Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever: Rediscovering Woman in the Moon

29 Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever Rediscovering Woman in the Moon Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew Preface: The Enigma of Woman in the Moon Tom Gunning 'it screaming comes across the sky ... " (Pynchon 3) With the screech of a missile making a deadly arc against the surface of the sky aimed to land back on earth with fatal force, Thomas Pynchon opens his 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow. One of the emblematic and monumental works of the late twentieth century, the novel is now recognized as a culminating moment in the history of the modern novel, possibly introducing the postmodernist novel. As an emblem of the modern, Pynchon chronicles the development of rocketry, conceived during Weimar-era Germany as opening new realms for extraterrestrial conquest, and transformed during World War II into a new weapon of mass destruction. At several points the novel refers to Fritz Lang's last silent film, Woman in the Moon from 1929. Lang's film also marks a culmination of one of the greatest eras of cinema production: the silent films of Weimar cinema, as Fritz Lang's last "super-film." Further, as we hope to show in this essay, Woman in the Moon brings to a climax a key tendency of silent German cinema: the celebration - and even spiritualization - of modern technology. This drama of the first manned landing on the moon not only portrays a scientific triumph in a detailed and truly technological manner. Lang's film, unlike earlier cinematic fantastic trips into space such as Melies's 1902 Voyage dans la lune or the Danish Himmelskibet from 1918, which left the means of achieving these voyages rather sketchy, displayed and publicized its own technological special effects, using cinematic technology to envision a new A Companion to Fritz Lang, First Edition. Edited by Joe McElhaney © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 555 cosmos. Beyond its role in film history Woman in the Moon participated in a modern conception of rocketry and conquest of outer space whose shock waves emanated from the screen into world history. The film not only predicted the future of rocketry, it actually played an effective role in its early development. Woman in the Moon presents a parable of modern technology whose consequences outran its imagination. This is evident not only in the style of the film itself, but in the discourses that surround it: publicity, production history, exhibition and its odd afterlife, reflected in both other works of art and even more in the history of rocketry from Weimar amateurism to Nazi militarism that the film bizarrely inaugurates. Woman in the Moon merges film text and historical context to such a degree that categories of science and fiction, technology and artistic design, blur. The uniqueness of Woman in the Moon lies less in anticipating the future of rocketry than in playing a role in realizing that future. Lang and Ufa hoped that the contemporary cultural fascination with rockets and interplanetary space would fuel the publicity for the film, just as Willy Ley, Hermann Oberth, and the other rocket enthusiasts at the time hoped the film would galvanize public interest and support for a German rocket program. Not only did the enthusiasm for rockets launched into space inspire Lang's and von Harbou's film, support for the development of rocketry formed a key part of the film's publicity as well as its legacy. Thus the film's legacy went beyond the golden era of Weimar filmmaking to land smack in the middle of the dark drive of Nazi world conquest, followed by the Cold War race for cosmic dominance that Pynchon's novel traced. In the Shadow of Metropolis Tom Gunning Like Woman in the Moon, Lang's other visionary science fiction film Metropolis (1927) had been a critical failure. But whereas Metropolis is now regarded as a major cinematic achievement, Woman in the Moon has yet to undergo a re-evaluation. Paula Felix-Didier's 2008 discovery in the Museo del Cinema in Buenos Aires of a nearly complete print of Metropolis (which had been shown only in a radically shortened version for decades) marked the climax of a dramatic afterlife of the earlier film. 1 Over decades the critical evaluation of Metropolis had already shifted from general condemnation. From the sixties on, Metropolis's reputation grew, as its undeniably powerful images were quoted by both progressive artists, from Stanley Kubrick to Robert Wilson, and pop divas Madonna, Whitney Houston, and more recently Beyonce. Now restored (with some additional discovered footage, added to the Argentine print), the film has become perhaps the most watched silent film (with the image of the robot Maria now rivaling Charlie Chaplin as the icon of the art and promise of cinema's first decades). 2 Greeted on its premiere 556 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew with more jeers than praise, denounced subsequently as an example of fascist cinema, or dismissed as nai"ve kitsch, Metropolis has not only survived previous myopic critiques but it seems ever more powerful. In a postmodernist era, the film is now appreciated rather than condemned for its pastiche of mythology and utopianism, and seen as a culmination of a vision of silent cinema art that united the styles of expressionism, futurism, and constructivism, along with aspects of action serials, and sci-fi adventure. But even in a newly restored version, Woman in the Moon still elicits tepid critical responses -with a few notable exceptions, such as Raymond Bellour's penetrating essay, "La machine-cinema." Writing my book on Lang (Gunning, Films of Fritz Lang) I only had the American release version available for study, which is missing nearly an hour of footage. Now with the availability of more complete restoration of the original German release I have rediscovered a film I thought I knew. 3 The longer version of Woman in the Moon displays a more ambivalent attitude towards technology and its relation to modern structures of power and profit by embedding the moon voyage within a plot of corruption and industrial espionage carried out by an international cartel, which aims to divert scientific research to capitalist gain. Woman in the Moon contaminates the science fiction of Metropolis with the conspiracies of Lang's urban crime films. Lang cannily complicates Metropolis's simplistic bifurcation of society into Hands (workers) Brains (masters), and Hearts (women - or dopey sons) when the credits for Woman in the Moon describe the cartel members as "the brains and the checkbooks." But if the sinister role of finance capital, which played no visible role in Metropolis, is here made manifest, it would seem the hands, the workers, have become invisible. Lang's silent films, made in collaboration with his wife, writer Thea von Harbou, presented a synthetic view of German identity that swept from myth (Die Nibelungen, 1924) to contemporary Weimar culture (Dr. Mabuse, der Spieler, 1922; Spies, 1928) to a vision of the future (Metropolis). His last silent seems to transcend this vision of homeland by escaping the earth itself. Lang has claimed that instead of the universally criticized tableau of reconciliation among classes that now ends Metropolis, he had considered ending the film with Freder (and Maria?) launching off to outer space in a rocket (Eisner, Fritz Lang 90). Whether an actual alternative ending or an anecdote created retrospectively, this extraterrestrial link between the films acknowledges the contemporary political crisis both films wanted to evade. As a response to the class rebellion that causes the near destruction of the city of Metropolis, this launch into space remains as unsatisfactory as the existing public love fest. The outer space portrayed in Woman in the Moon hardly offers a scenario of escape from earthly cares, but rather imports earthly greed into outer space. This rocket flight becomes captive to the most selfish motives, a futuristic gold rush, and ends in the most isolating of oneway ticket voyages. Like the handshake that ends Metropolis, the interaction between economics and technology in Woman in the Moon reveals only an uneasy truce over a conflict between idealist-utopian technology and scenarios of Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 557 dominance that had haunted German culture for decades. If Woman in the Moon cannot be said to offer solutions, it vividly reveals the conflicted modern terrain of German culture and its relation to technology. Space Rockets and the Narrative of Technology Katharina Loew Science and technology thrived in the German-speaking countries throughout the nineteenth century, spurring rapid modernization and economic growth. While the industrial revolution had commenced somewhat earlier in Britain and France, by the 1850s the German states had caught up with France and by the late 1800s the unified German Empire had emerged as a leading power among its European rivals (Hubert 14). The public embraced science and technology across the political spectrum as the embodiment of reason and progress. Socialists and liberals promoted them as part of a socially progressive agenda while the right followed suit mainly out of nationalist considerations. Technological achievements were celebrated as evidence for Germany's national superiority. This emphatic technophilia notwithstanding, many continued to harbor visceral anxieties about the soulless machine age and humanity's technological enslavement. As Goethe phrased it already in 1821 in Wilhelm Meister's journeyman Years, "the increasing dominance of machine production torments and frightens me" (396). Indeed, the ubiquity of new technologies in areas like power production, transportation, the military, communication, and entertainment was the most obvious sign for the dramatic changes brought on by the industrial revolution. Technology was considered the disconcerting epitome of modern reification. It was denounced for being one-dimensionally oriented towards mechanical, external progress, while neglecting the ethical, artistic, and spiritual element. Particularly the educated bourgeoisie, with its focus on culture and humanistic education, identified technology as a threat to its idealist values and socio-cultural relevance. In 1900, historian Max Lenz captured a widespread sentiment when he wrote: Technology can immensely increase the amount of goods, boost human power to an unknown degree, but on its own it is unable to shape the realm of the ideal. It successfully spellbinds masses, spreads ideas, creates power in all spheres of existence; but with respect to the realm of ideas it is neutral: its importance as an aid is immense, but it is impotent when it comes to looking into the depths of life. (20) 4 As a result, the German intelligentsia maintained an ironclad distinction between culture and technology. According to still prevalent romantic ideas, art could only arise from the subjective and the numinous. It was therefore considered incompatible with technical processes. Art embodied life, spirit, creativity, and subjective 558 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew autonomy, whereas technology was associated with materialism, heteronomy, automation, and, ultimately, death (Plumpe 28). Photographer G. Mercator explained: "technical productions are dead bodies, while art inspires its products with soul" (193). In the cultural realm, technology was saddled with all that made modern existence seem alienating and hostile. When film emerged as a prominent cultural phenomenon, however, the categorical opposition between art and technology was forcefully called into question. A heated public discussion began in Germany around 1907 and continued into the early 1930s. In this controversy, cinema became the