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Retro SciFi Film of the Week…
Woman in the Moon (1929)
This was Fritz Lang’s last silent film, which was released just three years before the Nazis took power in Germany. Lang, whose mother was Jewish, opposed the Nazis, and the main villain in this film has a remarkable visual resemblance to Hitler.
One of the striking features of this film is the attention to technical detail. Hermann Oberth (one of the founding fathers of rocketry along with Goddard and others) was the technical consultant for the film. There are long segments in the film that go into fine detail about the acceleration, speed and trajectory of the rocket complete with diagrams of orbital mechanics. The passengers in the spaceship are shown experiencing high G-forces during acceleration, followed by zero-G conditions. Many scifi films, even to this day, don’t bother to show zero-G conditions in spacecraft and just show the astronauts walking around; this film was way ahead of it’s time on scientific accuracy.
In science, there was a lot going on when this film was made with the Solvay Conference in 1927 just two years before the making of the film, and the first manned rocket-powered plane demonstrated a couple of months before the film’s release.
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video description:
clips from the film, video only, no sound, all the writing within the images of the film are in German, however the intertitles have been translated to English for this version of the film – video shows the rocket being rolled out to the launch pad and partially submerged in water, because “it is too light to stand freely”. Meanwhile, in the spaceship the astronauts are walking around dressed in ordinary street clothes. One of them explains to the others that “until the necessary speed of 11,200 meters per second is reached… there will be eight critical minutes in the battle with increase in velocity, the pressure of which is fatal for humans when it surpasses forty meters per second.” Closeups of analog dial gauges are shown for speed and acceleration. (the dial for acceleration correctly shows the units as “m./sec.^2”) Intertitle says, “After these eight minutes during which we feel as if tons of weight pull us back to Earth, we will be victorious in the battle with pressure, or...”. Another man (who plays the coward) covers his ears and appears upset. There is a dramatic countdown… “6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, NOW!” Then the rocket takes off at a very quick speed. The leader tells the coward to dump the first rocket stage when it is empty. Other astronauts appear distressed by the high G-forces, their acting style is exaggerated. The cots that they are lying in are suspended by springs, and the springs begin to stretch to show the G-force. It shows the second stage separating from the rocket and the upper stage engine firing. Later it shows the astronauts looking out a window at the Earth with the Sun appearing from behind it. Intertitle says, “On our Earth, the sun is just rising.” Later it shows a woman and a man – the woman is trying to pour out wine from a bottle but it won’t pour out because they are in zero-G. The man shakes out some of the wine and it floats in spherical bubbles, the woman laughs and the man scoops up the droplets into a wine glass and quickly covers the glass to prevent the wine from escaping, then carefully sips some out from the side of the glass while his hand partially covers the glass. Later someone writes in a logbook, “Have entered the gravitational field of the moon. Are within 9000 km of the moon.”
