the Design of the Landmark Science Fiction
Film. London: Rare Art Press 2015.
036 See M. Brooke, op. cit., for a listing of some of the collaborators.
037 Jaroslav Jiran, op. cit., p. 44.
038 See Ikarie XB 1 v tisku švýcarském. Československá kinematografie ve světle zahraničního tisku,
1965, no. 10,p. 98–99 [clipping from La Tribune de Genève, (Genève, 6. 9. 1965, Feuille dduill de
Neuchatel)].
039 I. Adamovič, op. cit., p. 184.
040 Jaroslav Jiran, op. cit., p. 43.
041 Ibid.
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Architecture, furniture design, clothing, light, screens, kinetic objects and electronic
music all come together to compose a monumental multimedial space that is
at once a “machine for living” and a theatrical stage.
Jan Zázvorka’s set design is one of Ikarie XB 1’s most remarkable achievements,
one that contributed to the film’s international success and continues to
fascinate today. Before Ikarie XB 1, Zázvorka had already been the go-to film architect
for over two decades, responsible for over 100 film and television titles. His
portfolio includes other science fiction films, Otakar Vávra’s Krakatit (1948), where
he met with Vávra’s then-assistant Polák, and Muž z prvního století released a year
earlier. For the latter, Zázvorka produced kooky sets that evoked contemporary art
movements as well as mid-century modern design (Umberto Eco, for one, compared
them to the work of Bruno Munari and his disciples).042
In the cacophony of playful
forms and objects the film echoed the then-popular “Brussels style”. For Ikarie XB 1,
Polák and Zázvorka opted for a more purist, structured, geometric style reminiscent
of pre-war modernism, though some of the architectural elements from the previous
film make a re-appearance.
The first third of the film is a parade of the ship’s impressive décor. One
by one, we see a central navigation room, video-communication room, dining room,
the “chlorellon” section, gymnasium, observatory, relaxation room, and, in between
these, corridors. Together, they picture a highly technologised environment of glistening
silver-painted surfaces and transparent plastics. All the common rooms are
uncluttered, open-plan interiors, which Jan Kališ’s photography generously shows
off. Corridors and walls are used as framing devices for actors’ actions. They either
flatten space, forming magnificent, often luminous, backdrops, or offer a deep perspectival
view for added drama, as is the case with the film’s “signature” octagonal
corridor, which, shot from a one-point perspective, leads the eye towards the vanishing
point. This is the most frequently mentioned detail of the film’s architecture,
evoked for its similarity to the corridor in Kubrick’s 2001.043
The extraordinary visual effect of Ikarie XB 1’s décor is created by a carefully
orchestrated composition of opaque and transparent volumes, textured surfaces,
high-contrast patterns and lights, all of which make a brilliant use of black
042 Corriere della Sera, 13 July 1963, transcription in: Zprávy z festivalu v Triestě, 1963. Národní
filmový archiv – signaturu prosim. Nota bene, Eco’s comparison was no throwaway remark. Earlier
in 1962, he wrote about his friend Munari in an essay about electronic/cybernetic art, “La forma
del disordine”, published in Almanacco Litterario Bompiani, and a catalogue essay for the kinetic
art and “programmed art” exhibition Arte programmata. Arte cinetica. Opere moltiplicate. Opera
aperta (May 1962), organised by Munari and Giorgio Soavi for Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in Milan.
