Woman In The Moon 1929 

TheLiteraryBrain

The shift identified by many film scholars as one from a cinema of attraction to a narrative cinema could also be seen as a shift from cinema as spectacle to cinema as world. The greatest change seems to lie in the immersiveness rather than the spectacularity or attractiveness of the film: whereas cinema as spectacle provokes context-poor sensational and emotional responses, and perhaps entails fragmentary points of curiosity, cinema as world situates the spectacles within the specific contexts of a storyworld and usually organizes the sequences of mere attractions into a consistent narrative. It is necessary that characters and events, as image-objects, be presented not in isolation but within a horizon which provides the spectator with an immersive experience. An image-object without horizon would not be recognized or identified as an object at all. The change of cinematic styles implies a change of cinematic horizon, hence a change in the cinematic institution itself. Audiences wish for a world, for a more intense form of film experience, and such a world cannot but be built around our perceptual horizons. This tradition of world building can be traced back to Fritz Lang’s 1929 Frau im Mond (Women in the Moon). Five years after the release of Aelita, this film—which is Fritz Lang’s last silent feature—totally changed the experience of science fiction cinema. In a manner very different from the previous SF films, Frau im Mond celebrates the spiritualization of modern technology, especially modern rocketry. The film, notes Tom Gunning, “merges film text and historical context to such a degree that categories of science and fiction, technology and artistic design, blur”. This insightful comment has to be understood on several levels: in terms of the film’s thematic treatment of science and technology, its realistic manner of portraying Space and astronautic activities; and in terms of its ties with and its indisputable impact on modern rocketry (including the V-2 rocket of Nazi Germany) as well as future aeronautics.
Whereas the emphasis of the genre previously fell on the second word “fiction,” Lang’s film reversed the situation by bringing to the fore the first term “science”. 

The depiction of the Moon is yet another prominent feature where this film differs from previous ones. Unlike the strange, yet life-flourishing, Moon represented in Le Voyage dans la Lune and the highly expressive Martian palace in Aelita, the Moon in Frau im Mond is bleak and barren (three). The meticulously crafted model in close-ups comes very close to what the Moon actually looks like (four). The much smaller gravity on the Moon is also taken into consideration; characters are dressed in shoes that have particularly thick (hence heavy) soles. The discovery of gold on the Moon in a subterranean cave, though purely fantastical, is sidelined as a metaphorical denunciation of insatiable capitalistic greed and misled scientific pride. As indicated in the film’s epigraph “‘Never’ does not exist for the human mind ... only ‘Not yet’”, the film’s technophilic quality straightforwardly rejects the satirical tone prominent in previous SF films. Technology in Frau im Mond is not something that is ridiculed as a form of medieval magic; nor is it the absolute accomplice of imperialism and capitalist greed. It is treated with respect. Thus, the film’s attitude toward science and technology marks the first major departure from the speculative tradition. Second, Lang’s Frau im Mond signals a bifurcation in the practices of SF world building which are still with us today.  The realistic manner Lang has taken to portray technology and extraterrestrial exploration rejects the mostly fantastical representations of alien space that had been popular and pervasive in previous SF films. Moreover, the possibility for Space travel in the film is not set in some inconceivable age to come. Rather, the story treats the available science seriously and envisages Space travel in an almost contemporary era (or, at most, a near future). In this way, scientific and technological knowledge about rocketry and Moon-landing is raised to an equal footing with artistic creations and imagination in the making of SF films.
The film does not extrapolate an entirely distinct world from pure and fantastic speculations, but instead relies heavily on an extended and expanded horizon of our own world (circa 1929) made possible by new technologies and the newly available scientific knowledge. Hence, Frau im Mond becomes perhaps the first film that falls under the rubric of the embodied method in representing Space travel on screen.

Translations: Italian - Spanish

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