Info
Deutschland 1929
Drama von Fritz Lang
Musikfassung für Piano von Wilfried Kaets
Länge: ca. 155 min
Short and Sweet
Gold on the moon, a rocket, a betrayal — and a love story played out 384,000 kilometres from Earth. Fritz Lang sends his heroes into space and along the way invents the countdown, the multi-stage rocket, and the modern science fiction film…
The last great German silent film — and the first serious space travel film in cinema history.
Plot
The impoverished Professor Manfeldt believes there are vast gold deposits on the far side of the Moon — a theory the scientific establishment mocks. Only engineer Wolf Helius takes him seriously. Together with Manfeldt, his colleague Windegger, and Windegger’s fiancée Friede, Helius launches the first lunar expedition. Shortly after takeoff, the crew discovers young Gustav as a stowaway who refused to miss the adventure. On the Moon, hidden rivalries erupt — over gold, over love, over survival. Not everyone will make it back.
Shot between October 1928 and June 1929 at the UFA studios in Neubabelsberg near Berlin. Following the commercial disaster of Metropolis, Lang was forced for the first time to work without a large budget or his producer Erich Pommer. Rocket scientist Hermann Oberth and science writer Willy Ley were brought on as technical advisors. To create the lunar landscape, 40 railway wagons of Baltic Sea sand were transported into the studio. When the talkie era arrived, Lang refused to add sound effects to the finished film — and won the argument with the UFA.
Fun Fact
Lang invented the countdown for this film: counting backwards from ten to zero at the rocket’s launch, so that audiences would immediately understand when liftoff was coming. Real space programmes later adopted this convention. The first successfully launched V-2 rocket at Peenemünde had the Frau im Mond logo painted on its base.