043 Indeed the corridor is subject to much Internet debate and appreciation. See, for example, Anorak,
“The most unforgettable corridors in sci-fi – in photos” on http://flashbak.com/the-most-unforgettable-corridors-in-sci-fi-in-photos-11857/
[accessed 10. 6. 2016]; see also “Kogonda’s” video
tracing the one-point-view in all of Kubrick’s cinema: https://vimeo.com/48425421 [accessed
10. 6. 2016]. But it is worth noting that Ikarie’s corridor has its own cinematic antecedents in King
Vidor’s The Crowd (1928), and especially Alain Resnais’s L’ Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year
in Marienbad, 1961).
and white film. Like in the earlier Muž z prvního století, the décor is everywhere
bathed in electric light and permeated with kinetic movement, accentuated by whirring
and bleeping electronic sounds. Zázvorka was probably not immune to contemporary
explorations of the expressive possibilities of movement (through mechanical
means or illusion), light and time by the optical and kinetic art movements.044
In
almost every interior of the Ikarie there are kinetic features that theatrically activate
the space: large cylindrical tubes with bubbles travelling through clear liquid,
turning and flickering video-eyes connected to a central monitoring system, revolving
structures that cast abstract light and shadow formations à la László Moho-
ly-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator (1922–1930) or, more recently, Otto Peine’s Light
Ballets (from 1959). Video monitors and screens are omnipresent, showing the inside
and outside of the ship or, more interestingly, psychedelic moiré patterns (as
when commander MacDonald loses connection with his wife Rena on Earth).
All the architectonic elements in Ikarie XB 1 are designed to maximise an
optical spectacle and intensify the sensory experience of space. Many of the walls
are backlit transparent or semi-transparent plastic sheets. Other walls are dark,
with perforated repeat patterns that allow light through its openings. One of the
044 Both had been growing in prominence internationally since the 1955 “Le Mouvement” exhibition at
Denise René gallery in Paris.
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354 — 355
dining room scenes, for example, opens with a shot framing a partition of corrugated
plastic, which becomes animated with heavily distorted images of bodies walking
behind it. Here film camera optics finds an ideal match in living architecture, and
vice versa – just as Siegfried Giedion noted about modernist architecture, “Only film
can make [it] intelligible”.045
Imposing, the film’s scenography often threatens to upstage the actors.046
A gym scene opens with a giant revolving sphere encircled by a ring of plastic stencils
(a sun lamp) before the naked torso of exercising Svenson moves into frame.
With lights attached to its top, the sun sculpture creates moving patterns of light
around the room.047
The birth of Štefa’s baby is first announced by amplified sounds
of a crying infant, visually matched with a close-up of a flashing speaker, followed
by another one positioned under a monumental constructivist ceiling. We eventually
see the baby as an image within an image, as it is broadcast live via a large circular
video monitor.
In this ultra-modern world, everyday life is saturated with technology,
which performs human tasks and mediates human relations. This is perhaps most
poignantly expressed in a scene when the crew fall into a temporary coma, caused
by a mysterious radiation. As they sleep, their machines seem to render them redundant,
as they continue to dispense meals, flash lights, make announcements and,
in the case of robot Patrik, move freely around. There is a sense of ambivalence in
the film’s attitudes towards such a future. Not only are the cool, efficient spaces
of automation and surveillance in need of some humanisation, they can also become
alienating and even hostile. In a delirious opening shot, the angular corridor suddenly
lights up as it senses Michal entering it, highlighting his anguish as much as
its own dramatic geometry. As Michal proceeds down to the “chlorellon” section, the
image starts rocking and the room’s columns turn into a phantasmagorical jungle
threatening to swallow him.
045 Andres Janser – Arthur Rüegg, Hans Richter. New Living: Architecture, Film, Space. Baden: Lars
Müller Publishers 2001, p. 22.
046 MGM’s art supervisor Cedric Gibbons once made a similar observation about his work for the film
Grand Hotel (1932): “motion picture settings usually serve the purpose of providing a background
for the action of the picture. Here, however, the sets take the role of an actor, becoming one of the
central figures in the story. ” J. A. Ramírez, op. cit., p. 188.
047 Only from a later shot we learn the turning sphere is part of a larger exercising platform, a monument-like
formation that recalls French visionary architect Étienne-Louis Boullée’s 1784 proposal
for Isaac Newton’s Cenotaph.
