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Oh nein, Helius! Sie werden die Fahrt zum Monde nicht ohne Windegger machen—und nicht ohne mich—!
I came home tonight from seeing Fritz Lang's three-hour science fiction epic Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon, 1929) at the HFA and excitedly recounted the plot to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
derspatchel while eating leftover noodles and cheese. I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to repeat the feat on LJ, but I really do want to talk about this film, because it was so many more firsts of science fiction than I expected to find in the same story. Also it has great model work and its rocket science that is that peculiar combination of prescient and influential that comes from actual rocket scientists consulting on your film a half-generation before space travel came true. Also its female scientist is terrific. Also I just really liked it.
Decades before our story begins, Professor Mannfeldt (Klaus Pohl) was a gentleman astronomer right out of Verne or Wells, but on a fateful day in 1896 he was laughed out of the academy after presenting his theory of gold fields on the moon. By the present day of 1929, he's a frail little half-crazed recluse in a garret with a pet mouse named Josephine and lunar maps drawn all over the walls; his only visitors are the mysterious figures he insists are trying to steal his research—an ancient, flaking bundle of manuscripts tied together with twine—and the sympathetic Wolf Helius (Willy Fritsch), an aerospace engineer whose company has been working toward a moon shot, even if he doesn't really believe he'll find gold when he gets there. Unfortunately for Helius and the professor, there are forces in the world for whom the prospect of limitless reserves of wealth just lying around on an unclaimed satellite trumps the spirit of scientific inquiry every time, and a few burglaries and a little industrial sabotage later Helius finds himself forced to accept the proposition of "the man who currently calls himself Walter Turner" (Fritz Rasp, with the most heinous Hitler comb-over I've seen since The Producers): proceed with his voyage under the auspices of the cabal that hired Turner or else. "Else" looks like the intertitles exploding when Helius' twenty-four-hour think-it-over period is up. Gritting his teeth, he agrees to take Turner to the moon; he fills out the crew with his chief engineer Hans Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim) and astronomer Friede Velten (Gerda Maurus)—between Helius' crush on Friede and her recent engagement to Windegger, not his first choices, but Friede won't let him leave them behind—with a berth for the professor and his pet mouse, of course, and the stage is set for an incredible launch sequence.
We're now maybe halfway through the film. The last movie about space travel I saw devote this much time to building up to the point of departure itself was The Right Stuff (1983). There are ways in which Frau im Mond is a documentary of the first moon launch that never happened. It is one of the spellbinding things about the film.
It's hard sci-fi. No cavorite, no gun cotton, no unobtanium. Footage of Helius' early experiments in rocketry looks like the real thing—and might well be; the film's technical advisors were Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley—and the launch itself looks like some black-and-white back-projection of a Saturn V. The bit where it's fully immersed in water prior to takeoff, not so much; NASA found that just flooding the launch pad with water did enough to cushion against shockwaves. The huge rolling gantry, though? The liquid-fueled three-stage rocket? The figure-eight trajectory of the unmanned craft that photographed the far side of the moon? The film presumes that constant forward acceleration is sufficient to generate artificial gravity, which turned out not to be true, but then the modular bit of the spacecraft reverses itself for landing and zero-g as we know it takes over, right down to Friede unsuccessfully trying to pour a drink from a thermos—Windegger gives it a sharp snap of the wrist to get the brandy out and the next thing they know the galley is full of floating spheres of booze (animated!) which he hastily has to capture in a shot glass. Handholds and footholds and loops and ladders everywhere. Some of the numbers are wrong. The human body can bear more g's than they thought in 1929 and the effects don't look like the bends anyway. The placement of the control panel in relation to the crew couches would have broken a real-life astronaut's neck. And it is sadly not the case that Earth's moon supports a shallow atmosphere and at least the potential for water, never mind gold fields and geothermal activity. But they got the weighted boots right. And the sunrise flaring around the curve of the Earth. And the Earth rolling behind the curve of the moon. And the lunar landing managed with controlled bursts of thrust. And the film is so enthusiastic about spaceflight, even when it's hijacked by capitalism and greed. The maiden flight of the Friede is a media event. There's a live radio broadcast and hand-cranked cameras rolling and reporters snapping pictures everywhere and crowds waving handkerchiefs and children being lifted onto their parents' shoulders to see the historic occasion, holding little white balloons like sympathetic lunar magic, and Lang even gives his astronauts (who never call themselves that) moon groupies, enthusiastically breaking through the police cordon and hanging over the officers' arms, screaming in delight. Spotlights play across the crowd and the rails and the hangar as everyone waits for liftoff at moonrise. There's a launch countdown. It takes over the intertitles for ten seconds.
