The Silent Star             

Many people may know this film by the title First Spaceship on Venus but that is the American version of The Silent Star after they dubbed it and whacked off 15-minutes of it. The version I saw was the German language version with subs. This is an East German sci-fi space exploration film. Interesting in itself because there were not a lot of them back then. This was made a few years before the Berlin Wall went up but there was a definite Iron Curtain that had come down across Eastern Europe. Kurt Maetzig was an established director with solid Communist Party credentials, but the script still had to go through multiple re-writes before the censors approved it. It is based on a book by Polish author Stanislaw Lem, who also wrote Solaris.


With all that said, for the most part the film avoids any strident propaganda but it is there in small doses. Hiroshima is brought up a few times and according to the film - which is set in 1971 - the East Germans have set up a small scientific base on the moon and the Chinese have been able to convert inorganic matter to food - so access to food is no longer a problem. To its credit the crew is from all over the world - an American, Chinese, African, Japanese and German - and the message of the film is a humanistic anti-nuclear one. The film doesn't rate very highly on IMDB but my guess is that is because the person saw the American version. Or even worse, saw it on Mystery Science Theater which mocked it.


The sets and designs have a wonderful retro-cool-sleek-look to them with bright primary colors and the special effects were supervised by Ernst Kunstmann, who had actually worked on Metropolis and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. So, he had been around for a while. What appealed to me the most was that it took itself seriously. The crew are all scientists and they work together to overcome the many problems that they encounter. Some of the scientific jargon went over my head. but once they get to Venus, the visuals take over and has some stunning imaginative sets and ideas.


An artifact is discovered in the Gobi Desert - a cylinder is found that they identify as alien probably connected to a huge explosion that took place in Siberia in 1908. The Tunguska Event had been put down as a meteor but the scientists now think it was a spaceship that they determine came from Venus. The cylinder has a message and the bit that they can translate suggests the same. They try and contact Venus but hear nothing back and so decide to go pay them a visit. Hello neighbors. There happens to be a Russian spaceship ready to go.


The crew all have their expertise from languages to piloting to nuclear science to a doctor who ends up having to perform surgery on board. She is played by fan favorite Yoko Tani. Not a lot happens on the journey - weightlessness, a meteor shower that damages the craft which they have to go outside to fix, one of the scientists having a thing for Tani - but it is once they get to the planet that things pick up. It seems that the friendly Venusian were actually planning a nuclear attack on earth - easy to wipe out their species a message says - but thankfully things went very wrong.  I know next to nothing about the East German film industry but there is actually a Blog dedicated to East German films called East German Cinema Blog. It appears that there are a number of their films that have come out with subs. One more film industry to explore! This may prove to be a little slow and talkie for many but it looks so great that it kept my attention throughout. And it gets quite suspenseful in the final 15-minutes.

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