emblematic forum for negotiating the parameters of aesthetic modernity. The opponents of the new medium emphatically ruled out the possibility that a technical tool such as the camera could create art. In their view, cinema merely produced mechanical copies of material reality. Cinema-friendly theorists, in contrast, made a case that technology possessed spiritual qualities constitutive for art. However, simple dichotomies between modern, cosmopolitan, and technophile ideas on the one hand, and reactionary, mythic, and neo-romantic ones on the other, inevitably fail to grasp the complexity of modernization processes. As Ben Singer has pointed out, it is precisely the "paradoxes and ambiguities that make nominally antimodern lines of thought ineluctably modern" (49). While efforts to spiritualize technology may in hindsight recall fascist aesthetics, at the time they were prevalent across the political spectrum and not automatically tied to nationalism or to the political right. In fact, considering the overwhelming antagonism toward aesthetic claims issued in the name of technology, propagating the concept of a technological art was in itself an unmistakably progressive position. In Woman in the Moon the spiritual dimension is attained in the infinitude of outer space. Indeed, the film represents a culmination point in cinematic efforts to integrate technophilia and romanticism. Lotte H. Eisner's focus on the Romantic roots of German silent cinema has downplayed technology's crucial role in the films of that era. Furthermore, it has obliterated the marked differences between the romanticism of the 1920s and that of the early 1800s. Apropos Woman in the Moon, Fritz Lang explained that nineteenth-century attitudes no longer corresponded to the spirit of the modern age: "Phony romanticism must be replaced by a new type of vision that does not need to be less romantic; it simply needs to be more realistic" ("Fritz Lang"). This modernist romanticism is paradigmatically embodied in the figure of the space rocket. Futuristic technology allows humanity to strive for the heretofore unreachable. In the twentieth century, as Walter Benjamin remarked, "[n]o one really dreams any longer of the Blue Flower" ("Dream Kitsch" 3). Instead, people build rockets and reach for the moon. Romantic longing has become target-oriented. Not surprisingly, satirist Alexander Moszkowski (91-99) claimed that modern technology eliminates distance as a value and thus impedes exoticism and romanticism. Science writer and ardent rocketry advocate Willy Ley countered this argument by declaring rockets and space travel the pinnacle of romanticism: Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 559 Technology allegedly robs human kind of its spiritual assets[ ... ] because it destroys romanticism and exoticism. The space rocket completely invalidates this accusation by Moszkowski. After all it is impossible to imagine anything more romantic than traveling into space and anything more exotic than the surface of another planet. Modern technology does not annihilate this utmost, excessive romanticism and exoticism; it makes it possible in the first place. (Die Moglichkeit 340) Of course, Ley did not actually refute Moszkowski's point. Exoticism and romanticism are necessarily dependent on distance and, as Wolfgang Schivelbusch has shown, technology shrinks space. Nonetheless, the space rocket differs from other modern means of transportation in that it opens up spaces previously entirely unattainable to humans. As such it is an instrument of visionary power, simultaneously rational and marvelous, as Thea von Harbou revealed in a trade press article: The rocket is[ ... ] a small miracle. It is the creature of a brain that welded numbers and matter into a unity that can be a creature if one believes in it - like in a miracle. This is what interests me most about our film: Whether we managed to raise that belief, to animate technology or to make it appear animated in such a way that the belief becomes reality. (L. W-s) Conflating technology and romanticism, the space rocket embodied a modernist myth that the German public eagerly embraced. Starting in the early 1920s the Weimar Republic was seized by what contemporaries described as "rocket fever." Numerous publications, including science fiction novels and popular science books, explored rocketry and spaceflight. The sudden and unprecedented public enthusiasm for rocketry traces back to a seemingly modest, equation-filled booklet that a twenty-nine-year-old high school teacher from Transylvania published at his own expense in 1923. Hermann Oberth's Die Rakete zu den Planetenrdumen (By Rocket into Planetary Space) had previously been rejected as a dissertation at the University of Heidelberg. It made four startling and at the time unverifiable claims (7-8): First, it was possible to build a machine that could rise above the earth's atmosphere. Second, such a machine could achieve escape velocity and leave the earth's gravitational field. Third, it was possible for such a machine to carry humans safely. Forth, interplanetary rocketry could become a profitable business scheme. Oberth's book was first to describe in detail the construction of large liquid-propellant rockets and subsequently became a reference work in the field of rocket science. Arguing in scientific terms that space travel was within human reach, the book stimulated the popular imagination and drew a fervent amateur following. In a Germany still reeling under the defeat of World War I, space rockets evoked a utopian future, youthful romance and escapism, revanchist dreams of German technology-based hegemony and imperialist visions of Lebensraum in outer space. 560 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew The first to make Oberth's ideas accessible to a wider audience was science writer Max Valier, one of the most prominent figures of early German rocketry. In 1924 he published a popular account of Oberth's theories, Der Vorstofl in den Weltenraum (The Advance into Space), which was hugely successful and sold six editions before 1930. In July of 1927, Valier and a handful of other rocket enthusiasts formed the Society for Space Travel (Verein for Raumschiffahrt, Vffi.). The organization issued a monthly club magazine Die Rakete (The Rocket, 1927-1929) and intermittently boasted a membership of 500. It existed until 1934 when it was dissolved by the Nazi government. In addition to Valier's activities as an author and public speaker, his practical tests were likewise crucial for the advancement of rocketry. In 1928/ 1929 he collaborated with industrialist Fritz von Opel (also known as "Rocket-Fritz") on a number of spectacular and widely publicized stunts with rocket-propelled cars, planes, and sleds. In 1930, Valier became the first casualty in the history of spaceflight: He was killed at the age of thirty-five when experimenting with an alcohol-fueled rocket engine. The beginnings of German rocketry, which literally shook and transformed the world in the following decades, were humble, indeed. Our contemporary sense of the massive government budgets for space programs leaves us unprepared to imagine the situation of rocket pioneers like Oberth. They had no governmental or institutional support for their research and experiments, no laboratory or experimental launch site, no engineering team. The handful of racketeers in Weimar Germany resembled fanatical hobbyists obsessed with an ideal that most scientists saw as dubious, if not absurd. Rockets seemed the stuff of pulp novels or movies, not serious science. And it was from the movies that the first institutional support for rocketry came. Wernher von Braun, the scientist who came to represent the space race after World War II, later called it "the oddest source of funding in the history of rocket science" - a film's budget that allocated specific funds for rocket research (Braun and Ordway 65). The Production of Woman in the Moon Katharina Loew Woman in the Moon is a close adaptation of an eponymous novel by Thea von Harbou, a typical example of the popular spaceflight novels that emerged in the wake of Oberth' s Die Rakete zu den Planetenrdumen. Most of these stories adhere to a standard narrative pattern that, as Dina Brandt (87-88) has argued, was first established in Otto Willi Gail's Der Schuss ins All (The Shot into Infinity, 1925): Intrigues or financial difficulties initially jeopardize the hero's visionary space endeavor. These obstacles can be overcome, yet travel preparations and the construction of the rocket still take up more than half of the book. Eagerly anticipated by the public, the rocket launch poses the greatest challenge to the crew (and Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 561 frequently a stowaway), since the space travelers have to endure the dangerous gravitational force and operate the spaceship on a specific time schedule. The destination itself, the moon or another celestial body, is typically less dramatically important, but the return to earth becomes called into question by technical difficulties such as insufficient fuel, and causes excitement once again. Back on earth, the travelers are celebrated as heroes. Woman in the Moon follows this generic plot remarkably closely, yet Lang, as he indicated in a contemporary interview, was not concerned with the film's narrative: The idea to Frau im Mond is more than four years old. My wife thought about it a lot before constructing the novel. [... ] I had no part in the artistic structure of the novel; we do not interfere in the artistic work of each other on principle. In any case, my wife studied the most important astronomic and space technological works for years. (Dubro) At the end of her novel, von Harbou acknowledged three nonfiction works on rocketry and space travel for providing her with scientific and technical ideas: Oberth's Die Rakete zu den Planetenrdumen, Otto Willi Gail's Mit Raketenkraft ins Weltenall (By Rocket into Space, 1928 ), and Willy Ley' s Die Moglichkeit der Weltraumfahrt (The Possibility of Space Travel, 1928). While Gail and Ley were important figures in popularizing rocketry at the time, Oberth enjoyed cult status among rocket enthusiasts. The "father of space travel" was indeed an obvious choice as scientific advisor for a film that, in Lang's own words (Dubro 4), sought to represent "what is scientifically or theoretically proven or at least possible." Thus, in May of 1928, shortly after the premiere of Spies, the contemporary spy thriller that followed Metropolis, Lang sent a lengthy recruitment cable to Oberth in Transylvania (Barth, Oberth 96). Oberth saw Lang's job offer as a unique opportunity to advance his research and promote rocketry. Willy Ley later explained, a "Fritz Lang film on space travel, consequently, meant a means of spreading the idea which could hardly be surpassed in mass appeal and in effectiveness. More than that, this connection might also mean funds, sizable funds, for experimental work on liquid-fuel rockets" (Rockets, Missiles 115). Oberth arrived in Berlin in July of 1928, three months before principal photography was scheduled to begin (Barth, Oberth 96). He devised the rocket models used in the film and advised the crew on technical and astronomical questions. Following the economic disaster of Metropolis, Ufa's new leadership, taking over in March of 1927, was determined to limit the risks associated with financially irresponsible filmmakers. Having unsuccessfully attempted to terminate Lang's contract, Ufa's board of directors agreed with Lang on a different production model (Toteberg 219). Like Metropolis producer Erich Pommer, who was also not considered trustworthy, Lang was to establish an independent company. FritzLang-Film-GmbH would produce two films for Ufa, each budgeted at 800,000 Reichsmarks ($190,000). The terms of the contract were in fact quite favorable for 562 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew Lang: He only had to defray one quarter of the production costs and could utilize Ufa's studio facilities in Neubabelsberg near Berlin at the usual fees. Nonetheless, as Michael Toteberg (220-223) has described, Lang was a difficult contractor. He spent funds generously and for instance ordered forty carloads of sea sand for the moonscape, which subsequently had to be roasted to increase its photosensitivity (nk). The production was delayed repeatedly; principal photography dragged on for more than half a year and also post-production took longer than anticipated. 