(The intertitles were not translated by a science-minded person. The visual effect of compound nouns is faithfully reproduced at the expense of technical accuracy and a couple of sentences garble their physics in ways that can be reconstructed from context after the fact, but the viewer shouldn't have to. They didn't destroy the film; I just really wanted someone with an actual background in engineering to go through the translation and fix them.)
And it's hard sci-fi with characters, not just tech. I truly, unironically like Friede. She suffers a little from the static vocabulary of silent film which requires her to pose like a pietà when she's arguing with Helius about scientific progress and her right to it, but she's not written like a saint—beyond the professor, whose dedication to reaching the moon is something of an idée fixe by now, she's the most ardent explorer in the film. Finding out that Helius would have made the flight without her and Windegger, she reproaches him without theatrics, only a resolve he can't argue with. When he tries at the last minute to change her mind, out of fear that she'll get hurt or killed, she's incredulous: does he want to shame her as a woman? Doesn't he know the world is watching them? How dare he ask her to back out now? Her co-workers support her; she's congratulated on her engagement, her career, and her flight into space. She's not an exception to her gender, just a splendid argument for more women in the sciences. The last decision of the film—which I will talk about in comments if anyone cares—feels like the one she would have made regardless of circumstances or meta-plot. And I like Windegger, whose expressive hangdog face and volatile temper would have made him, in another film, either the heavy or the comic relief. His problem is a wholly realistic one: he's a skilled engineer and a terrible astronaut. His technical competence as a co-pilot is not in question. It's the fact that actually being aboard a tin can full of rationed air for 40,000 kilometers of vacuum makes him claustrophobic and convinced of his imminent death and there's no way anyone could have known. There's no space program in this movie, just Helius Hangars. No rigorous physical and psychological testing. Friede in space is courageous and elated; Helius takes it very seriously; Windegger is snappish and pessimistic and increasingly prone to melting down and it's not pleasant to watch, but it's not contrived. I completely failed to recognize the actor from Nosferatu (1921) because he is way the hell more interesting here than he was asHarker Hutter, who still looks like a plot-shaped space when I think about him. The first thing Windegger does after the successful lunar landing is embrace Friede, the second thing he does is look totally unimpressed with the panoramic view of the moon, and the third thing he does is pick up a voltmeter and head for the engine with the perfunctory explanation of "That ignition cable is not going to sort itself out on its own!" because he is an engineer. Did I mention Gustav (Gustl Stark-Gstettenbaur)? Chauffeur's kid, always reading pulp magazines with titles like Mingo, der Nick Carter der Luft—Saturnen-Piraten and Im Kampf mit Mondkälbern; he stows away on the Friede and is discovered shortly after the last stage separation, but he's not an obnoxiously cute little sidekick and in fact he's necessary to the plot. I don't like Turner, but no one is supposed to. He really looks like Hitler.
I wanted to talk about Helius and the cold equations, but I am out of brain. See this movie. I hope it's on DVD. Goodnight.
