Mars [film]
Entry updated 3 April 2025. Tagged: Film.
Russian film (1968). Lennauchfilm. Directed and written by Pavel Klushantsev. Briefly seen cast members are unidentified. 50 minutes. Black and white.
This successor to Klushantsev's Space Documentaries Doroga k Zvezdam and Luna focuses on the planet Mars, devoting most of its length to a discussion of how humans have long endeavoured to learn more about the planet; while generally factual, the film does endorse the notions, clearly invalidated by 1968, that Mars has canals and vast expanses of vegetation (see Scientific Errors). There are also animated sequences depicting human cosmonauts in spacesuits on Mars. The concluding scenes oddly depict the first exploration of Mars being undertaken by a Dog in a spacesuit, though it is unclear what knowledge humanity is gaining as the animal wanders through the Martian landscape. But he eventually joins a spacesuited human in a brief scene as they stand and gaze at the new world around them.
Overall, this is certainly the least ambitious and most disappointing of Klushantsev's space documentaries, suggesting that Klushantsev had to work with a budget significantly less than those of his other films. At the time, it had long become clear that the Soviet Union would not be sending cosmonauts beyond Earth's orbit in the foreseeable future, which resulted in the suppression of Luna and, presumably, an ever-diminishing interest in financing films about future space initiatives that would not involve the Soviet space programme. [GW]
see also: Spacesuit Films.
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