Chris Marker in his Immemory multi media DVD asks if Fritz Lang ever watched Aelita, Protazanov's 1920s silent movie featuring costumes by Aleksandra Ekster; it is one of the main forays into films by Dadaism. In it a revolutionary communist society is imagined on Mars. Marker is making a point about European art although he does link the theme of slaves in both Aelita and Metropolis. However it is the costumes rather than the content for which Aelita is remembered. Here are Sophie Taeuber-Arp and her sister photographed wearing Dadaist dresses in the recent Taeuber-Arp expo at the Picasso museum in Malaga.
A more interesting answer to Marker's question for Lang is offered by Malinowska and Tomaszewski's Mother Earth and Sister Moon installation; how did the communist imagination or the imagination of individuals trapped in communism represent the future to themselves? How did cults within the soviet bloc represent the extra mundane? In their installation they develop Ekster's dress designs even further with an enormous installation of a female Russian astronaut's space suit and more yet more striking versions (if that is possible) of Taeuber-Arp's dadaist dresses.
