The Fredösphere

Ten years after making Metropolis, near the end of the silent era, Fritz Lang directed a sci-fi film called Frau im Mond.  To the modern eye, its a salad of astonishing prescience, laughable retro-futuristic anacronisms, compelling achievements in special effects, compelling (because amusing) crudities in special effects, some great action sequences, and long stretches of boooooring dramatic developement -- just as you would expect.

The first plot points Lang wants to establish is that a certain Professor Manfeldt has determined the mountains of the moon are loaded with gold; he now lives alone, impovershed and bitter because his ideas were mocked by his peers.  That's it.  It takes Lang eleven minutes to lay that out.  Shoot, in a modern sci-fi action movie, we would have seen all that in the first eleven minuts plus seen the professor build a rocket, fly it to the moon and back, invent a new weapon system, use it to blow up some aliens, travel back in time so he could become his own father and mother, then have the only-mostly-dead alien come back to get its butt kicked one more time.

This film is nearly three hours long, so it is not like the thing needed padding.  Honestly, I almost gave up on it about three different times.  For the first two whole hours Lang laboriously introduces Manfeldt's disciple, Wolf Helius, who decides to vindicate the professor by attempting a moon landing.  Eventually it becomes clear the movie is all about Helius and the love triangle he shares with his assistant, Hans Windegger, and Windegger's fiancée; why the irrelevant Manfeldt wasn't cut from the story, I'll never understand.  We also meet the evil Mr. Turner, who works for five of the richest industrialists in the world.  They use threats of violence to take over the project, in order to maintain their control of the world gold market.

Note the extrordinarily repulsive Mr. Turner's English name.  Could that be a bit of continental hostility to Anglo-Saxon capitalist savvy?  It turns out, however, membership in the club of five big shots shows almost James Wattian-levels of sensitivity to diversity:  the group includes one Asian, and one of the white guys is in a wheel chair.  There's one important demographic group that remains shut out, however.

Non-smokers not welcome.

New music was composed for this DVD release of Woman in the Moon.  It's a disappointment -- it's just some guy and a synthesizer.  During the stirring scenes, the music seems to rise to the occasion, but during the dull parts, the music becomes unfocused and only serves to make things duller.  Honestly, I've been to silent film screenings with music improvised live by organists that demonstrated more immagination and sympathy for the flow of the action.

Lang seems to have an aspergery love of diagrams.  I didn't expect a movie from 1929 to have such a geeky engineering thing going.

An animated diagram of planetary gravity fields.

This flawless beauty mesmerizes me -- and that broad on the right ain't half bad either.

If you watch this movie, consider skipping to the last hour.  Once they start rolling out the rocket, things become, dare I say it, exciting.  Lang loves his toy models.  They don't fool the modern eye, but generally they don't embarass, and they're fun to watch.

A fly-over of the outdoor model.

A peek inside a demonstration model of the rocket.

The least convincing model:  cheesy bread, anyone?

Lang makes a stab at hard sci-fi, and the result is only sometimes wildly wrong:  that's quite an achievement for a 1929 film.  For example:  the rocket is emmersed in water just before takeoff, because it is so lightweight, it can't support its own weight otherwise.  Compare this genuinely inspiring scene with a real-live NASA rollout:  not bad!

Just before takeoff, all the men in the audience doff their hats.  It's quite moving, and it seems like a million years removed from today's sensibilities.


Half way to the moon, they find a boy stowed away.  Of course.  To our eyes, the boy's outfit seems vaguely military, and his hair is flipped to the side in a way that stirs some uneasy associations.  Our mind wanders a bit, and we start to think ... no, no, this was 1929.  Those people came along a few years later.  There couldn't possibly be any connection to ... uh oh.

Hail ladder!  I mean, leader!

The boy insists he knows all about rockets.  To prove it, he pulls out a sci-fi pulp magazine from his napsack.

A woman at the mercy of an alien insect.	30 years later:  some things never change.

Labels: Futurism, movie, sci-fi