Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA (U) |Home Ents Review
Dir. Kurt Maetzig, Gottfried Kolditz, Herrmann Zschoche, East Germany, 1960-1976, 366 mins, in German with subtitles
Cast: Ignacy Machowski, Yoko Tani, Piotr Pawlowski, Evgeniy Zharikov, Gojko Mitic, Cox Habbema, Ivan Andonov, Rolf Happe, Jana Brejchova, Alfred Struwe
Review by Colin Dibben
Following the division of Germany after World War II, DEFA was established as the state-owned film studio of East Germany, aka the German Democratic Republic. The studio made hundreds of films, including a series of colourful and wildly imaginative science fiction films, collected here: The Silent Star, Signals: A Space Adventure, Eolomea and In the Dust of the Stars.
The two earlier films are pretty ‘hard sci fi’ and highlight technology and the brave endeavours of a racially diverse set of cosmonauts to reach deep into space. They are full of tips on good project and team management as well as some excellently trippy special effects – in the case of The Silent Star especially. Signals has a nicely contemporary time-bending element, when the signals in question appear to come from the future.
All four films are very different. If the second half of The Silent Star focuses on the weirdness of a strange planet, Signals focuses on the behaviour of team members in claustrophobic spaces.
The two films from the 1970s head off in a different direction.
In Eolomea, an Earth-based maverick female cosmologist and her laidback, literally off-planet lover investigate the disappearance of eight spaceships, while flashing back to the beginning of their affair. Despite resonances of Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the film comes across slightly campy, especially when the lovers run at each other along a beach in a series of establishing shots and actor-runs-at-camera shots – the sort of sequence that is so pastiched that it is hard to believe there was ever a time when it was not so.
However, if it is campy you want, In the Dust of the Stars will have your delirial wiring retro-engineering to infinity. This film features some incredible sequences that will leave you pointing at the screen and screaming ‘THIS, this is the 1970s!’
Mixing Blakes 7 hairdos and clothes with visual elements from the original Star Trek and sensual disco stylings – including a naked silhouette dance against a backdrop of spaceship mainframe computers – In the Dust of the Stars really is a strange experience. Oddly, as one of the extras points out, at a time when DEFA was breathing new life into tales of proletarian liberation with films like this, they produced their most Hollywood style story, of an enslaved indigenous population overthrowing their masters with help from spacemen.
The films come with excellent extras that give historical context to the films, making this set a real treasure for lovers of leftfield cinema. East German sci-fi? Who knew? Strange new worlds indeed!
