Film
First Spaceship on Venus
D: Kurt Maetzig
Der Schweigende Stern, Kurt Maetzig, gdr 1959, 95 min (German OV)
Socialism is the most extensive social experiment in the history of humankind that is based on an initially utopian, then scientific, notion of the future: Communism. It is from this realm that one of the few Science Fiction works emerged which really deserves the attribute ‘science’: the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem spent his entire life developing a vision of the future that would incorporate technological, social and psychological criteria. Fittingly, the first Science Fiction film coming out of the GDR as a German-Polish co-production – Der Schweigende Stern – is based on one of his early works. The fascinating imagery in Total Vision (the East German wide screen equivalent of the American Cinemascope) reveals how a global visual canon of utopian ideas was begun to be created in the 1950s; and further developed throughout the following decades until eventually coming more or less to a standstill for lack of new utopias.
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