5 It also angered Ufa's board of directors that costly sequences did not make it into the final cut (Toteberg 223), including a dream sequence in which little Gustav and his hero Helius fight space pirates. 6 The constant production delays rendered the marketability of Woman in the Moon as a silent film increasingly questionable. Sound was spreading rapidly. In 1929, only 5 percent of German feature films were produced with synchronized sound; one year later it was already 70, and two years later 100 percent (Jason, Handbuch vol. 3, 10). Thus, in mid-June of 1929, Ufa approved 60,000 Reichsmarks ($14,000) (Aurich et al. 134) to add "sound effects for the rocket going off etc." to the film, a request that Lang flatly rejected for artistic reasons (Phillips 181). Spies had already gone over budget by about 13 percent. Halfway through principal photography of Woman in the Moon it became clear that the film would cost 40 percent more than the anticipated 1,132,000 Reichsmarks ($270,000). Ufa's board of directors stopped payments to Lang and sued him for damages. However, in order to protect their investment, Ufa eventually decided to back the completion of Woman in the Moon and the studio's lawsuit against Fritz Lang ended in a settlement. Nevertheless, relations between the two parties were irretrievably broken and Lang would never direct another film for Ufa. It was not until principal photography was completed in June of 1929 that Oberth mustered the courage to seek additional funding for his rocket research. Willy Ley, a regular on the set, recalled: In the end it was mainly Fritz Lang who brought the matter to pass, dragging the reluctant management of the Ufa Film Company at least part of the way along with him. There would be, he said (and I believe that was his own idea), commercial value in scientific experiments if they were used for advertising the film. (Rockets, Missiles 115) Having persuaded Ufa to invest in a promotional rocket launch, Lang agreed to bear 50 percent of the costs. On July 9, 1929, an agreement was reached: Within three months, Oberth would complete his preliminary experiments and construct a 6.5-foot liquid-fuel test rocket, which would be launched in celebration of the premiere of Woman in the Moon. Lang and Ufa each would contribute 5 ,000 Reichsmarks and Oberth could utilize the studio workshops at the usual fees. The contract attests to the fact that Oberth's rocket was deemed more than a shortlived marketing stunt: With a preliminary expiration date of December 31, 2020, the contract secured Lang und Ufa a 50 percent share on profits from this and any Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 563 follow-up projects. 7 The practical implementation, however, proved far more challenging than anticipated. First, the timeframe was completely unrealistic. According to Ley, "about a year and four to six months would have been needed. They did not have even four months" (Rockets, Missiles 118). In addition, Oberth lacked practical knowledge. While being "the greatest authority on rocket propulsion at that time [... ], he was a theorist, not an engineer" (Ley, Rockets, Missiles 115-116). Oberth also made poor choices in his collaborators and hired, in Michael ]. Neufeld's words, a "con-artist engineer, Rudolf Nebel, and a fugitive Bolshevik aviation writer, Alexander Scherchevsky (described by Oberth as 'the second laziest man I ever met')" ("Weimar Culture 738), who incidentally reported on Oberth's activities to the military counterintelligence of the Soviet Army (Barth, "Sensationeller Archivfund"). After further experiments and an explosion that almost cost his eyesight, Oberth designed a combustion chamber that he named Kegeldiise (cone nozzle) (Oberth, Veifahren), which was built in Ufa's metalworking department. 8 Indeed, important advances were made during this short period of feverish work with Oberth creating Europe's first functional liquid rocket engine nozzle, a first step towards the V-2 missiles the Nazis later rained on London and Antwerp. However, the film's release schedule forced him to cut corners and forgo the completion of his research rocket. Instead, he hastily came up with a new design for a show rocket that combined fluid oxygen with conventional solid propellants (Barth, Oberth 103). Meanwhile, public excitement about Oberth's rocket launch mounted. Willy Ley recalled: "The public waited for the experiment with an enthusiasm that looks incredible even in retrospect. The demand for information was so great that I had to write an article about rockets literally every day for several weeks" (Rockets and Space Travel 133). The premiere of Woman in the Moon took place on October 15, 1929 at the UfaPalast am Zoo in Berlin with over 2,000 illustrious guests, including Albert Einstein. For the first time, a film premiere was broadcast live on the radio. Willy Ley reported on the audience reactions: [T]he spaceship races up. The first applause breaks out, rattles over the orchestra towards the screen, roars up to the box of those who created the film[ ... ]. Inside the ship, the gravitational force weighs on the lungs of the passengers. With wild effort Willy Fritsch (Helius) releases the medium stage. The lower part drops, the engine of the upper stage fires anew, and again thundering applause. Strange - precisely for the technical things. Are all of these people engineers or does technology create the most powerful effects? Undeniably; no other scene, neither on earth nor on the moon, unsettled the minds of these cool and reserved expert spectators -journalists, scholars, diplomats, economists and film celebrities. These technical achievements they applaud. ("Berlin spricht" 27-28) While the film was a major popular success, Oberth could not live up to the exaggerated expectations about a rocket launch that he had helped fuel. At the time when Woman in the Moon opened his demonstration rocket was still not ready. 564 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew The much-anticipated launch from a site on the Baltic coast was postponed repeatedly, and Oberth continued working frantically until Ufa cut off his money supply, leaving him with debts at the amount of 30,000 Reichsmarks ($7,000) (Barth, Oberth 106). At this point, Oberth simply ran away, in his own words "economically and morally ruined by [his] business friends" ("Professor" 52). He returned to his family and job in Transylvania where his creditors could not prosecute him. The grand plan for a simultaneous launch of a major film and new rocket technology had fizzled. However, as we will see, both film and the interest it galvanized in rocketry had an extensive afterlife. First let us turn to re-evaluating the film itself, a process that must begin with its initial reception. Initial Reception of Woman in the Moon Katharina Loew In contrast to many later claims it was financially unsuccessful, Woman in the Moon was the highest-grossing production of the 1929/1930 season (Jason, Handbuch vol. 1, 60). Its critical reception, however, was overwhelmingly negative. With great alarm the liberal intelligentsia registered how right-wing media mogul Alfred Hugenberg (also known as "The Spider") increasingly impinged on the public opinion of the Weimar Republic. And Woman in the Moon was widely perceived as a showpiece of the Hugenberg Corporation. Alfred Hugenberg, leader of the reactionary German National People's Party, understood his multimedia empire as a crucial tool to advance his reactionary, nationalist, and antidemocratic agenda. In addition to important news and advertising agencies, the Hugenberg group controlled the August Scherl-Verlag, one of Germany's three leading publishing groups with over 300 newspapers and journals. In March of 1927, the company took over Ufa, in part to rescue the national film market from Hollywood's foreign clutches. Hugenberg charged top manager Ludwig Klitzsch with radically restructuring the struggling studio giant, and indeed, before long, Ufa was profitable again. Although Hugenberg pursued unambiguous political goals, Ufa's new leadership did not interfere with production and focused on rationalization and economic efficiency. Ufa under Hugenberg was no more politicized than its Hollywood competitors. Nonetheless, liberal observers were justifiably mistrustful of Hugenberg's activities. Hugenberg actively supported the National Socialists, who shared his antidemocratic and ultranationalist convictions. Like many among the reactionary elites, he was under the fatal illusion that the National Socialists could be instrumentalized and briefly served in Hitler's first coalition cabinet. During the 1920s, Lang and von Harbou maintained diverse business connections with the Hugenberg Corporation. Like The Indian Tomb, Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, and Spies, Woman in the Moon was simultaneously commercialized in Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 565 multiple Hugenberg companies. Von Harbou's novel ran in serialized form in the August Scherl-Verlag's illustrated weekly Die Woche from October 31 to December 8, 1928. The book version of Woman in the Moon was published in December of 1928 with August Scherl-Verlag, shortly after principal photography for Fritz Lang's epic Ufa film had begun. To leftists the lavish Lang-von Harbou-Ufa productions attested to Hugenberg's dominant position in the German media landscape and, by extension, highlighted the threat that the far right posed to liberal democracy. Critic Hans Sahl for instance remarked acerbically: "Once a year the curtain rises on the sanctuary of the German film industry. Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou, the respective Scherl novel under the arm, step into the limelight in order to once again seal their Hugenberg pact in the presence of a public that reverently tallies the millions." Although the Weimar intelligentsia spurned Lang and von Harbou jointly as the poster couple of the Hugenberg Corporation, blame and praise for their teamwork were allocated rather unevenly. Faults in their collaborations were often blamed on von Harbou while laudable aspects were credited to Lang. Years before von Harbou became persona non grata for siding with the National Socialists and Lang's voluntary exile established him as democrat par excellence, critics portrayed him as a fickle genius while she was denounced as a reactionary hack, a "Hugenberg librettist" ("Fritz Langs Millionenfilm") and a "Scherl dame" (Mendelsohn) with a "Nibelung heart" (Sahl). Indeed, for many commentators, the main obstacle to Lang's artistry was that he "wastes his talent on Thea von Harbou's scripts" (Ihering). Critics habitually found fault with von Harbou's lack of originality. In the case of Woman in the Moon they pointed out that von Harbou had "assembled [the story] from various sources" (Degner) and accused her of plagiarizing the dime novels Mister Excentric (1921) and Der Untergang der Welt (The End of the World, 1922). 