Frau im Mond (1929)

(Woman in the Moon)

directed by Fritz Lang
Frames in this review are taken from the Kino DVD which is © 1929 Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau Stiftung, renewed by Notice of Intent to enforce a Copyright 1996 under the Uruguay Round Agreement Act by the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung successor of UFA, English Translation © 2004 Kino International Corp, Licensed from Transit Films GMBH on behalf of the F. W. Murnau Foundation, Wiesbaden
To catch misspellings in web searches: Frau im Monde

Jump to section: Launch and the Trip to the Moon | The Kino DVD

When one speaks of German director Fritz Lang's work in science fiction, one most often is discussing Metropolis. That futuristic masterpiece has been cited as harbinger or inspiration of such brilliantly conceived films as: Blade Runner (the androids), The Fifth Element (that breathtakingly frenetic futuristic city traffic), and 2001: A Space Odyssey (the theme of man and machine's symbiotic development). It's filled with Biblical and classical allusions, has some of the most startling imagery to come out of the silent era, and has that additional cachet of having been cut to pieces and painstakingly pieced back together (90% of it, anyway).

Woman in the Moon (Frau im Mond) is much less prominent among Lang's films, certainly far below M or Mabeuse. The film has mostly been relegated to the annals of historical rocketry pictures: sandwiched between Georges Méliès' fantastical and whimsical A Trip to the Moon and the post-V2, pre-Sputnik Destination Moon, penned by science-fiction great Robert Heinlein. Frau is remarked to have pioneered the 3-2-1-liftoff sequence, and very people know more of it beyond that trivia item.

But it's actually a good film. Or perhaps, one great piece of visionary cinema sandwiched between a rather pedestrian plot. The meat consists of the launch and flight to the moon, scientifically accurate to the limits of the day's knowledge, almost documentary in nature. But the film becomes thrilling in anticipation of the launch, wondrous in weightlessness, sad and wistful as the pioneers watch the earth grow smaller. For the space enthusiast, watching Frau im Mond is likely to send shivers up the spine. It's got an impressive pedigree — the technical sections are attributed to Dr. Hermann Oberth, the father of German rocketry and mentor to Dr. Werner von Braun, creator of the V-2 ballistic missile and later head of the NASA rocket program that resulted in the great Saturn heavy launchers.

The rest of the plot was written by Thea von Harbou based on her novel of the same name (published in the English-speaking world as Rocket to the Moon). It is almost entirely separate from the Oberth sections, for the science is clearly nonsense, and the visionary documentary gives way to melodrama. von Harbou was married to Lang at the time and was a frequent collaborator. Metropolis was also her work, and shows many parallels to Frau im Mond. Man, woman, machine. Man loves woman, technology stands in the way, humans lust for profit is criticized, but there's a happy ending. Yet, where Metropolis contrasted the spectacles of the city with the misery of the workers, Frau remains lighthearted throughout.

When one summarizes the plot, it reads very melodramatically. Promising young professor Manfeldt claims that the far side of the moon has an atmosphere and riches of gold (see, it's on the far side, so nobody really knows). He's ridiculed and winds up destitute, but mentors young tycoon Wolf Helius, who is heading up a great aeronautical enterprise building a rocket to the moon. Helius is in love with Friede Velten, a beautiful blonde studying astronomy at the university (though she never demonstrates her scientific knowledge on film). But the most cinematic type of love is the unrequited type, so naturally Friede is engaged to Helius' engineering associate Hans Windegger (some hardheaded engineer, who becomes panicky after they launch).

For additional conflict, there are "five of the richest and cleverest heads who wish to keep the gold reserve of the earth under their control." They get wind of the project and send a representative who "asks" to be added to the journey. And, while we're at it, let's throw in a little boy who's "devoted [his] entire life to moon research" by reading comic books, and the professor's pet mouse who naturally has to be taken into space. After the predictable happens with all these characters, the visionary part of the film takes us from launching to landing, then they find gold and all the tensions erupt into a predictable climax and a rather fun denouement.