Fashions Fit for the New Age
Within the science fiction genre, costumes and costume-related artifice
are among the most effective means though which to convey future-ness. Whereas
architecture provides compelling settings within which bodies move, dress and
adornments attach themselves directly onto the body; they act upon it and visibly
transform it. Through dress bodies not only inhabit the future but, more radically
perhaps, the future also inhabits bodies.
Ikarie XB 1’s costumes were designed by Ester Krumbachová, Jan Skalický
and Vladimír Synek. Both Krumbachová and Skalický had already enjoyed a successful
career in the theatre while Synek had worked in film since the 1950s. Krumbachová
especially was a prolific and well-established costume designer (among
her many other talents), with a decade-long career that had included prestigious
collaborations with director Miroslav Macháček (who plays Marcel Bernard in Ikarie
XB-1) and scenographer Josef Svoboda at Prague’s National Theatre.048
Like Záz-
048 With a lack of accessible archival material related to the film’s production design, it is difficult to
know how exactly Krumbachová worked with Skalický and Synek, and how she worked with the director
(who himself admitted to a controlling personality). In later recalling some of the production
details, assistant director Hynek Bočan mentions mostly Krumbachová, singling her out as the most
significant contributor to the costumes. Rozhovor s Hynkem Bočanem, in “Bonusové materiály”,
DVD Ikarie XB 1, (Filmexport Home Video 2011).
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356 — 357
vorka, Krumbachová had already worked with Lipský on Muž z prvního století, her
first foray into film. There she parodied the kind of futurist exoticism of pre-war
films like Аэлита, employing asymmetrical geometric shapes, metallic fabrics and
rigid plastic accessories (the film even features a futurist fashion show).
For Ikarie XB 1, Krumbachová developed a softer, more restrained look that
would blend into the film’s solemn ambience. The ship’s crew wear near-identical outfits,
though these are not the prerequisite utilitarian overalls popular within earlier
space operas. The costumes here are two-piece, more casual daywear than workwear
and seem to be partly derived from the fashionable youth styles of the late-1950s
and early-1960s. They consist of a tunic, a prominent cowl neck collar (evocative of
the spacesuit silhouette) and trousers in a contrasting shade. The tunics are worn
with a semi-transparent organza over-layer, which reveals a big “Ikarie” logo on the
back (and in women’s dress cleverly shows off the female figure while at the same
time obscuring it). As a small concession to futuristic gadgets, the crew sport two
pieces of wearable tech – an unspecified monitor hidden under the top layer of the
tunic, and a “personal transmitter”, worn on the wrist like a watch.
Variations in individual garments are only minimal. The purpose of these
costumes is not to demarcate the individual but rather to emphasise the individuals’
subjection to the higher purpose of a collective project. Indeed, even gender differentiations
are limited only to slight alterations in cut and detail – women’s collars
are made from more decorative black lurex fabric. In her “realistic”, “civilian”
approach, Krumbachová located Ikarie’s costumes not in the radical otherness of
a far-off future but, rather, in a plausible, imaginable near future. The costumes
are in dialogue with fashion, although perhaps ironically, fashion was about to get
ahead of fiction. In 1964 the highly structured, white-and-silver “Space Age” look
would be launched in Paris, instantly rendering Ikarie’s version of modern elegance
too conservative. Nowhere is the proximity between Ikarie’s costuming and fashion
more apparent than in Hopkins’s 110th birthday party, where the crew suddenly
transform into a soigné society. The men don identical “evening wear” of dark,
tapered trousers paired with white collarless jackets that evoke the austerity of
modernist architecture but also the sleek minimalism of Pierre Cardin’s menswear
of the 1950s. Traditional embellishments of men’s suits such as lapels, buttons and
bow ties have been discarded in favour of a black criss-cross strap motif at the
neckline (as seen in Cardin’s 1956 women’s collection). But the party serves above
all to showcase women’s sophisticated cocktail dresses made in shimmering fabrics
(which could be lamés, brocades and satins but also synthetic textiles). With
cinched-in waits, partially exposed shoulders, asymmetrical draping and wide chiffon
sashes and shawls, these dresses emphasize the chic femininity of the 1950s
silhouette. They resemble what was seen of MacDonald’s wife’s dress, implying that
material luxuries are commonplace back on Earth.