9 While von Harbou was disliked across the board, Lang was commended for his "talent for suspenseful thrillers" (Sahl) and skill in "capturing external technological events and, almost like a playful boy, rendering fairy stories as reality" (Georg). The "monumental, grandiose, and overwhelming" (Henseleit) was considered Langian and, while not to everyone's liking, forgivable in part. Von Harbou, on the other hand, was scorned for all the "dishonest, kitschy, and banal" ("Fritz Langs Millionenfilm") aspects in their films. The union of Lang's bombast and Harbou's triviality resulted in what critics identified as characteristic for their collaborations: the disparity between" external dimensions and inner void" (Brentano), the fact that their films featured "mammoth facades and nothing behind" (Georg). Technology, however, was considered Lang's strength. On account of his "rampant technological imagination" (Henseleit), he was deemed the right man for bringing astronautics to the screen: "Fritz Lang achieves magnificent results when he works with the machine" (Ihering). Although critics patronizingly characterized space travel as a juvenile subject, "speculating on the sixth grader in everyone" (Arnheim), they also realized that "space travel is topical. ... A film about a trip to the moon therefore comes at the right time" (Ntirnberg). In terms of futuristic 566 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew technology and youthful action Woman in the Moon was well received. Indeed, reviewers wholeheartedly embraced science and technology as subject matter for film art. They agreed that the "boyish aspects of these fantasies - the feeling of start and goal, of explorer bliss and great journey, of utopia and attainability, of productive hallucinations, manly execution, and heroic sacrifice - account for the charming aspects of the film" (Blafi). Particularly the representation of the actual space flight won high praise. Many highlighted the "overwhelming moment" (Henseleit) of the "breathtaking launch" (Jager), which, like the "flight and landing of the space ship makes for frantic sensations" (Degner). Commentators applauded "the incredible departure, the initial mortal danger, the technical gadgets, the view of the approaching moon: here is the success of this enterprise" (Blafi). Yet Lang's unwavering commitment to scientifically grounded realism was not always well received. Some critics were disappointed by the film's all too factual rendition of the lunar surface, "a common snow landscape without any Dantean imagination or the thoughts of a Jules Verne or H. G. Wells" (Zwehl). Others, however, readily took Fritz Lang up on his assertion that "everything unreal had to be eliminated. No Jules Verne ... no utopia!" ("Interview"). These critics sardonically pointed out inconsistencies such as "the unpractical layout of the rocket control room[ ... ] it is not comprehensible why for this [life-threatening acceleration] phase of the trip no operating levers were mounted conveniently above the stretchers" (R.T.). In fact, some, like Hans Pander, went to great lengths to expose the film's scientific flaws: Evidently Fritz Lang told himself: if my film is set on the side of the moon nobody has ever seen, nobody can criticize me. Very true, and therefore nothing shall be said about the absurd assumption that the dark side of the moon has an atmosphere. In that case, however, it is not comprehensible why the stars are brightly visible in the sky during the day and when it is day has also not been considered either when the script was written. The space travelers leave earth at full moon and arrive around 36 hours later on the other side of the moon, which is completely dark at full moon. After 1 'lz days it is very early in the morning there, after all a whole moon day lasts 14 earth days. The sun should be very low; instead the light is already at a steep angle. The film hardly takes into account the low gravity on the moon. The people wear some type of heavy shoes, but otherwise move around like on earth [... ] of the gold that evidently just stands around the audacious professor breaks off a thick rod as if the metal had no strength and the measuring instruments and clocks work just like on earth. Rather than finding fault with the film's exuberant technophilia, critics disliked Woman in the Moon on account of its reactionary mawkishness. Indeed, they bashed the first technologically plausible depiction of spaceflight in film history for being old-fashioned and backward looking: "This Ufa production, which is an old and mediocre Jules Verne" (Brentano), features "too many aspects of a stale, bygone, and completely antiquated film drama" (Henseleit) and must Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 567 therefore be considered "a step backward" (Diebold), "a film of the past" (Georg). Woman in the Moon seemed to revert to the conservative attitudes, materialism, and blind faith in technological progress characteristic for the German Empire: "We see a materialist wasteland and stuffy sentimentality. Cosmos from the 1880s" (Blafi). The Wilhelminian era was idolized by reactionary nationalists like Alfred Hugenberg as the proud, truly "German" period of national strength and time-honored values. Liberal critics despised Woman in the Moon for reflecting such a mindset. For them, the film's thematic progressiveness did not mask its reactionary undercurrents. Herbert Ihering diagnosed a fundamental imbalance at the core of the film: "Thea von Harbou [... ] invents people that no longer exist and puts them into machines that almost exist already: Miracles of coming mechanical precision and miracles of backward sentimentality." The uneasy mix between modern and reactionary was also reflected in the characters, "young hearts in the moon snow" (Georg), who "dream of upscale kitsch instead of thinking of machines" (Ntirnberg) and "make outer space listen to pillow talk that ought to make the sun leave its orbit shuddering. Film has never usurped a scientific idea in a more pointless manner" (Sahl). One-dimensional figures like Friede, a "Madonna in the moon rocket" (Pol), attested to an archaic sensibility at odds with modernist sobriety and authenticity: "It no longer works today that a Madonna [... ] strolls around amidst machines and outer space, rocket and oxygen" (Ntirnberg). That critics found the plot and characters of Woman in the Moon retrogressive and insincere is unsurprising given that, as scriptwriter, they were von Harbou's responsibility. Interestingly, however, Fritz Lang, much admired as a creator of "technological miracles" (Degner), faced similar allegations: "Lang's fervent cinematography lags behind eight to ten years. Even minor Hollywood directors shoot differently today. Lang's camera remains mostly static" (Pol). Furthermore, critics deplored the "melodramatic" (Pinthus) and "antiquated" (Wollenberg) acting style and the unconvincing special effects: "The way the spacecraft stands on the moon like an Easter egg house in a picture book is already funny. And during the launch even the most inexperienced viewer can spot the miniatures" (Schwabach). While those on the right idolized Fritz Lang as Germany's national film poet, leftist commentators took Woman in the Moon as evidence that Fritz Lang represented a bygone era: "As if he never had seen a Russian, French, or modern American film! Lang and his partial talents are remnants of the Wilhelminian era of film history" (Georg). The reactions to Woman in the Moon were largely shaped by the ideological conflicts between democratic liberals and authoritarian nationalists during the final years of the Weimar Republic. Indeed, the controversies about Fritz Lang's artistry must be seen as a consequence of his monopolization by the nationalist right. The left despised Woman in the Moon as an incarnation of the radical reactionary sentiments that, also as a result of Hugenberg's activities, were becoming increasingly mainstream. 568 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew The Earth as Viewed from the Moon: Outer Space as the Vision of Modernity Tom Gunning The literary lineage of science fiction moon voyages derives primarily from Jules Verne's pair of moon voyage novels, From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon. Arguably the first description of a moon voyage that attempted to be founded on scientific principles, Verne's work not only inspired a succession of later scientific fantasies (including von Harbou's), but also sparked Oberth's adolescent fantasies of space travel. Verne's semi-satirical novel chronicles a group of veterans of the American Civil War known as the Gun Club who extend their experience with the ballistics of artillery batteries to a more distant target, the moon. But although the great artillery shell that functions as a space ship in Verne novel contained a number of scientists, its aim did not include a moon landing. As the title of the second novel indicates, the huge projectile circles the moon, gets a good look at it, and then returns to earth with a splash down in the ocean. The actual physics of reverse-thrust rocketry had not replaced the ballistics of cannon fire and artillery shells in Verne's scientific references. Thus, even if it inspired the three pioneers of modern rocketry, the American Robert H. Goddard, the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and the advisor on Woman in the Moon, Hermann Oberth, Verne's novel of a huge artillery shell shot into outer space technically speaking does not belong to the history of rockets. Oberth came from the rural area of Romania known as Transylvania, the region immortalized in legend and fiction as the realm of occult powers. But he was a solid scientist - even if in his eccentricity he resembled (and perhaps provided the model for) Lang's slightly mad rocket scientist Manfeldt. In his early reading of Verne, Oberth recognized the flaw in the novelist's physics. The speed necessary to fire the moon-bound projectile from Verne's monster gun would necessitate such acceleration that the shell and all its passengers would be crushed to atoms. The era of space exploration had to leave behind the physics of the gun for the autopropelled reverse thrust of the rocket. Ultimately, of course, this principle would lead to a new concept of weapons, the missile. In Melies's Voyage to the Moon, the bullet-like projectile inspired by Verne lands smack in the eye of a human-faced Man in the Moon. Stressing the burlesque fantasy style of this trick film, the highly comic image also carries a significant impact for modern vision. Imaging a moon landing as a sock in the eye expresses the shock implied in the technological transformation of vision that underlies our desire to attain our closest heavenly body and arguably the cinema as well. Walter Benjamin claimed that both Dada and cinema take on a ballistic force that "turned the artwork into a missile" ("Work of Art" 119). 10 Melies' s conjunction of a voyage into outer space and the cinema had already in 1902 imagined the force of this radical new vision. Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 569 Hanging above us, the moon marks a point of view outside our terrestrial horizons; it seems to peer down at earth like a cosmic voyeur. This lunar eye corresponds to the urgent desire many filmmakers have to establish another viewpoint, a place beyond our earth from which we could observe our world. The moon has been portrayed as the object of the human gaze almost as long as the female body (and Lang and Harbou's title inscribes a deeply rooted identity between them). The great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich produced perhaps the ultimate images of contemplative and longing moon watching, two figures transfixed by a lunar view. Thus the moon expresses the intercourse between seeing and the visible object. Georges Melies portrayed both aspects of the moon. First as the object of technological gaze, in his 1898 film La Lune a un metre, in which a voracious grimacing moon seems to descend to earth through the medium of a magnifying telescope, and swallows both astronomer and his instrument. Most famously, to express the space ship's movement, in Voyage to the Moon the camera itself seems to speed toward the moon's eye. Melies's masterful film followed Wells's The First Men in the Moon rather than Verne in portraying a moon landing which anticipates Lang and von Harbou's later film (although Katharina Loew's research has found that none of the publicity or reviewers for the Lang film referred back to Melies's prototype, apparently forgotten by the late twenties). Once his lunar explorers emerge from their rocket, Melies staged an essential topos that had already appeared in Verne's illustrations and became a repeated cinematic image: looking back at the earth from this extra-terrestrial viewpoint and watching the earth rise (a scene Lang will repeat). Such a desire for a cosmic view seems especially to be a modern obsession, with filmmaker Werner Herzog in Wim Wenders's film Tokyo-Ga expressing a desire for "pure, clear, transparent images" which he feels he might attain from a NASA rocket into outer space. As a filmmaker, Lang tended to look down on the world; his vision flies above things. The high-angle shot, often placed at some height above the set, served as a Langian signature. This downward gaze often gives his narrational viewpoint a God-like perspective. But Lang's high-angle view also rendered the world unfamiliar and abstract, supplying an essential visual element of his style as modernist photographers like Rodchenko and others also discovered in the twenties. This aerial technological perspective was pioneered in the nineteenth century by the great French photographer Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, best known by his pseudonym Nadar. Jules Verne's first successful technological voyage novel Five Weeks in a Balloon reflected the transcendence such an aerial voyage produced. 11 Friedrich, Nadar, Melies, Lang, and Herzog - all envisioned moon gazing as an awed gaze contemplating an expansive universe, one whose scope demanded new technologies of both transport and imagery, transforming our sense of the world that we dwell on - and seek to transcend. 570 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew The Space of Technology Tom Gunning Lang's cinematic vision configured a world composed by abstract patterns. Even within Lang's mythological primitive settings as in the forest in Die Nibelungen, a consciously laid-out geometry determines Lang's set design, composition, and direction of actors' movements. These abstract patterns, rendered more visible by his frequent high-angle views, characterize his view of both nature and technology, the archaic past and the projected future: from Helius's sleek hard-edged apartment to the moon's mineral cliffs and grottos in Woman in the Moon. Seen from above, space becomes diagrammatic, a chessboard of plotted moves. The massive sets and miniatures of the city of the future in Metropolis most clearly embodied such a totally designed environment. But as the modernist design of Lang and von Harbou's apartment and workspace reveals, in late Weimar-era Germany Lang already dwelt in a modern environment. It is in this already evident new world that Woman in the Moon takes place. The film avoids the (then) distant date of Metropolis's 2027 in favor of a more recognizable twentieth-century environment. (An intertitle that opens the film places the story as taking place in the "Not Yet.") In an interview at the film's release that Katharina Loew has unearthed, Lang indicated he did not want this film to be about a future utopia, but addressed to the people of today (Dubro 4). But this nearly contemporary world is highly technological. The film's narrative moves us through strong different environments, from the shabby garret in which the outcast genius Prof. Manfeldt initially dwells, to the technological environment of the space ship and, finally, the desolate surface of the moon. If the streets, meeting rooms, and Helius's apartment project an image of a new technological world, remnants of an old world, like Manfeldt's hovel, still persist, recalling the medieval cathedral preserved in the midst of Metropolis. But if the modern environments appear sleek and functional, they also seem cold and a bit inhuman. Only Manfeldt's abject garret (resembling the attic storage place in which Hans Beckert hides in M) projects a feeling of a human (alltoo-human) location. As antithetical as Manfeldt's hovel and the inhuman spaces of the moon that open and close the film may be, the film's quest for cosmic space begins in a space so constricted and filthy one feels claustrophobic and even itchy viewing it. Yet even here amid Manfeldt's broken furniture, rough board partitions, dusty pallet, and accumulated mouse droppings, scientific diagrams, equations, scholarly articles, and graffiti of sketches of the moon's surface cover the walls. This accumulation of abstract calculations reveals the world in which this semi-mad scientist truly dwells: a vast technological project calculating the interplay of massive forces and geometric trajectories. The contrast of Manfeldt's grubby mouse hole to the streamlined, immaculate art deco Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 571 apartment (patterned, it seems, on the decors of Lang and Harbou's apartment) of the film's industrialist hero Helius conceals a deep affinity between the aspirations of both characters. As the abstract diagrams that cover the walls of both locations reveal, well-dressed engineers and grubby madmen already dwell elsewhere, projected into the alien space of their calculations. The new cosmos the engineer aspires to sprouts from an eccentric's obsession. The opening intertitle proclaims the film's setting as this mental space of anticipation: "Never does not exist for the human mind, only Not Yet." The title places the whole film under the rule of the unrealized reign of possibility and abstraction. In the same interview Lang gave as one of his major interests "modern functional spaces" (Dubro 4). In Woman in the Moon abstraction expresses the functional nature of modern technology as a visual spectacle. Yet Lang displays an ambivalence toward the modern environment that contrasts with the celebration of the machine found in the films of Soviet constructivists. He expresses awe and wonder at modern technology and design, but the intermeshed networks of technology he portrays in nearly all his films entrap his characters as much as empower them. Within these calculated environments the inevitability of danger dwells, like the explosions that beset the Paternoster machine in Metropolis, which provoke images of primitive human sacrifice in the midst of scientific progress. This view of a modern technological world that returns one to the mythic and primitive recalls Ernst Jtinger's celebration of the modern environment of risk with its storms of steel. Critics, including Siegfried Kracauer (149-150, 162; 272) and Lotte Eisner (Haunted Screen 336-337), have identified Lang's recurring geometric arrangement of people, things, and architecture with the mass ornaments of fascism and the spectacles of Leni Riefenstahl, or the Nazi Kulturfilms of Walther Ruttmann, in which man and technology seem to merge in their subjection to a common will and purpose. However, this reading simplifies the ambivalence that underlies Lang's vision. Riefenstahl's images meld crowds into a single mass through devices of spectacle, rhythm, and elementary geometry, manufacturing mass joy in triumph and unity, the ecstasy of man-become-machine through submission to the Fuhrer' s will. The principal scenes of mass geometry in Lang's oeuvre - the movement of the crowds in Metropolis - do not resemble the Nuremberg rallies. Rather geometric and rhythmic unity in Metropolis marks moments of oppression and enslavement, such as the workers moving in lockstep to and from their dehumanizing jobs. The expression of excitement and ecstasy, such as the workers' riots culminating in the immolation of the false Maria, are chaotic, marked by the frenetic ring dances resembling the Carmagnole of the French Revolution or the decadent jazz-like shimmies of the nightclub revelers emerging from the fleshpots of Yoshiwara (both associations anathema to the Nazis). Only the final triangular form that ends Metropolis as the now-calmed workers submit to the union of the hands with the head seems to celebrate authoritarian order through geometry. 572 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew Whatever its failure as human drama, Woman in the Moon offers Lang's coolest and most detailed view of the technological environment of modernity. The most spectacular sequence of the film comes with the launching of the rocket, a sequence lasting more than twenty minutes, dividing the film almost equally between an earthly first act and an extra-terrestrial finale. As Loew's research shows, the general negative critical reaction to the film often made an exception for this sequence, which, as Willy Ley ("Berlin spricht") indicates, the premiere audience greeted with applause. In comparison, the drama on the moon seems anti-climatic. Woman in the Moon provides less a dramatic character-driven narrative than a logical progression from abstract concept to technological realization, followed by the collapse of human-based relations through greed, cowardice, and jealousy. The espionage action of theft of documents and blackmail that drives the opening section of the film centers on controlling technical prototypes and plans. As is often true in Lang, documents that contain a schema for the future possess an almost magical power, such as Mabuse's scribbled visions of "The Reign of Crime" that seem to exert hypnotic control over characters in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse. Whether stuffed under Manfeldt's grimy pillow or secured in Helius's state-of-theart safe, the plans for space travel and moon exploration constitute the stakes of scientific plans and criminal conspiracies. These prototypes appear in many forms: paper documents, but also a largescale detailed model of the rocket, which the sinister cartel examines carefully in their conference room as they plot to seize control of Helius's project (models whose construction Oberth supervised - and which apparently the Nazis later impounded as state secrets) (Eisner, Fritz Lang 110). The cartel also scrutinizes photographs taken from Mt. Wilson observatory of Helius's previous unmanned rocket launch to the moon. But even these photographs are trumped when the head of the cartel announces he has something "totally different." The conference room becomes a projection room as films are shown of the moon's surface taken from the unmanned rocket, which carried an automatic camera. Besides detailing the rocket's system, the films shown include animations of the way the rocket will evade the gravitational field of the earth and enter that of the moon, with moving diagrams of forces and trajectory. On the screen the camera moves across a rough ulcerated surface of a lunar landscape showing, as an intertitle explains, "What no man's eye has ever seen": the dark side of the moon eternally turned away form earthly view. The capitalists applaud these images fervently and immediately take out their checkbooks. Lang's style of modernist abstraction offers more than aesthetic stylization. The abstract visualizes a new technological world in which schema and archetype precede and determine realization. Geometry pervades all aspects of the film: concentric circles define the futurist-expressionist style paintings that decorate Helius's office; the rough graffiti of moon craters on Manfeldt's walls; the films of the actual moon surface taken from the rocket. The animated diagrams of space flight Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 