If Georges M\u00e9li\u00e8s\u2019s silent fantasy \u201cA Trip to the Moon\u201d was the \u201cStar Wars\u201d of 1902, it can be said that \u201cWoman in the Moon\u201d was the \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey\u201d of 1929. Lang\u2019s movie was at once pedantically scientific and outlandishly speculative \u2014 a spectacle low on human interest and high on cutting-edge special effects, some developed by the avant-garde animator Oskar Fischinger. \u201cMotion picture technology celebrates its triumph,\u201d a German reviewer wrote.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Working from a novel by his wife, Thea von Harbou, Lang sought the imprimatur of Hermann Oberth, whose 1923 book, \u201cThe Rocket Into Interplanetary Space,\u201d fueled a German craze for spaceflight. Oberth and his young disciple, the science writer Willy Ley, served as technical advisers, adding weight to von Harbou\u2019s flimsy story about a privately funded rocket, with an unconventional crew, in search of gold on the moon. As a favor to Oberth, and as a publicity ploy, Lang helped finance a planned rocket launch to celebrate the movie\u2019s premiere. (Although the proposal fizzled out, Oberth was later recruited by the Nazi missile program and contributed to the development of the V-2 rocket.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWoman in the Moon\u201d begins as an energetic, if routine, reprise of Lang\u2019s previous film, \u201cSpies\u201d (1928). The first half is largely devoted to criminal conspiracy. A gang of plutocrats, fronted by a master of disguise and suave thuggery named Turner (played by German cinema\u2019s favorite villain, Fritz Rasp), plot to steal a rocket designed by an aging mad scientist from his earnest young prot\u00e9g\u00e9, the entrepreneurial astrophysicist Helius (the popular leading man Willy Fritsch).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As a counterpoint to the assorted burglaries and deceptions, the movie establishes a romantic triangle involving Helius and his two assistants, the cowardly Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim, the hapless hero of \u201cNosferatu\u201d) and the courageous Frieda (the Croatian actress Gerda Maurus). As resourceful as she is noble, Frieda had managed to produce close-up movies of the lunar surface, which resembles something grown in a petri dish. Amid much talk of trajectory, velocity and the \u201cweightless zone,\u201d a lunar expedition is organized that will involve all five of the principals and a young stowaway, first seen reading a science fiction pulp magazine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWoman in the Moon\u201d reaches its emotional peak midway through with the rocket launch \u2014 a full-scale media event complete with search lights, a grandstand, a frenzied crowd held back by the police, and, as the full moon rises, the unveiling of a huge silver rocket, as godlike as a Kubrick monolith. The hysteria, which some have said anticipates the Nazi propaganda film \u201cTriumph of the Will,\u201d was paralleled by the movie\u2019s premiere (the first covered live on the radio), which had Albert Einstein among the invited guests. The facade of the Ufa Palast theater was redesigned as a monumental bas-relief to dramatize spaceflight. A sculpted rocket, launched from a three-dimensional skyscraper city, shuttled back and forth to the moon against a heavenly deep blue backdrop of a thousand twinkling light bulbs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the movie\u2019s most suspenseful sequence, the countdown to blastoff (a convention Lang invented) gives way to agonizing pressure on the space travelers, followed by the requisite weightless scene. The lunar landing is also stressful. Fortunately, the moon turns out to be a giant sandbox. (Unfortunately, it also provides an arena for the travelers to play out all the conflicts they brought from Earth.) A desperate overlay of mawkish sentiment notwithstanding, the end of \u201cWoman in the Moon\u201d combines an overwhelming sense of desolation with an agoraphobic fear of the void. More than presaging Kubrick\u2019s \u201cSpace Odyssey,\u201d this horror vacui anticipates the terror of Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s \u201cGravity.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWoman in the Moon\u201d proved a box-office success despite hostile reviews, particularly from left-wing critics who perceived the movie as a showpiece for the right-wing media mogul Alfred Hugenberg, who had bought a controlling interest in the film studio Ufa. The film theorist Rudolf Arnheim began his review with the declaration that Lang\u2019s films were \u201cparvenus, trashy novels that have come into money\u201d and ended by mocking the notion that Frieda and Helius would be spending their honeymoon on the moon.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Fritz Lang was not merely a major practitioner of genre cinema but the creator of several genres, and a German documentary accompanying this handsomely restored 163-minute version of his last silent picture is correctly called The First Scientific Science-Fiction Film.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":157,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false},"categories":[33],"tags":[6,3,4,5],"week_theme":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article\/64"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/article"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/article"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/157"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64"},{"taxonomy":"week_theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/imd3.at-eikon.ch\/19-20_imd3_s6_demain_schorderet-chloe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/week_theme?post=64"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}