The shooting script specifically refers only to Eva’s dress, describing it as
“strange evening dress, more like draped fabric”.049
This abstract idea may have
been taken directly from Lem who, as Polák recalled, was not prepared to entertain
the filmmakers’ specific design-related queries:
say, now they are making lurex, it’s a novelty. Do you think it would
fit in? Mr. Lem didn’t know what lurex was and said he saw costume
as an idea, and that he had met filmmakers like us before
who had really annoyed him with such specific questions and who
didn’t understand his artistic intentions. He said he sees the
girl as a beautiful young creature walking through a birch park,
everything is filled with fragrance, and it’s as if her dress was
floating on her. And I wanted to talk lurex or dyftyn or other loathsome
materialististic things, and what’s worse, I also wanted to
stick something on top of it, or sew something on, and otherwise
differentiate from contemporary fashion. Shock horror!050
049 Barrandov Studio a.s., archive collection: Scripts and Production Documents, Pavel Juráček and
Polák, ‘Za 200 let koncem června’ (Stříbrná kometa), shooting script, january 1962:59.
050 Cited in J. Jiran, op. cit., pp. 43–44.
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Just before the party, Eva comes to Brigitte’s private cabin fretting over her dress looking
good. With a prominent shawl collar forming a giant bow and sash on Eva’s back, the
dress has the exclusive look and feel of haute couture (something that Eva further reinforces
by adopting mannequin-like gestures). Brigitte’s comment, “Why, you did a pretty
good job on them! ”, indicates that the women are themselves responsible for their
own creations (though in this case, Eva’s “draped fabric” would require her to possess
expert seamstress skills), presumably to emphasize their nature as non-commodities.
What Polák’s recollection of his visit to Lem captures most vividly is the
close attention he himself paid to recent novelties in fashion and textiles, as they
would become a springboard for Ikarie’s costumes. His reflection on the process of
differentiating suggests a careful consideration of how to locate Ikarie’s particular
future in time. Are current fashion novelties appropriate for 200 years ahead? And
what kind of statement on future fashion would a close link with current materials,
styles and details effect? Utopian narratives had always been keenly aware of the
perils of fashion as a supremely precise dating device, and as a result typically
pictured dress as classical, timeless and “outside of fashion”. The popular nineteenth-century
utopia Voyage en Icarie (Travels in Icaria, 1840), which may have
inspired the title of Polák’s film, was no exception. Its author, the French socialist
Étienne Cabet, imagines Icaria’s dress to be highly tasteful, diverse and even opulent
but at the same time strictly rejects any “irrational” qualities of a capitalist
fashion system, such as luxury, exclusivity or programatic change.
Fashion in socialist countries after the Second World War also made a utopian
attempt to step outside of time, taking the form of a staunchly anti-fashion
stance. As Konstantina Hlaváčková and Djurjda Bartlett have shown, Eastern bloc
countries had during the Stalinist period rhetorically renounced Western fashion,
deeming it too redolent of capitalist individualism and excess. At its crudest, the
heavily ideologised socialist narrative rejected fashion’s very essence: a constant
self-renewal. A system based on permanence and utilitarianism was instituted in its
place, making the figure of the worker its aesthetic ideal.051
In the scene of Hopkins’s party, Ikarie makes a demonstrative turn towards
fashion, with all its connotations of refinement and glamour. This gesture is symptomatic
of the thaw years that began in earnest after Khrushchev’s denunciation
of Stalin in 1956, and which witnessed a gradual repositioning of Eastern fashion
in relation to the West. Somewhat amusingly, in 1961 one of the script’s “peer
reviewers” suggested changing this scene to one of a music concert, in order to
avoid considerable expense with the sets, expensive choreography and evening ex-
tra-gowns.052
Though his pragmatic advice may have been well-meant, it missed
the point entirely. The party played an essential role – to show that future utopia
needn’t be unstylish, that it can uphold fashion as a necessary expression of taste,
sexuality and, within given parameters, also individuality.