derspatchel while eating leftover noodles and cheese. I'm not sure I have the wherewithal to repeat the feat on LJ, but I really do want to talk about this film, because it was so many more firsts of science fiction than I expected to find in the same story. Also it has great model work and its rocket science that is that peculiar combination of prescient and influential that comes from actual rocket scientists consulting on your film a half-generation before space travel came true. Also its female scientist is terrific. Also I just really liked it.Decades before our story begins, Professor Mannfeldt (Klaus Pohl) was a gentleman astronomer right out of Verne or Wells, but on a fateful day in 1896 he was laughed out of the academy after presenting his theory of gold fields on the moon. By the present day of 1929, he's a frail little half-crazed recluse in a garret with a pet mouse named Josephine and lunar maps drawn all over the walls; his only visitors are the mysterious figures he insists are trying to steal his research—an ancient, flaking bundle of manuscripts tied together with twine—and the sympathetic Wolf Helius (Willy Fritsch), an aerospace engineer whose company has been working toward a moon shot, even if he doesn't really believe he'll find gold when he gets there. Unfortunately for Helius and the professor, there are forces in the world for whom the prospect of limitless reserves of wealth just lying around on an unclaimed satellite trumps the spirit of scientific inquiry every time, and a few burglaries and a little industrial sabotage later Helius finds himself forced to accept the proposition of "the man who currently calls himself Walter Turner" (Fritz Rasp, with the most heinous Hitler comb-over I've seen since The Producers): proceed with his voyage under the auspices of the cabal that hired Turner or else. "Else" looks like the intertitles exploding when Helius' twenty-four-hour think-it-over period is up. Gritting his teeth, he agrees to take Turner to the moon; he fills out the crew with his chief engineer Hans Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim) and astronomer Friede Velten (Gerda Maurus)—between Helius' crush on Friede and her recent engagement to Windegger, not his first choices, but Friede won't let him leave them behind—with a berth for the professor and his pet mouse, of course, and the stage is set for an incredible launch sequence.
We're now maybe halfway through the film. The last movie about space travel I saw devote this much time to building up to the point of departure itself was The Right Stuff (1983). There are ways in which Frau im Mond is a documentary of the first moon launch that never happened. It is one of the spellbinding things about the film.
It's hard sci-fi. No cavorite, no gun cotton, no unobtanium. Footage of Helius' early experiments in rocketry looks like the real thing—and might well be; the film's technical advisors were Hermann Oberth and Willy Ley—and the launch itself looks like some black-and-white back-projection of a Saturn V. The bit where it's fully immersed in water prior to takeoff, not so much; NASA found that just flooding the launch pad with water did enough to cushion against shockwaves. The huge rolling gantry, though? The liquid-fueled three-stage rocket? The figure-eight trajectory of the unmanned craft that photographed the far side of the moon? The film presumes that constant forward acceleration is sufficient to generate artificial gravity, which turned out not to be true, but then the modular bit of the spacecraft reverses itself for landing and zero-g as we know it takes over, right down to Friede unsuccessfully trying to pour a drink from a thermos—Windegger gives it a sharp snap of the wrist to get the brandy out and the next thing they know the galley is full of floating spheres of booze (animated!) which he hastily has to capture in a shot glass. Handholds and footholds and loops and ladders everywhere. Some of the numbers are wrong. The human body can bear more g's than they thought in 1929 and the effects don't look like the bends anyway. The placement of the control panel in relation to the crew couches would have broken a real-life astronaut's neck. And it is sadly not the case that Earth's moon supports a shallow atmosphere and at least the potential for water, never mind gold fields and geothermal activity. But they got the weighted boots right. And the sunrise flaring around the curve of the Earth. And the Earth rolling behind the curve of the moon. And the lunar landing managed with controlled bursts of thrust. And the film is so enthusiastic about spaceflight, even when it's hijacked by capitalism and greed. The maiden flight of the Friede is a media event. There's a live radio broadcast and hand-cranked cameras rolling and reporters snapping pictures everywhere and crowds waving handkerchiefs and children being lifted onto their parents' shoulders to see the historic occasion, holding little white balloons like sympathetic lunar magic, and Lang even gives his astronauts (who never call themselves that) moon groupies, enthusiastically breaking through the police cordon and hanging over the officers' arms, screaming in delight. Spotlights play across the crowd and the rails and the hangar as everyone waits for liftoff at moonrise. There's a launch countdown. It takes over the intertitles for ten seconds.
(The intertitles were not translated by a science-minded person. The visual effect of compound nouns is faithfully reproduced at the expense of technical accuracy and a couple of sentences garble their physics in ways that can be reconstructed from context after the fact, but the viewer shouldn't have to. They didn't destroy the film; I just really wanted someone with an actual background in engineering to go through the translation and fix them.)
