247. First Spaceship on Venus

Song - The Final Countdown (Europe)

Movie: First Spaceship on Venus - Der schweigende Stern (Kurt Maetzig, 1960)

American professor Hawling is part of an international crew of scientists, engineers and astronauts on a spaceship bound for Venus. When not working, he likes to play chess against his fellow passengers, usually beating them soundly. The one opponent he can't defeat is the ship's robot Omega. After the umpteenth mate, Sumiko, the Japanese doctor on board, confronts Saltyk, the Polish developer of the robot. She explains that while Omega may be an impressive technical feat of machinery, it lacks a heart. Saltyk listens to her, rewires Omega, and when the robot lets the professor beat it, a rejuvenated Hawling immediately starts bragging to his team about his great chess prowess, completely oblivious to what has happened. 

This little subplot is a good example of the film's good-natured corniness, for better and for worse. It's easy to feel sympathetic towards a film that has such a sincerely utopian view of the potential of peaceful international cooperation to improve humanity. We are told that beyond just discovering extraterrestrial life, the Earth's greatest minds on board of the ship are also close to eradicating hunger and physical labor. The world will then see the value of international, interracial solidarity (worth noting though that the black passenger on the ship is the only one without a nationality - he is 'African' - and the only one who speaks German with an accent) and come together to stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons and end the Cold War. But the film is afraid to make any interesting/fun/artistic choice that could distract it from bringing its message across. The acting and the dialogues are so wooden that the actors may as well stand in front of a Powerpoint and give a presentation. 

I didn't realise this before watching it, but this is a film produced by DEFA, the state-owned film studio of East Germany. That does put the punch-line of the chess story in a different view. In an American film this would have been a pointed, sharp joke that's worth thinking about. In this context, it is state-approved messaging, regurgigated propaganda that's not even ferocious enough to work as serious criticism (the film's many reminders that the Americans are responsible for Hiroshima are at least a bit saltier). Now, some would argue that on the global political stage, even during the Cold War, the Americans were the biggest power 'colonising' the world with their culture and their capitalism, and that the communist state-produced films were a subversive corrective to that. But that glesses over the question of why the Americans were/are more succesfull in promoting their culture and lifestyle to the rest of the world. Part of the answer is that you will see in American movies jokes about dumb Americans that are critical of the very fundaments of American life. In First Spaceship on Venus there is not a single lighthearted moment that would allow for even a little doubt or ridicule of a communist idea.