Strange New Worlds: The Silent Star
It was found in 1985 during an industrial project to irrigate the Gobi Desert and render it fertile and productive, a strange rock with an object inside soon determined to be of otherworldly origin, traced back to the Tunguska blast of 1908 and believed by astrophysicist Professor Arsenyev to be a fragment of an exploded spacecraft, its origin most likely the planet Venus, the untranslatable message it contains the first words of an alien language.
With international cooperation a rocket is prepared, a mission of peace but clouded with an apprehension as thick as the skies of the distant planet they approach through meteor storms, the question of why the civilisation on the planet known as the Morning Star has remained silent, the concern that the destroyed vessel may have been part of an invasion force, the question being whether their expedition will now trigger that pending hostility.
Forming part of Eureka’s new four film box set Strange New Worlds, The Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern) is presented from a 2K scan of the original 35mm camera negative, directed by Kurt Maetzig and based on Stanisław Lem’s first science fiction novel The Astronauts, released in 1960 then cut and dubbed for American audiences as First Spaceship on Venus in 1962, the version under which it became an early experiment on Mystery Science Theatre 3000.
An impressive production of the East German studio DEFA, technically inventive and daring, with the launch platform a forced perspective miniature of the triple-engine Kosmokrator 1 shot on location in the snow-capped Tatra Mountains, there is no comparison with the American science fiction monster movies of the same era, The Silent Star methodical in the processes of space flight which would be new to audiences of the time and sober in the mission statements of the crew which includes a German pilot, a Polish engineer, an Indian mathematician, a Chinese linguist and an African communications officer.
Japanese Doctor Sumiko Ogimura (Yoko Tani) a child of the bomb, rendered infertile by the radiation which killed her mother, for all the mystery and spectacle, the fragments of clues pieced together as they arrive at the vast ruins of a melted city under a toxic sky, The Silent Star is also a warning which echoes the words of Bernard Quatermass that humanity faces the same challenges that destroyed the Venusian, and if we do not learn we will also inherit a dead planet.
Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA also includes Signals: A Space Adventure (Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer), Eolomea, In the Dust of the Stars (Im Staub der Sterne), animated shorts The Robot and Janna and the Little Star, commentaries, archive interviews, newsreels and featurettes, a video essay and new interviews with science fiction scholar Mark Bould and Soviet cinema expert Claire Knight.
Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA is available on Blu-ray from Eureka now