573 (commissioned from abstract filmmaker Oskar Fischinger) demonstrate that Lang considered abstraction an effective way to convey information. Lang's camera seeks to abstract the deep structures of the world from its surfaces, like an x-ray stripping away the flesh of the world to reveal its hollow core. Woman in the Moon perhaps takes this approach the farthest of any of Lang's films (perhaps even too far), depending more on objects and machines to tell its story than on its characters. Thus when Helius narrates the theft of the rocket plans to his partner Windegger and his fiancee Friede, Lang conveys it to the audience by a tour de force sequence of overlap dissolves linking objects. We see successively: a close-up of Manfeldt's note book; the drugged bouquet Helius received from a flower girl; the seat of his car where only the twine that bound the manuscript remains; the door of his safe; the interior of the safe, stripped bare. This sequence represents an extreme point of Lang's obsession with human absence with narrative consequences conveyed exclusively by things. Cinema provided Lang with the ideal form for portraying such a post-human world composed primarily of ideas and objects. Lang's conflation of the rocket and the camera - already noted by Raymond Bellour (50, 54) develops not only the modern theme of an eye released from earthly bounds, but techniques of vision independent of human operators. Nestled in the nose cone, an automatic camera forms the literal point of the projectile, piercing into space in order to record the aspect of the moon never seen by human eyes, exceeding even the aerial views of Nadar's aerial balloons or the World War I reconnaissance flights in which Lang participated. This eye is purely technological. The Launch Tom Gunning The first act of the film ends as Helius and Windegger surrender to the cartel's blackmail and agree to take their representative, the sinister Walter Turner of Chicago, on their moon voyage. The ensuing launch sequence is dominated by a series of rhythmically defined and carefully coordinated movements and formal elements. As the major achievement of Woman in the Moon and one of the climaxes of silent Weimar cinema, the launch deserves an in-depth analysis. Lang begins with the diegetic equivalent of a title sequence: a message appears written in the sky by the vapor of an airplane, a form of publicity made popular in the twenties, which says simply "START 21:30." Opening with this form of technological writing- a message written, even if ephemerally, in the sky- expands the themes of abstraction and technology of the film's first act into a spectacular and public form. Lang follows this view of the sky with a view from the sky, an aerial shot passing over the launch site. Lang used miniatures here, but so carefully 574 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew designed that one could take them for an actual aerial view (in sharp contrast with the equally intricate but very romantic images of misty forests, rivers, and vertiginous mountains glimpsed during the magical trip through the sky in Murnau's 1926 Faust). While Murnau took as his model landscapes by Dtirer or Altdorfer, Lang's images recall the modernist aerial photographs of the twenties. The buildings, roads, and runways of a flying field define this space with geometric precision, marking it as a technological, not a natural, space. Strewn through it in undulating ribbons we see masses of tiny dots that represent less people than crowds gathering for the event, the camera movement masking their actually static nature. Again visual abstraction derives from the forms and functions of technology. The views from aerial balloons described by Verne, drawn by the caricaturist Grandeville, and photographed by Nadar, were transformed when the airplane allowed aerial photography to become systematic and increased its altitude and therefore its abstraction. 12 Modernist painters such as El Lissitzky found in such aerial photographs a secular source for the visual abstraction that other modernists, such as Kandinsky and Mondrian, found in spiritual traditions such as Theosophy. 13 Years later in Hollywood Lang would write a script for a spy film in which an aerial view of a secret air force base is concealed as a modernist painting. 14 Throughout the launch sequence Lang presents the event as mediated by technology. The new mass medium of radio narrates the launch (as the actual premiere of Woman in the Moon would be), while Lang's cinema orchestrates the visual spectacle through the rhythmically intercut motion of massive machines. The spaceship (named Friede, "Peace," the name as well of the film's heroine- the masculine form, Fried, was von Harbou's nickname for Lang) is shot within the hangar from multiple angles. Bleachers hold crowds of onlookers gathered to witness the launch. The radio event is narrated to a home audience by a man whom the film's credits name as "the man at the microphone" (as if he merged with his technology) who stands flanked by microphones atop a high platform. The whole sequence cuts rhythmically, articulating individual actions into an orchestrated whole. With a perfectly simultaneous gesture the men in the crowd remove their hats. Inside the hangar the massive ship begins to move out on its rails toward a water pool that will serve as its launch pad, seemingly pushing the workers in front of it. The massive beams and struts which make up the transport system move through the frame, shot from different vantages, recalling the various "ballets mecaniques" of twenties avant-garde cinema - not only Leger's absolute film, but the films of the Soviets, Abel Cance, or Joris Ivens' s The Bridge, not to mention the opening of Metropolis. A cut from the rocket moving towards its launch pad shows another superb miniature of the rocket field as the moon begins to peer over the horizon, the launch perfectly timed to coincide with moonrise. The hangar and the rail track along which the rocket moves are illuminated by the moving lightbeams of beacons, anticipating (or inspiring?) a motif of Triumph of the Will. A man on a platform beside a parabolic mirror of one such beacon turns and points off left. The crowd reacts in unison, pivoting their attention, many lifting their Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 575 arms and pointing off. The moon, the object of this attention, continues to rise above the horizon. The doors of the huge hangar open as the rocket moves forward. The crowd now pivots to the right (toward the off-screen rocket) and cheer together, their arms waving. The doors to the hangar open further, fully revealing the almost humanoid figure of the rocket beginning to emerge. In medium shot the man with the microphone gestures broadly as he stares off, describing what he sees for the radio audience. In a closer shot from a low angle the rocket looms as it rolls towards the hangar doors. Its massive transport moves past the camera laterally. Over several shots the crowd continues to cheer, men waving their hats, the ladies their handkerchiefs; a boy is lifted onto his father's shoulders to see better as the rocket clears the hangar door. The crowd suddenly rushes across the field, restrained by a human chain of policemen, while cameramen, tiny figures viewed from above, scurry around the huge moving rocket, photographing its progress. A long shot shows the railtracks converging at the rocket some distance in the background. The light-beams cast twin dark moving shadows of the rocket's phallic shape onto either side of the open hangar doors. This striking symmetrical composition of the rocket framed by its shadows crowns the first movement of the launch sequence. The next shot shifts orientation and dramatic focus into the rocket interior and the human protagonists. Helius warns his fellow passengers, especially the old man Manfeldt and the woman Friede, of the dangers of the voyage. This human dimension seems paradoxically lower key than the tense interaction of machines and crowds shown previously. Friede's comment, "the eyes of the world are on us - the ears of the world are listening," places the human drama in its proper context, subordinating personal fear and shame to a new public created by technologically mediated watching and listening. A nearly allegorical, yet strongly modernist, constructivist photomontage visualizes this confluence of crowds and media. This composite image opens the second movement of the launch sequence, in which the crowd and the earth are left behind and the human characters merge with the technology of their space ship. The composite image is dominated by two overlapping sets of concentric circles, representing the radio system broadcasting the news of the launch. The large circle in the upper left of the frame encloses a moving image of the man with microphone continuing his broad gestures as he describes the launch. To convey broadcast sound in this silent medium, his words float one by one from his circle out over the screen. The speaker and his words remain the only moving elements in the shot, the other images being stills. Directly below the circle on the left a young man listens intently over radio earphones, his face turned upward. On the right of the frame a series of still faces watch intently, while the background is composed of the images of the crowd, the cordon of policemen restraining them. These frozen images express a mood of suspense and expectation. The next cut brings us back into the ongoing process of moving the rocket into position. A high-angle view shows it moving over the water tank from which it will launch, where the beams of light converge. A low-angle view from the pool, 576 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew looking up at the rocket, follows, then a shot of the man at the microphone. A series of shots show the derricks lowering the rocket into its fluid nest. We return to the interior of the rocket as the travelers bed down for the launch and Helius explains the pressure will be so intense they will lose consciousness and it could be fatal. His explanation is punctuated by shots of the circular gauges that measure speed and pressure, with their numbers clearly marking thresholds of danger. The technological drama has changed scale: from massive long shots to close-ups of these dials. Although most of the process is automated, it is essential that the lever that stops acceleration be pulled by a crewmember at the right time or, as Windegger exclaims, they will be "lost in space, irretrievably, never to return to earth - never!" The slow methodical descent of the rocket into the pool and the removing of its transport mechanism are intercut with the restless movement of the crowd. As the platform moves away from the pool, the focus shifts back inside the rocket to the voyagers and the various clocks which count off the minutes to launch. A growing stasis marks the countdown to lift off, marked by an emphasis on circular objects: the gauges, the portals, and the lights within the ship. A great deal has been made of Lang's "invention" of the countdown for the rocket take-off, perhaps deservedly so, less for its anticipation of an actual practice of future space programs than its role in the film's logic of abstraction (Eisner, Fritz Lang 106). I have emphasized the role clocks play within Lang's oeuvre, both as a technological marker of the inhuman orders that determine his fictional worlds (what I have called the "Destiny-Machine") and as a marker of the inexorable progress of temporality and mortality. Time in Lang's world is always later than you think (Gunning, Films of Fritz Lang). The close-up of the clock with its jerky second hand, intercut with the long shot of the moon above the horizon, aligns the temporality of machine and cosmos with the circular motif of this