As silly as all this may sound, many of the best German silent films also had a simple story made up for by impeccable execution, for example Murnau's intertitle-less The Last Laugh. Lang doesn't try for a deeply psychological film here, and indeed the whimsical story is much better suited to comedy. The conflict doesn't produce much tension, and when Helius is cut off from outside help we never feel that he is in danger. The bankers' agent is big and looks sinister, but he's actually quite mild-mannered (indeed, in the manner of Clark Kent). All in all, there's much humor in the film. Starting with the chicken dinner that Helius begins and the hungry Prof. Manfeldt ends up eating, the wisp-of-a-plot is treated as an excuse for sharp photography and gleeful moments.

The only problem is that this isn't a comedy, and to set up enough conflict for the plot to move forward, the camera often holds on the actors for long periods of time to get both the action and the follow-through. This isn't a cut-cut-cut-to-intertitle type of film. Unfortunately, it does move a bit slowly at 24 fps; it looks like it was shot mostly around 20-22, so the movement is practically lifelike.

The lifelike frame rate does give us a chance to observe the actors, all of whom are relative unknowns outside Germany. Several had long acting careers, in particular Helius (Willy Fritsch) and Prof. Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl). Gerda Maurus plays Friede as a cool Hitchcockian blonde; in a simple yet elegant white dress at her engagement party, she looks very much like a Hitchcockian blond. She calmly tells Helius that she will be going along on the spaceflight; this puts the men very much off-balance.

Another element that helps get through the lengthy setup (we don't see the rocket until an hour into the film) is the superb condition of the print. In terms of film preservation, success at the box office is ruinous and lack thereof is beneficial. Most likely one will be seeing it on DVD (Kino is the US distributor), but at 24 fps the only reason that one can't see it from a 35mm print yet is economic. The transfer is so pristine that it looks like it came from first-generation printing material. The negative dust and scratches and the poor quality of intermediate materials then make it very likely that it's original negative, well-preserved with very few scratches, excellent contrast, and crisp focus, and has very little grain except in opticals. The grain that does exist, for example where a segment is run a second time in reverse, seems to indicate that the transfer was done telecine-and-forget; it would've been easy to match up the segment and run the cleaner version in reverse.

With such a crisp print, spacious framing, and tastefully decorated sets, there's much for the eye to wander over in slower scenes. It's all very pleasing to the eye — the middle- to upper-class people are smartly attired, even the professor's shabby clothing isn't that shabby, and the clean neat people are lit in classic studio fashion, like a Hollywood film from the Golden Age. And there's an effective score by silent-film accompanist John Mirsalis on the Kino DVD, making for an engrossing silent film experience that deserves to have a glittering proscenium arch over it in a movie palace. In space, Mirsalis' astronomical (a pun if you like) score conveys mystery and wonderment, vocal and instrumental accompaniment (both synthesized) provide an effective backdrop to soft piano (recorded). And in the build-up to launch, the score blasts out triumphantly with drums and brass that unfortunately remain much farther from the real thing than synthesized woodwinds. (Imagine John Williams' Star Wars on a synthesizer; actually, don't — it's been done and you can buy the CD.)

Launch and the Trip to the Moon

Clearly, the climax of the film, coming a bit early at halfway through, is the launch. Prior to the launch we get to watch along with the power elite as they screen three minutes of spy footage depicting an unmanned test launch. The footage gives one the awesome feeling of having a privileged peek into a grand human endeavor. Certainly very different in tone to The Right Stuff's hilariously paranoid footage of Soviet work accompanied by commentary from two jesters. The schematic diagram animates itself, complete with a rotating earth, an orbiting moon, and a rocket which leads the moon a bit to reach the right position on arrival. In an era when America's Dr. Robert Goddard was being ridiculed for his liquid-fueled rocket experiments, this bit of animation is a precursor of space race era educational films thirty years later. And believe it or not, it stirs the heart strings to watch it, no doubt aided by Mirsalis' unabashedly cosmic score.

