Orphans in Space: Forgotten Films from the Final Frontier
special edition for Roger That! 2021
To our knowledge this is the web debut of this remarkable little film.
Meteorites (Meteority / Метеориты) 
(Pavel Klushantsev, USSR, 1947)
Leningrad Studio of Popular Science Films
10 min., b&w, sound
English subtitles by Maria Vinogradova (2011)
Source: Gosfilmofond of Russia
The transition from World War II to the confrontation between two former allies, the USA and the USSR, generated intense interest in long-distance rocket development and, as a consequence, growing fascination with space travel. The secrecy-obsessed Soviet Union of the late Stalin period (1945-1953) was less open to public discussion of space-related issues than its American adversary. However, 1947, the year of the launching of the first Soviet long-range ballistic missile, saw several Soviet publications on rocket flight and outer space – as well as the appearance of Meteorites, a short educational film written, directed and co-photographed in 1947 for the Leningrad Popular Science Film Studio by Pavel Klushantsev (1910-1999), who was to become the most prominent representative of a small group of Soviet filmmakers focused on the theme of space exploration.
In accordance with the Soviet version of Marxism, Meteorites presented the history of an important branch of astronomy as the struggle between “progressive” and “reactionary” forces. However, the ideology expressed in the film was surprisingly understated for the time, an era when Soviet culture was accepting a new set of Cold War conventions, including the treatment of Western science as a force hostile toward its Russian counterpart. Non-Russian achievements in astronomy were presented in Meteorites in a generally positive light, as part of humankind’s drive for knowledge.
More importantly, Klushantsev’s film told the story of the efforts to understand the meteor/meteorite phenomenon with perfection and elegance rare in Soviet popular science cinema and virtually unique for the Soviet cinema of the late Stalin period, which was characterized by insistent and heavy-handed didactic attitudes.
The film’s opening title, drawn in the night skies by meteorites, sets a tone of melancholic, nearly mystic romanticism. This tonality is upheld through a sequence of historical illustrations composed around astronomical models enhanced by luminescent paints and ultraviolet rays; minimalist performances by nameless actors; and delicate cutout animation resembling the work of Lotte Reiniger. Even the stylistically different, documentary-like final segment is integrated into the main narrative by means of a rhythmic voiceover, a “celestial” score, and an abstract ending which, while formally announcing the correctness of the Marxist philosophy of nature, returns the viewer to the striking pictorialism of the film’s earlier parts.
Meteorites is very close to the ideal of Soviet popular science cinema, “the organic unity of entertainment and didacticism.” Using modest resources and schematic genre conventions of Soviet popular science cinema, Klushantsev and his collaborators produced a compact, meticulously detailed, and technically inventive film — a prologue to his more ambitious and better known works about the structure and exploration of the universe.
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Sergei Kapterev is a film historian and senior researcher at the Moscow Research Institute of Film Art.
Preservation note
The Moscow archive Gosfilmofond of Russia houses a 35mm nitrate negative of Meteority / Метеориты. The Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive in Krasnogorsk retains a German-language print.
Screen credits
Produced by Leningrad Studio of Popular Science Films, 1947
Directed and written by P. V. Klushantsev
Camera: P. V. Klushantsev, A. V. Lavrentiev
Artist: K. P. Yanov
Composer: N. K. Gan
Sound engineer: P. I. Kolotilschikov
Consultant: V. V. Sharonov
Production manager: L. B. Idelson