sequence. Helius, his eye fixed on the clock, extends his hand to the lever. Through a series of intertitles, intercut with shots of the immobile passengers strapped in their cots, he announces successively: "60 seconds to go"; "20 seconds to go - lie still - take a deep breath!" "Ten seconds to go!" Then an animated title counts down successively "6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Now," the numerals enlarging in each title. Helius's hand in close-up pulls the lever; the water in the pool explodes in foam, and in an animated shot the rocket blasts from earth to sky, merging with the stars. Windegger and Helius strain to operate the dials and levers. Gauges in close-up show the increase in speed and pressure. The voyagers breathe laboriously, as if in agony, and then lose consciousness - although not before Helius in an overhead shot manages to pull the final lever. As he lies passed out, the rocket, with its gauges and the whole technical ensemble, proceeds on its course, bearing its unconscious crew. The clock ticks on as they sleep for hours, the rocket propelled through a star-filled sky, completely independent of any direct human control. That the first part of the voyage is made as the human characters sleep inaugurates a major motif of space travel films to come, from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 577 Space Odyssey (1968) to Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) and Prometheus (2012): actual transport into space occurs while voyagers are unconscious. Whatever realistic motivation this may have, in this film it underscores the oneiric dimension of a trip to the moon. As the process of technological obsession becomes realized it passes through the dream state. Lang once claimed that the genesis of the film came from a night he spent in a railway sleeping car: I love the night in the sleeping coach. I can lie for hours, hands under my head, and stare into the night. The rolling of the wheels which has for me an ever new changing rhythm, the soft movement of the body, the whistle of the locomotive, the swarms of falling stars of its sparks, the consciousness to be carried from one place to another without having anything else to do but lie still dreaming the dreams of youth[ ... ] all this combines for me into a condition of intoxication which inspires me again and again. This night, now became for me the most adventuresome ride of my life up till now: it became the optical vision of the ride to the moon[ ... ] a sleeping coach berth became a space ship cabin and a huffing vehicle tied to rails with a velocity of 70 or 80 kilometers became a rocket racing through space at a speed of 11,200 meters per second. (Qtd. in Ott 148) Lang envisioned the trip to the moon as being rocked to sleep in a cradle hurled at inhuman speed into an endless night. When the crew awakes, new discoveries occur: first, the discovery of the stowaway child. The child's cache of his "research" on the moon- a series of sciencefiction dime novels with lurid covers - acknowledges the dual sources of Lang's film, rooted in some aspects of hard science in the research and theories of scientific advisors Willy Ley and Hermann Oberth, but also in the kitsch of sensation fiction so beloved by both the director and his scriptwriter wife. But the collaborators' belief that this "trash literature" also contained serious themes becomes vividly expressed, as the adults, after laughing over the images of a vampire, death rays, and a monstrous moon calf, then gaze soberly at an image of the comic book hero drifting through dark space in his attempt to return to earth. Friede looks up from the image to ask, "The earth - where is our earth?" Leaving behind the earthy, so thrillingly celebrated as a technological triumph in the launch sequence, now dawns on these characters as an anxiety of separation, a grim psychological isolation. Friede's question becomes answered quickly as the rocket opens onto new vistas. Helius opens a portal and gazes out. We see a point-of-view shot of the earth, anticipating the "blue marble" photograph of the earth, which NASA made famous, snapped by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972, the last manned moon voyage. The voyagers gather to look out, their faces first shrouded in shadow as they peer into darkness. Then the aura of the sun begins to emerge from behind the earth. In the reaction shot the moon voyagers receive bright illumination as they gaze at their distant home planet, recalling and reversing the beckoning moon rising above the horizon at the launch. Manfeldt searches space with his telescope, the circular matte indicating his technological view aligning perfectly with the circle of the moon. The voyagers have 578 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew switched orientation for their gaze, from earth to moon. As they descend into the gravitational field of the moon, they watch the earth disappear behind the revolving and pockmarked surface of an extremely alien-looking moon. The rocket plummets, and the moon's surface spins outside the portal, resembling a blurred film image slipping through the projector gate. Helius and Windegger fiddle with dials, a pair of meshed wheels spins wildly (resembling more a constructivist sculpture or Duchamp's ready-mades than any functional machinery). In a dizzying sequence of kinetic rotations, these wheels are intercut with the moon surface, blurring as it rotates rapidly and the passengers gyrate, trying to keep balance. Manfeldt stands before the portal gesticulating frenetically, like a mad orchestra conductor. As other critics and myself have indicated, the film's final forty-five minutes, which take place on the moon, remain a bit of a snooze. The set design of the moon - its craggy mountains, sand dunes, and grottos - certainly represents one of the final triumphs of the stylized environments of the Weimar cinema. But the various dramas of exploration (searching for water and gold) and personal betrayals (the death of Manfeldt; Turner's sabotage of the rocket; Friede's choice of Helius over Windegger) all seem to play out scenarios that were foreseeable even before the landing. The moon itself, while spectacular, remains as cold and empty as the death which Windegger claims will be the only thing they find there. Literally true for Manfeldt and Turner, death, more than the fulfillment of romantic love, seems to loom before Helius and Friede as the rocket flies off at the film's end to leave them there alone, possibly forever. The moon is a dead satellite, its atmosphere of isolation overwhelms both Eros and cupidity: When Windegger seems condemned to remain on the moon, he rejects Friede's offer to stay with him, claiming, "There is only one longing! Back to earth." Although initially the object of their collective obsessive desire, once obtained, the moon offers no obvious fulfillment to any of the characters. Perhaps the most emblematic image of the sequence on the moon is the torch that Helius drops into the abyss in the caves in which Manfeldt died, which falls through darkness without illuminating it, and is finally swallowed within it. The image seems a commentary on the whole voyage: spectacular yet pointless, swallowed by nothingness. The launch of the rocket from the moon back to earth contrasts sharply with the twenty-minute exultant take-off. Less than a minute long, it consists of some seven shots alternating between Helius standing on the lunar wastes and checking his watch and the boy within the rocket pulling the lever. The rocket in long shot shoots into a dark and starry night. Helius, looking up, watches it vanish, then lowers his head to stare blankly directly into the camera. Throughout this film Lang almost systematically avoids the classical taboo on looking at the camera directly. In most eyeline matches actors gaze into the lens, with the succeeding shot showing the object of their gaze. Here, as the film ends, however, there is no cut to the object Helius looks at, because nothing seems to meet his gaze only absence and emptiness. Helius's horrified stare off expresses this. He then covers his face in despair. Looking off to the right resignedly, he reacts with a Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 579 start. The POV shot withheld after his previous look off is now fulfilled. A medium shot shows Friede standing in front of the base camp looking towards Helius (that is, at the camera) compassionately. Disobeying her agreement with the men, she has slipped away from the rocket to stay on the moon with Helius. The embrace that follows completes the melancholy of this denouement. Friede holds Helius to her breast and smoothes his hair in maternal comfort, as he seems to simply sob against her breast. The moment recalls the regressive gesture of sobbing on a wife's breast that Kracauer (122) commented on as the end of Karl Grune's 1923 Die Strafle, as the protagonist of that film has abandoned his adventure and only wants to find comfort in his return home. But no home exists on the moon. Aftermath and Epilogue Tom Gunning It is possible that Willy Ley may have introduced the countdown for rocket launches at NASA from his memory of this film (it was not used by the Nazis in launching the V-2 rockets), bringing fiction and reality full circle (Eisner, Fritz Lang 106). The sense of cosmic isolation that ends the film seems to anticipate an aspect of metaphysical chill that undermines the technological optimism of early science fiction and ends up possibly dominating the genre. Its tone was captured by the statement of the great seventeenth-century philosopher Blaise Pascal as he contemplated the new limitless universe revealed by the discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus: "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me" (Pascal 73). 15 This sentiment was translated vividly in the advertising tagline for Ridley Scott's film Alien: "In space no one can hear you scream." 16 For Lang this may be a characteristic of modern space, not just outer space. In his next film Mas the serial killer accumulates his child victims, it seems that in the modern city, too, no one can hear you scream. But the ultimate nightmare looming was not a man and woman marooned on the moon, but the circumstances that truly accelerated the development of modern rocketry, forces that stretched far beyond movie publicity into global warfare and the militarization of space. What began as a marriage of movie ballyhoo and popular science ended in a campaign of terror. If Oberth's experiments failed as film publicity, they nonetheless continued to have effects on the Society for Space Travel (Vffi.). The still underfunded organization begged Ufa to allow it to gather up the models and experimental material created for the film. Apparently unwilling to give up the show business route, one member of the group suggested they sell the rocket model to a circus to raise money for further experiments (Ley, Rockets and Space Travel 132). According to Tom D. Crouch: 580 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew Between March 1931 and April 1932, the members of the VfR completed 270 static liquid-propellant rocket engine tests; 87 flights; 23 demonstrations for other organizations; and 9 presentations for the press. Their rockets reached altitudes of up to 4,922 feet. (158) Rocketry continued to be the pursuit of dedicated and informed amateurs, but the Society was revitalized by a new member, a young student of Oberth's and Ley's, Wernher von Braun (Gruntman 126-137). In 1936, at the age of twenty-four, von Braun became the technical director of Nazi Germany's top-secret ballistic missile program and later, after immigrating to the United States, served as director of the Marshall Space Flight Center (Gruntman 13 7-139). The Society for Space Travel had continued launches and