The launch itself is breathtaking in conception. Imaginative ideas include a skywriting plane juxtaposed with overview model shots of the view from the plane, complete with rolls, pans, and tilts as the plane traces out its message. The similarities to real space missions are uncanny. There's intense newspaper and radio interest, an Eric Severaid/Walter Cronkite-like announcer, a gigantic vehicle assembly building from which a gantry-laden crawler slowly emerges, throngs of crowds gathered to watch the event with the lucky ones in viewing stands. A series of heartfelt goodbye handshakes to comrades inside the assembly building, then a climb up the ladder, is reminiscent of Yuri Gagarin at the launch of Vostok 1. It is very thrilling, all the more so because of the lack of precedent. Certainly a long step from the simple cannon of Georges Méliès' A Trip to the Moon. The model shots are beautiful, and composites are done in-camera so it's very high quality. The detail on the crawler, in particular, with its spiny gantries of exposed steel, looks very lifelike. The spaceship does look a bit too smooth, without the ice formation and imperfections that would make it true-to-life, and the shallow depth-of-field belies the pre-Kubrick special effects techniques.

There are equally impressive visuals in space — the standard closeups of the moon, the lonely sight of the earth disappearing behind the lunar horizon as the spaceship passes to the far side, things that stir the heart of cosmo/astro/taikonauts. There is meticulous attention to detail — for example, the stirring sight of the sun emerging from behind the earth is made possible because the spaceship launches at night. Many later films would choose beautiful visuals which work out to nonsensical flight paths; here, it actually has a scientific basis. Scale holds true in matte shots featuring high levels of detail, aided by the verisimilitude boost provided by black-and-white, but the one shot of a lunar model during the earthset sequence is a little bit wrong. The moon can look very curved when you're at high altitude, or the craters can look very sharp when skimming along at a few miles above the surface, but not both at the same time!

Speaking of scientific inaccuracies, the difference between the middle and the rest of the film makes it easy to attribute major errors to the novel's author, notably plot points like lunar gold, lunar atmosphere, and oxygen that is consumed for breathing but not in propulsion. Errors from Oberth's portion are more minor and mostly in line with scientific knowledge of the day, later revised by actually going to space. Certainly the amount of space in the spacecraft is overoptimistic, though this can be attributed to production needs. The spacecraft launching from a water tank seems strange, but I speculatively attribute that to a mistranslation (see below). There's talk of having a light and dark side of the spacecraft to control solar heating, which sounds logical enough except that Apollo actually rotated ("barbeque mode") to distribute the solar heating; here, basic science doesn't foresee engineering cleverness.

Of course, a direct ascent was the obvious way of reaching the moon. We take for granted lunar orbit rendezvous, but it would not come to the forefront for another thirty years, and is actually a nonobvious engineering breakthrough. And weightlessness is a difficult concept to grasp; just like Jules Verne, Oberth forgot that free-fall also results in weightlessness and diagrammed a weight-free zone at the neutral point where Terran and lunar gravity cancel each other out. Hence fountain pens work perfectly along the trip. Humans have been known to withstand far greater than 4 g's of acceleration without dying, but they could not have known that at the time with the limited forces available in propeller planes. (Coincidentally, 4 g's is what the Saturn V pulls.)

For its time, though, the Oberth-penned sections of Frau im Mond represent the forefront of scientific knowledge in rocketry and astronomy. There is a refenrece to an earlier unmanned probe which set off a giant magnesium flare on the moon to signal its arrival. Dr. Goddard proposed a similar idea in 1916, to much ridicule from the press. The film gives the correct escape velocity of 11000 meters/second. The rocket is even a three-stage rocket, just like the Saturn V. En-route course corrections are performed with the aid of two bicycle wheels arranged at right angles, serving as a gyroscope. Weightlessness is fun; one of the characters anticipates later space shuttle and space station antics by launching up a deck with one push of the feet. There's the standard trick of drinking up water globules in zero-g, done in an optical with meticulous animation featuring spinning and merging. Unfortunately, the effect don't look any more real than the bubbles! in Wings. Knowledge of free-fall behavior was limited at the time, as propellor aircraft just don't have the power to simulate zero-G for a reasonable amount of time.

