(Recorded) Movie Thoughts: Frau Im Mond
Jul. 10th, 2019 08:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerThe month-long cycle of science fiction films on Turner Classic Movies is under way. Despite saying before I have most of the movies scheduled for it on disc one way or another already, one film in the first night’s programming had eluded me until then. Recording the Fritz Lang production Frau im Mond (Woman in the Moon) left me with a small dilemma or two, though. The movie was too long to write to one recordable DVD at the standard qualities of my combination recorder, but to watch it in hopes of finding a good point to break it in two would mean getting through a long silent movie. I’ve noted the comments of various ages about them being an art form in themselves and even told myself “movies don’t need dialogue,” but a part of me still seems to shrink back from them as somehow unnatural.
The slim counterweight, perhaps, was the thought that Frau im Mond was a space travel movie with a rocket in it rather than “a projectile fired out of a giant cannon” or “an anti-gravity sphere,” made just a few years after the first spindly liquid-fuelled rocket had lifted off, and perhaps a different sort of “retro-future” than the most popular ones. Thinking I could at least take a break midway through, I buckled down to the movie. That it only had a piano accompaniment wasn’t quite optimal, but I seemed to cope, as I did with an impression that this was less a “movie without dialogue” as one where you had to be a lipreader (and fluent in German) to go beyond the title cards.
I’d already understood the movie had bypassed “the journey is its own justification” with a tale of finding a wealth of gold on moon; the introduction of the now-elderly professor ridiculed and living in a garret after advancing that theory took its own time. However, the younger man taking sympathy on him (which reminded me of a jocular comment it was something Back to the Future hadn’t gone to lengths setting up at its beginning how Marty McFly and Dr. Emmet Brown had got to know each other) declared at last his intention to go to the moon, and then all of a sudden I realised he was a captain of industry with the film’s distinctive-looking and indeed perhaps iconic rocket almost ready to go. The sinister gold magnates of the world (they have an agent who you know is sinister in this German movie for going by an American name), after establishing the rocket’s interior layout by opening up a pilfered model, got to discussing a previous rocket that had exploded magnesium flash powder on the moon (an idea I’d seen before in speculative works further into the days of radio) and, more than that, another unmanned rocket that had brought film back to the earth showing mysterious areas on the far side. After that, one more surprise of a previous fatal attempt to rocket into space might have become sort of amusing.
The movie got around to the launch itself before halfway through its running time, and I was interested in what’s been described as “the first countdown” (decades earlier, Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” had counted up to firing its Columbiad). I was familiar enough from other pre-spaceflight works for blastoff acceleration to make everyone pass out, although it was tempting to see the rocket’s controls as less than ergonomically sound for high G-forces. Still following Verne’s understanding of gravity, there was only a brief interlude of weightlessness beween the earth and the moon, although there was also an “earthset” sequence anticipating some of the impact of the real thing for all that the lunar horizon looked as dubious as any other effect in the movie. That the mysterious areas on the far side had a breathable atmosphere cut down on the otherworldliness, but I did get through the movie and did find a point to break it into parts and archive it. I have heard Lang’s earlier Metropolis is a superior film (and that much more influential on visual science fiction as opposed to “an anticipation of spaceflight”), but it was just short enough to record to one DVD, such that I’m stuck wondering about getting to it “later.”
The slim counterweight, perhaps, was the thought that Frau im Mond was a space travel movie with a rocket in it rather than “a projectile fired out of a giant cannon” or “an anti-gravity sphere,” made just a few years after the first spindly liquid-fuelled rocket had lifted off, and perhaps a different sort of “retro-future” than the most popular ones. Thinking I could at least take a break midway through, I buckled down to the movie. That it only had a piano accompaniment wasn’t quite optimal, but I seemed to cope, as I did with an impression that this was less a “movie without dialogue” as one where you had to be a lipreader (and fluent in German) to go beyond the title cards.
I’d already understood the movie had bypassed “the journey is its own justification” with a tale of finding a wealth of gold on moon; the introduction of the now-elderly professor ridiculed and living in a garret after advancing that theory took its own time. However, the younger man taking sympathy on him (which reminded me of a jocular comment it was something Back to the Future hadn’t gone to lengths setting up at its beginning how Marty McFly and Dr. Emmet Brown had got to know each other) declared at last his intention to go to the moon, and then all of a sudden I realised he was a captain of industry with the film’s distinctive-looking and indeed perhaps iconic rocket almost ready to go. The sinister gold magnates of the world (they have an agent who you know is sinister in this German movie for going by an American name), after establishing the rocket’s interior layout by opening up a pilfered model, got to discussing a previous rocket that had exploded magnesium flash powder on the moon (an idea I’d seen before in speculative works further into the days of radio) and, more than that, another unmanned rocket that had brought film back to the earth showing mysterious areas on the far side. After that, one more surprise of a previous fatal attempt to rocket into space might have become sort of amusing.
The movie got around to the launch itself before halfway through its running time, and I was interested in what’s been described as “the first countdown” (decades earlier, Jules Verne’s “From the Earth to the Moon” had counted up to firing its Columbiad). I was familiar enough from other pre-spaceflight works for blastoff acceleration to make everyone pass out, although it was tempting to see the rocket’s controls as less than ergonomically sound for high G-forces. Still following Verne’s understanding of gravity, there was only a brief interlude of weightlessness beween the earth and the moon, although there was also an “earthset” sequence anticipating some of the impact of the real thing for all that the lunar horizon looked as dubious as any other effect in the movie. That the mysterious areas on the far side had a breathable atmosphere cut down on the otherworldliness, but I did get through the movie and did find a point to break it into parts and archive it. I have heard Lang’s earlier Metropolis is a superior film (and that much more influential on visual science fiction as opposed to “an anticipation of spaceflight”), but it was just short enough to record to one DVD, such that I’m stuck wondering about getting to it “later.”