A clear distinction is nevertheless made between this version of high fashion
and one more traditionally emblematic of the “excesses” of bourgeois “decadence”.
This is brought into focus during an inspection of a mystery derelict spaceship,
the film’s only extended scene outside of the Ikarie. Upon an unexpected
discovery of a saucer-like craft, two of the crew are dispatched in an explorer
shuttle to examine it. They enter into darkness and gradually aim their torchlights
at an array of easily legible clues, pointing to a lifestyle of the rich and idle: a hand
clutching paper money, scattered gambling dice, several dead bodies including men
impeccably dressed in smart evening clothes, a posh-looking woman wrapped in
a fur collar. Sure enough, it is the clothes that help date the ship, if rather vaguely.
As one of the explorers announces: “Judging by their clothes, I’d say [they come
from the] twentieth [century]”, and “Women are wearing jewellery”. Past expressions
of luxury, then, are seen as anachronisms, as belonging to an out-dated idea
of beauty and glamour. And as the scene gradually reveals further sinister imagery,
all this material paraphernalia becomes directly implicated in a politicised image of
human depravity and debauchery.
051 Djurdja Bartlett, Fashion East: The Spectre that Haunted Socialism. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press
2010, pp. 99–180. Konstantina Hlaváčková, Czech Fashion, 1940-1970. Mirror of the Times.
Prague: Olympia 2000.
052 Národní filmový archiv, signatura, Šašek, “odborný posudek” for ‘Stříbrná kometa’ (shooting
script), 2/12/1961.
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360 — 361
Travelling through Time
The end effect of oddly clad intellects semi-sleepwalking through
the gangways of Polak’s vast Hotel Cosmos is a sort of “Space
Marienbad”.053
Let me return to the link I drew earlier between Ikarie XB 1 and Chris Mark-
er’s La Jetée. Perhaps made opportunistically, the connection does nevertheless
help illuminate a central, though rarely discussed, aspect of Ikarie XB 1 – its fascination
with the workings of time. La Jetée is a film about time, with a scenario that
proposes the possibility of moving in time and re-living a moment. Its protagonist
physically moves between different time zones, sent there by the scientific-fantastical
means of a laboratory “experiment”. In that regard, La Jetée belongs to an
older tradition of time travel narratives. In contrast, Ikarie XB 1 is patently a film
about travelling through space. Indeed, Polák later specified that he tried to eschew
the theme of time travel (which, he noted, had already been tackled in Muž z prvního
století). Instead, he wanted to arrive at a “pure genre film” situated in a single point
053 Elliott Stein, op. cit., p. 12.
in time.054
And yet, his film repeatedly engineers confrontations between different
time zones and temporalities. In a manner similar to time travel film, he juxtaposes
different points in time, in order to generate new insights and meanings. Except,
here the juxtapositions are achieved not by fantastical means but through scientific
speculation or various real objects-triggers.
Although the story of Ikarie XB 1 unfolds within a single, coherent time
zone, the very idea of time as a universal flow of events is immediately complicated,
narratively as well as cinematically. From early on, time is conceptualised as subject
to the scientific gaze while we are constantly being reminded of its unpredictability
and aberrations. For example, Ikarie’s scientists have calculated the length of
the crew’s artificially-induced sleep, but their predictions are in the end marred
by external forces. Then there is a video conversation between MacDonald and
his wife after Ikarie’s departure which reveals that the spaceship and its crew will
be subjected to considerable time dilation: when the crew arrives back on Earth,
MacDonald will have been away for 28-months in which time his wife will have aged
by 15 years, and their unborn baby will have grown to be a 15-year-old girl.055
Thus
from the very beginning, the film proposes a dual time frame in which to consider
the voyage. For the duration of the journey, time on the Ikarie and on Earth will be
bifurcated: compared with his, hers will appear drastically accelerated; compared
with hers, his will appear dramatically slowed down. Spatial distancing here goes
hand-in-hand with temporal distancing, so in effect, space travel becomes time
travel. Characteristically, though, in Ikarie XB 1 this is shown lessas a scientific
wonder than a source of personal angst and sacrifice for the couple.
