A harsh mistress
The Industrial Revolution’s all-encompassing cultural sweep meant many industries blossomed in parallel motion. Take flight and cinema: In 1903, both launched in the United States. The Wright brothers took off in the dunes of North Carolina; meanwhile, The Great Train Robbery became the country’s first hit film. Two totally unrelated fields racing each other into the future. Both disciplines experienced rapid breakthroughs in relative synchronicity: In 1915, film and flight each reached brutal maturity: D.W. Griffith directed the first feature-length blockbuster, The Birth of a Nation, while the English military attached mounted machine guns to the Fokker Scourge military aircraft, creating WWI’s legendary flying aces.
And it didn’t slow down from there. By 1929, silent cinema had matured into its own sophisticated art form, just as aeronautical scientists looked to the stars. That year, the two industries crashed together. Fritz Lang, the great German director, teamed up with rocket scientist Hermann Oberth, a groundbreaking engineer (and a future Nazi). Together, they came up with Woman in the Moon, a milestone in sci-fi cinema as the first on-screen depiction of realistic space flight.
Lang collaborated with his wife and frequent partner, Thea von Harbou (another future Nazi), who adapted her own novel from the previous year into a screenplay. Their depiction of a mission to the moon is lightyears beyond Melies’ whimsy. Woman in the Moon is remarkably plausible in the broad strokes, decades before the space race even properly began. They even got some details right: In Woman in the Moon, a huge shuttle lifts off from a launchpad after a countdown sequence (cinema’s first ever), followed by a quiet, zero-gravity journey toward lunar orbit. These are some beats and images we take for granted a century later in the likes of First Man and Ad Astra.
Of course, this was still forty years before Neil Armstrong took his small step, and plenty of finer points are hilariously misguided. Lang knew the Earth-facing side of the moon had no atmosphere, but depicts the Moon’s far side as a comfortable, breathable environment (which was even then a crackpot theory), where astronauts casually stroll around in street clothes, no helmets necessary. Even funnier is how Lang portrays G-forces after liftoff like some mild seasickness: it’ll make some passengers woozy while others casually pace around the rocket. It’s jarring to see the mistakes when other moments nail the details, like the delightful depiction of weightlessness demonstrated with a floating wine bottle. Sadly no potato chips (”careful, they’re ruffled!”).
Woman in the Moon follows Helius (Willy Fritsch), a wealthy entrepreneur whose fascination with space travel leads him to collaborate with the eccentric Professor Mannfeldt (Klaus Pohl). Mannfeldt’s theory about gold deposits on the Moon earns him ridicule from peers but grabs the attention of a shady cabal of businessmen who plant the villainous spy Turner (Fritz Rasp) among the expedition crew. Meanwhile, Helius secretly pines for his assistant Friede (Gerda Maurus), who’s engaged to their cowardly colleague Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim). The rocket launches with this colorful crew assembled: Helius, Mannfeldt, Friede, Windegger, Turner, and a young stowaway named Gustav (Gustl Gstettenbaur), who brings along his favorite pulp sci-fi magazines for some ironic read-along material.
It’s an interesting and well-realized story, but the real fly in the ointment is the pacing. Like Lang’s Dr. Mabuse the Gambler, the film has the pace of an old-timey serial à la The Vampires or Lang’s own The Spiders, with endless episodes of minor incident that drag on for hours before we even get a whiff of space… Yes, hours, plural. The film’s runtime is 2 hours and 50 minutes, and liftoff doesn’t occur until well more than halfway into that. We have a whole feature of buildup that really ought to be about fifteen or twenty minutes.
But even the slow parts are not bad so much as they are modest. Lang is an outstanding filmmaker, and many of these sequences are excellent in isolation: mini-heists and melodramas. Lang’s skill in crafting images of crushing modernity never fails him. One of my favorite images comes from one of the first scenes and recurs throughout the first half of the film: Mannfeldt tosses a hat onto a lit, angular chandelier. The glowing from a head-cover suggests illumination and genius. But the heat of the light slowly singes the hat; Mannfeldt’s erratic brilliance causing danger and presaging trouble.
But the main event here isn’t corporate espionage and love triangles. It’s outer space. Lang, two years off the landmark expressionism of Metropolis, balances realism with spectacle in the film’s much more consistently engaging second half. Once the ship readies for takeoff, the film transforms into something truly special.
The film’s masterpiece sequence is the preparation for the launch. We witness, via miniatures and camera tricks, a giant rocket carted from a warehouse, docked on a launching pad, and taking off into a starry sky in front of a crowd of cheering spectators. The editing is tense and quick here, and the compositions are astonishing feats of geometry. One specific shot taken from the ground upwards of the rocket approaching the launch pad ranks among the most awe-inspiring shots from any silent film I’ve ever seen.
The entire second and final hour of the film — the preparation and launch plus the space mission — is overall excellent and exciting. After the launch and some wonder-filled depiction of space flight, the rocket lands, and the rest of the film unfolds as drama on the surface of the moon, in which various plot threads come together in a surprisingly twist-filled finale.
The film is in the public domain, and Eureka released a sensational restoration of the film on Blu-ray. It’s one of the more pristine and attractive silent restorations I’ve seen, with gorgeous, shaded lighting, crisp detail, and sharp contrast. The motion is extremely steady, and the effects still look great. The restoration has no tinting at all; I’m not sure if this reflects how theaters projected it in 1929.
As with Dr. Mabuse and some other silent features that drag into multiple hours, Woman in the Moon is tedious to sit through with modern eyes, and that really degrades what should be a genuinely great moviegoing experience to more of a flawed but rich curiosity. The interminable opening half is not bad, but rather a slog: a bunch of wheel-spinning setup episodes and plot threads for the much stronger second half that’s the true promise of the premise. Even then, the latter half takes its time telling its story. Three-hour movies can be an attention span challenge in general; slow-paced silent films especially so.
But I’m still very glad I watched Woman in the Moon, and at a minimum I would recommend the film’s greatest hits (the launch, the weightlessness, the lunar surface) as borderline essential for sci-fi cinema enthusiasts. Woman in the Moon is not quite the genre-definer that Lang’s Metropolis was, but it’s a visionary piece of near-future, realistic speculative fiction.
Here are a few more images from the film:
Is It Good?
Good (5/8)
A few words on "Is It Good?" ratings for early cinema.
Dan is the founder and head critic of The Goods. Follow Dan on Letterboxd. Join the Discord for updates and discussion.