And it's hard sci-fi with characters, not just tech. I truly, unironically like Friede. She suffers a little from the static vocabulary of silent film which requires her to pose like a pietà when she's arguing with Helius about scientific progress and her right to it, but she's not written like a saint—beyond the professor, whose dedication to reaching the moon is something of an idée fixe by now, she's the most ardent explorer in the film. Finding out that Helius would have made the flight without her and Windegger, she reproaches him without theatrics, only a resolve he can't argue with. When he tries at the last minute to change her mind, out of fear that she'll get hurt or killed, she's incredulous: does he want to shame her as a woman? Doesn't he know the world is watching them? How dare he ask her to back out now? Her co-workers support her; she's congratulated on her engagement, her career, and her flight into space. She's not an exception to her gender, just a splendid argument for more women in the sciences. The last decision of the film—which I will talk about in comments if anyone cares—feels like the one she would have made regardless of circumstances or meta-plot. And I like Windegger, whose expressive hangdog face and volatile temper would have made him, in another film, either the heavy or the comic relief. His problem is a wholly realistic one: he's a skilled engineer and a terrible astronaut. His technical competence as a co-pilot is not in question. It's the fact that actually being aboard a tin can full of rationed air for 40,000 kilometers of vacuum makes him claustrophobic and convinced of his imminent death and there's no way anyone could have known. There's no space program in this movie, just Helius Hangars. No rigorous physical and psychological testing. Friede in space is courageous and elated; Helius takes it very seriously; Windegger is snappish and pessimistic and increasingly prone to melting down and it's not pleasant to watch, but it's not contrived. I completely failed to recognize the actor from Nosferatu (1921) because he is way the hell more interesting here than he was as
I wanted to talk about Helius and the cold equations, but I am out of brain. See this movie. I hope it's on DVD. Goodnight.
no subject
I didn't know he screened it at Peenemünde, but I am not shocked; I knew Oberth was one of his teachers. The introductory speaker mentioned that the Friede used in the movie was a model rocket in the sense of being a literal model for a full-fledged rocket, later confiscated by the Nazis (and lost during the war) in case it gave away any of the secrets of the V-2.
I had a writeup on this somewhere on my LJ, but as I'm commenting via phone I can't track it down just now.
I'd love to read it if you can find it. I keep finding criticism of the film that refers to the industrial espionage as time-wasting and the love story as boring and I didn't find either of these things to be true, although it is also true that I wasn't sure at all that we were watching a love triangle in the conventional sense.
This film does make me sad in some ways--it's a reminder of all the wonderful possibilities Germany represented, after the hyperinflation and before the Depression, which ended up choked and distorted and twisted instead.
One of the other things that interested me about the film was its straightforward asssumption of a spacefaring future proceeding from the Friede's successful moon voyage. If only.
no subject
<a href="<a href="http://http://fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com/2008/05/23/">http://fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com/2008/05/23/</a>">Here</a>, I hope.
no subject
The HTML went screwy, but I extracted the link. Thank you!
You quoted the line I almost used as a subject header. Friede's line just seemed to sum up the film for me.
I take it Fischinger was responsible for the trajectory animations and possibly the moon footage in the short film viewed by the capitalist cabal? If so, fantastic: that was one of the sequences that looked like a direct steal from the 1960's.
I agree that Fritsch's acting style is the hardest to accept with an eye accustomed to naturalism or even to silent acting, because not everybody in the days before sound felt the need to stare intently to express everything from inner turmoil to unspeakable joy, but he grew on me. He has such a strange face for a leading man; he's not boyish and he's almost never actually handsome and he's so much more competent in space than he is on the ground, which I wasn't expecting. I was weirdly fond of him by the end of the movie. He was kind of a blank when it began.
I was actually surprised by how much of a planetary romance the movie wasn't. Its greatest concession to science fantasy is the idea of an atmosphere on the moon and I have to assume someone in 1929 believed in it or it wouldn't have made it to the screen, its general ability to distinguish scientific fact from At War with the Mooncalves is so solid otherwise. There are no aliens on the moon—no life of any sort, despite the presence of liquid. The pulpiest thing that happens in Frau im Mond is the shootout between Turner and Windegger which leads to a perfect Golden Age dilemma of morality and physics. I just liked Lang and von Harbou's resolution a hell of a lot more than Tom Godwin's take.