But there is another aspect in which Ikarie XB 1 problematizes the notion
of time as simply a linear progression of events. Structurally, the film is in large part
an extended flashback, an “objective” recollection of events through the eyes of the
ship’s captain, Abajev. The film opens in medias res, with a scene showing Michal
running amok around the ship, a scene to which we then cyclically return towards the
end of the film. It is also interesting to note how the Ikarie’s journey through space
is experienced in temporal terms, by its crew, and how this is then mapped onto cinematic
time and the viewer’s subjective experience of it. The film follows the long journey,
which, demarcated by its start and finish, presents an otherwise empty itinerary
that has to be filled (hence the gym, party and other pastimes). The first part of the
film is marked by a distinct thinness of action, which deliberately foregrounds time
as duration for both the protagonists and the viewer. Unfilled, time is experienced
as slow-moving, monotonous and drawn-out. It becomes almost tangible, something
to be endured, like boredom. As one crew member tells another: “Something should
happen. It’s taking too long.” This is in sharp contrast to the condensed action of
054 Jaroslav Jiran, op. cit., p. 43.
055 The theme of time dilation is yet another aspect Ikarie shares with Muž z prvního století whose
original working title was “Einstein is to Blame”.
VoyagethroughSpace,TimeandUtopianModernisminIkarieXB1MarkétaUhlířová
362 — 363
the second part of the film in which time begins to move faster, and the initial contemplative
mode is exchanged for a dramatic build-up. Time, then, is not a universal
given but a felt experience, one that can be easily manipulated through cinema.
Throughout the journey, the future of the twenty-second century and its
various pasts are brought into close proximity via a variety of material objects that
represent other times. Some of these objects enable a mockery of the past’s naïve
ideas of the future, effecting a kind of retro-futuristic entertainment. In the dining
room, everyone has a laugh at the idea of a meal-in-a-pill, a late-nineteenth century
idea of progress (that was again gaining currency within space age-inspired mass
cultural imagination).056
Anthony’s robot Patrik too is deemed an amusing antique.
A descendent of Forbidden Planet’s anthropomorphic robot Robby, the technologically
primitive Patrik is openly ridiculed at an age of a computerised central operation
system. In contrast, Marcel’s grand piano, also anachronistic, impractical
and incongruous on the spaceship, gains a crucial importance as a reminder of the
beauty of twentieth century classical music (Arthur Honegger, to be precise).
The most significant of such encounters is one with the twentieth-century
spaceship. Its exploration is a crucial moment in the film, one which signals
a shift from the journey’s initial inaction to increasing drama. Through the derelict
ship, the Ikarie’s crew are “transported” into the late twentieth century. There they
find a magnificent tableau of death, with all life paused at a single moment, all
action frozen into a pose. By virtue of a “clean” destructive power of a poisonous
gas called “Tigger Fun”, bodies have been perfectly conserved so they look merely
asleep. This is a place of a temporal paralysis, time stands still here. And it is
a stillness of a photograph, an immobilised moment, a forensic record. The scene
resembles a museum of a strange past civilisation. But such an excursion into history
has a special gravitas for the perfect society of the twenty-second century
which had deemed the past unwanted. The explorers approach the ship like a site of
an archaeological excavation (indeed, one of them tells the Ikarie: “You should have
sent an archaeologist”), an entertaining thought given we are only 200 years away.