experiments in an open area on the outskirts of Berlin that they dubbed the Raketenflugplatz, the rocket airfield. There were successes and failures, explosions that cost lives as well as substantial progress in the development of liquid-fuel rockets following Oberth's ideas (Ley, Rockets and Space Travel 64-74). However, with the rise of the Third Reich things changed, and the Society had to dissolve. In the new regime, Crouch indicates: "Private individuals were forbidden to build or launch rockets, or to write articles on the subject. By the end of 1934, Ley was barred from lecturing or publishing on his favorite subject" (158). Ley emigrated to the United States, while von Braun eagerly took advantage of the opportunities the Nazi system offered to realize his rocket obsession. His work became part of the Nazi war machine. A secret army research center was established in Peenemtinde on the island of Usedom on the Baltic Sea coast (not far from where Oberth had planned the launch for the premiere of Woman in the Moon). After a raid by the Royal Air Force in August of 1943, production was relocated to a secret underground plant in the Harz mountains. Here, inmates of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp (a subcamp of Buchenwald) were forced to manufacture the V-2 missiles under horrific conditions. Von Braun, SS member since 1940, willingly participated in the criminal exploitation of slave labor in the rocket program (Neufeld, "Wernher von Braun" 61, 64-66). Between August 1943 and April 1945 approximately 20,000 prisoners died of starvation, disease, cold, overwork, beatings, and executions while building the V-2 rockets (Neufeld, "Wernher von Braun" 57), more than were killed during its use as a weapon. Space travel now took a back seat to weapons research. Drawing on Oberth and the experiments of the Society for Space Travel, von Braun and his team at Peenemtinde worked on a succession of new weapons (Gruntman 137-157). The most prominent of these was called the A-4, following a series of numbered rockets that had begun with the experiments of the Society for Space Travel. But Reich Minister of Propaganda Goebbels rechristened it the V-2 and moved it into a new series (Braun and Ordway 72-73). This V did not stand for Victory but for Vengeance and it followed the previous terror weapon, the V-1 (the buzz bomb, which was not a rocket), also developed at Peenemtinde, whose screaming flight streaked across the London sky. The V-2 rockets began to rain on London in Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 581 September of 1944. This marked the closing days of World War II and the V-2 was less a truly effective weapon than a means of psychological terror, the desperate gesture of a dying dictatorship (Gruntman 154-155). Over a thousand rockets landed on London, killing nearly three thousand people and destroying hundreds of homes. Unlike the screeching V-1 buzz bomb, the V-2 arrived in deadly silence, followed, since it was the first rocket to travel faster than the speed of sound, by a deadly clap of thunder. As Pynchon (55) describes it in Gravity's Rainbow, you are dead before you hear it. He compares this temporal dislocation between impact and sound to a "few feet of film run backwards." The British intelligence had realized something big was underway at Peenemtinde and had carried out a bombing raid before the first rocket launch, which killed some scientists but by chance missed the center of the research and hardly affected the production of rockets. Aerial reconnaissance photographs showed the surface of Peenemtinde pockmarked with bomb craters like the surface of the moon (Gruntman 149). As the war ended, the Russians and Americans rushed to reach Peenemtinde and the underground rocket factories of Mittelwerk in the Harz mountains, scooping up all the remaining rockets and parts they could and shipping them home for analysis (Gruntman 57). Rocket scientists became prizes of war as well. Oberth, who was at Peenemtinde but had not played a key role at this late point in his career, was interrogated and released. Wernher von Braun and his crew surrendered to US forces, wishing to avoid the Russians and immediately worked out a deal to be brought to the United States and help develop the space program, as well as intercontinental ballistic missiles (Braun and Ordway 116-118). Ensconced in the US he quickly became a media celebrity hailed as the father of the space program. A sanitized version of his life story was made into a film in 1960 starring Curt Jurgens, called I Aim at the Stars. I remember as a child hearing my parents, who had lost friends in the London Blitz, react to this title with a snort, saying, "Yes, I aim at the stars, but I often hit London." As the heritage of Woman in the Moon returns ironically to the echo chamber of the cinema, it is important to recall (as von Braun's once highly recognizable figure fades from cultural memory) that he provided the model for the eponymous demonic rocket scientist played by Peter Sellers in Stanley Kubrick's satire of nuclear war, Dr. Strangelove (1964, making clear Strangelove's relation to 2001: A Space Odyssey, which can also be counted among Woman in the Moon's progeny). Besides placing him in a wheelchair, Kubrick also indicated his character's dependency on prosthetic technology by endowing him with a mechanical hand with a will of its own, at points attempting to strangle himself and at others apparently involuntarily giving a Nazi salute. The genealogy of this hand is clear: It refers directly to the mechanical hand of the mad scientist Rotwangwho invents the robots in Lang's Metropolis. This image of the mechanical hand reveals Rotwang, the father of robots, as half mechanical himself. As I claim in my book on Lang, hands held a great significance for the filmmaker: the image of the human touch, of control, but also (as in M) the sign of guilt (Gunning, Films of Fritz Lang 1-5). Lang frequently 582 Tom Gunning and Katharina Loew referred to himself as a craftsman, rather than an artist, using the German word Handwerker, which emphasizes traditional manual skills. But in spite of his love of craft and his deep involvement with every detail of his films, especially during the German period, Lang's art remained deeply technological, employing complex machines more than hand tools. As Katharina Loew has demonstrated earlier in this essay, early German film aesthetics questioned whether cinema, as a machine art, had eliminated the hand and soul of the artist, and therefore remained limited to the realm of technicians and the mechanical. Rotwang's mechanical hand seems to raise this issue even more fundamentally - whether in the technological future a society run by machines escapes from human control entirely- even as Rotwang' s robotic Maria nearly destroys Metropolis. Kubrick's Strangelove takes this a step further. Strangelove's mechanical hand no longer obeys its master, but shows a will of its own, like the wayward B-52 nuclear bomber that brings on the end of the world, unresponsive to military or executive command- the falcon that no longer hears the falconer. At the climax of the launch in Woman in the Moon Helius's hand struggles to pull the final lever and the rocket then plunges into space carrying its unconscious human crew. The machines have taken over. Unlike Metropolis, Woman in the Moon does not end either with the destruction of technology by proletarian machine-wreckers, nor with the spectacle of restoration of class dominance under the aegis of the apparently compassionate heart. Rather technology functions effectively, the launch and landing on the moon are successful, and even the romantic couple are united - but the human heart beats in desolate isolation. In this essay both authors extend earlier work. Tom Gunning is supplementing his monograph on Lang's films and Katharina Loew draws on her dissertation and forthcoming book, Techno-Romanticism: Special Effects in German Silent Cinema. Gunning primarily concentrates on the film's visual style while Loew focuses on the film's cultural context, its production and reception. From somewhat different perspectives, both of us dealt with cinema's relation to modern technology, and Woman in the Moon offers a site where Gunning's auteur and formal perspective and Loew's exploration of film technology in a national cinema context come together. Although we have revised each other's work, we have placed author names before the sections that we were primarily responsible for. Notes 1 2 3 For an account of the rediscovery and restoration of Metropolis see Kino Lorber, Inc. The restoration is available from Kino Lorber as The Complete Metropolis, copyright 2010 Kino Lorber. The longer restored version of Woman in the Moon is available in the United States from Kino Video as Fritz Lang's Woman in the Moon. It is copyrighted 1929 by Friedrich Murnau Stiftung, renewed 1996, with English translation copyright 2004 Kino International Corp. It is 169 minutes long. Quotations from intertitles come from this version. Lunar Longings and Rocket Fever 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 583 Unless noted otherwise all translations are by Katharina Loew. As was customary in Europe, Lang edited the four camera negatives himself (see Lang, "Fritz Lang"). The premiere had originally been scheduled for August 1929 (see Bruns 205). For a list of deleted scenes see Cinematheque Frarn;:aise. Once Oberth's profits would exceed 4,000 Reichsmarks ($950), Lang's and Ufa's share would be reduced to 30 percent. For the wording of the contract, which is preserved in the archive of the Hermann-Oberth-Museum in Feucht, Germany, see Barth, Oberth 99, 270-271. The Kegeldiise was officially tested by the Reich Institute for Chemistry and Technology on July 23, 1930. Authored by Peter T. Toth, both were republished in 1927. Critic Hans Taussig pointed out that the former features "an ingenious bluffer of a thousand masks, a trip to the moon, the preparations for the journey, attacks on the space ship hangar, the journey itself including the detection of a stowaway. There is also a moon excursion on metal soles and leaking oxygen tanks." The second novel, whose "cover shows a space missile that bears a curious resemblance to a certain movie poster of 1929, ... deals with space travel planned by a mad professor, a conference of the world's richest and most powerful people, who discuss space travel in a particularly original meeting." For a longer discussion of this issue see Gunning, "Shooting." In fact, Verne patterned Michel Ardan, his most flamboyant lunar explorer in his novels From the Earth to the Moon and Around the Moon, after Nadar, baptizing him with an anagram of the famous pseudonym. On aerial photos as an influence on modernism see Asendorf and Amad. See Asendorf, especially 69-79. A French translation of the script "Men without a Country" is available in Lang, Mort d'une carrieriste, an anthology of Lang film scripts and treatments. "Le silence erernel de ces espaces infinis m'effraie." This poster forthe original 1979 release of the film can be found at http:/ I en.wikipedia. org/ wiki/ File:Alien_movie_poster.jpg Works Cited Amad, Paula. "From God's-Eye to Camera-Eye: Aerial Photography's Post-Humanist and Neo-Humanist Visions of the World." History of Photography 36.1 (Feb. 2012): 66-86. Arnheim, Rudolf. "Die Frau im Mond." Die Weltbiihne 43 (1929). Asendorf, Christoph. Super Constellation Flugzeug und Raumrevolution; Dir Wirkung der Luftfahrt auf Kunst und Kultur der Moderne. Vienna: Springer, 1997. Aurich, Rolf, Wolfgang Jacobsen, and Cornelius Schnauber. Fritz Lang: Leben und Werk, Bilder und Dokumente. Berlin: Jovis, 2001. Barth, Hans. Hermann Oberth: Derwirkliche Vaterder Weltraumfahrt. Diisseldorf: VDI-Verlag, 2008. Barth, Hans. 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