The Kino DVD

Buy the Woman in the Moon DVD from Amazon

The spectacular source print shows through to the Kino DVD. The compression is well-done and does not produce any artifacts. Some minor quibbles — at 24 fps the film really ought to have been encoded as progressive rather than interlaced. There's also single-line interlaced twitter on the title screen, the result of sending computer animation straight to the encoder without low-pass filtering first. The reason for the 60-field encoding is revealed by the computer-generated English intertitles — these clearly come from a digital video source which subsamples the color, as there's chroma noise around the text edges but no analog noise. The rainbow effect comes through particularly strong in the animated schematic of the spacecraft trajectory and other places where subtitles are superimposed over footage.

Still, these are minor quibbles, watch it on a standard-definition analog television and they disappear entirely. If Kino ever got around to spending money to upgrade a DVD that had already been released, top priority ought to be given to Kurosawa's Dersu Uzala, which has horrible compression artifacts and very hard-to-deal-with interlacing from lots of film weave.

The English translation by Ingrid Scheib-Rothbart, very active among New York's film scene and a board member of the Anthology Film Archives, reads smoothly and naturally. However, she is clearly out of her element when it comes to technical translations. Many show signs of overliteral translation:

• The earlier unmanned rocket is referred to as a "register" rocket, with "register" cameras. How about a "survey" rocket instead, with "recording" cameras?
  
• The recording camera are linked to a "clockwork" and has three "mirror teleobjectives." Clockwork is understandable, but does it refer to a mechanism or to a "chronometer"? And it sure sounds like they're describing objectives for a reflecting telescope.
  
• "Mysterious, monochrome plains" on the moon are better described as "featureless plains" considering that the footage is in black-and-white.
  
• "Because the spaceship is too light to stand freely, it is submerged in a water basin in which it stands upright." Considering that this is a direct ascent moonshot, and that only alcohol-liquid oxygen fuels would be available, the rocket would have to be roughly twice the size of the Saturn V. Either Scheib-Rothbart got the sentence structure backwards and this should be "too heavy," or the rocket is "too fragile."
  
• "From the launch until the necessary speed of 11,200 meters per second is reached ... / ... there will be eight critical minutes in the battle with the increase in velocity, the pressure of which is fatal for humans when it surpassed forty meters per second."
  
  This is a very stilted sentence. An English-speaking engineer would write it as "... the battle with acceleration, whose force is fatal for humans when it exceeds forty meters per second squared." I suppose it is possible that the superscript for "squared" is missing in the original German, but we don't get the original intertitles so we can't tell.

These quibbles about the video interlacing and the translation are just minor details, noticeable because the rest of the DVD looks so good. Of course, obsession to detail is why Criterion stands above the others, including Kino. Too often, it seems as though Criterion is the only company that sits people down in a screening room for a critique before deciding to master the DVD. (As far as re-transfers are concerned, Koch Lorber actually redid The Umbrellas of Cherbourg and I'd be surprised if even an obscure Kurosawa didn't sell as well.)

Summary

A great visual and musical experience. A fabulous treat for space fans. Destination Moon is much better-known among American audiences, but feels like a rerun compared to Frau im Mond. 1950 just isn't as visionary as 1929.

P.S. In reality, it cost far more to obtain the Apollo moon rocks than their weight in gold. The Apollo program cost $25 billion from 1961 to 1972 and brought back 842 pounds of moon rocks, for a cost of $2 million per troy ounce. Gold was selling for about $60 per troy ounce in 1972.

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