All the objects seen on the derelict spaceship have a symbolic meaning, like
in a traditional vanitas scene, only they do not allude to a general idea of life’s transience
but, more prosaically, to the transience of corrupt capitalist ways.057
Gradually,
we see a more gruesome picture, with yet more bodies ravaged by age, strewn
around the upper galleries of the ship – presumably, these did not have the benefit
of Tigger Fun’s mummification effect. The exploration then climaxes with the discov-
056 In the realm of cinema, the meal-in-a-pill was introduced in 1930 in the Fox Film Corporation
film Just Imagine. Polák himself would later brilliantly elaborate on the idea in his 16-part television
series Návštěvníci (The Visitors, 1983). For a more comprehensive historical account, see
Matt Nowak, Meal-in-a-pill. A Staple of Science Fiction, BBC online, 18/11/2014, available online:
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120221-food-pills-a-staple-of-sci-fi [accessed 10. 6. 2016].
057 In Lem’s novel the twentieth-century spaceship was specified as an American satellite filled with
imperialistic warmongers. Ikarie XB 1 is less explicit about its geographical provenance, although
the English language branding connotes the original meaning.
ery of the general, the main villain, a corpse in an advanced state of decomposition,
but with his military cap and aviator glasses still in place. As the crew bend over him
to get a better look, a dried-up piece of flesh falls off to reveal white skull underneath.
While the scene downstairs was a perfectly preserved time capsule, here the
explorers walk among history’s ruins.
The found ship becomes a materialisation of a collective memory that,
suppressed, comes back to haunt the Ikarie crew’s own present. Visiting it is an
act of remembering, and it is thoroughly appropriate that this finds its expression
in an eerie, disorienting sequence which begins with stumbling in darkness. And
of course, this particular “past” that is being remembered was a near future of
Ikarie XB 1’s and La Jetée’s time of making – an anxiety-ridden climate informed
by the horrors of the Second World War and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, which
represented a real possibility of a nuclear war.058
The films of course speak about
their own time, without doing so. As Fredric Jameson has it, science fiction acts to
“defamiliarise and restructure our experience of our own present”,059
transforming
this (un-knowable) present into “the determinate past of something yet to come”.060
In distancing ourselves from our own present, in making the present strange through
the perspective of the future, we can render it more legible. But there is also a sense of
warning in both films about the nature of time travel. Just like in La Jetée, Ikarie XB 1
seems to suggest that remembering can be a violent deed, and, more specifically,
that remembering by physically being there is a perilous act of transgression, akin
to the opening of Pandora’s box. The ship of the past may appear to be a wreck but
it turns out to be a deadly trap that does not let go of what it once swallows. And as
the past is reactivated (and its nuclear weapons with it), it causes the future and
the present to collapse into it.
058 For more on this in relation to La Jetée see Janet Harbord, Chris Marker. La Jetée. London – Cambridge,
MA: Afterall books & MIT 2009.
059 Ibid.
060 Fredric Jameson, Progress versus Utopia. Or, Can We Imagine the Future?, Science Fiction Studies
9, 1982, no. 2, Utopia and Anti-Utopia, p. 151 (emphasis in the original).
VoyagethroughSpace,TimeandUtopianModernisminIkarieXB1MarkétaUhlířová
364 — 365
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List of Archive Sources
• Barrandov Studios Archive (BSA)
Draft Screenplay Stříbrná kometa by Pavel Juráček
and Jindřich Polák, February 1961.
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Ikarie XB 1 by Pavel Juráček and Jindřich Polák,
Assessment Signed by Jiří Procházka, 27/7/1961.
Expert Assessment of the Shooting Script Stříbrná
kometa, Signed by Šašek, 2/12/1961.
Shooting Script of Ikarie XB-1 by Pavel Juráček
and Jindřich Polák.
VoyagethroughSpace,TimeandUtopianModernisminIkarieXB1MarkétaUhlířová