We love the handful of fantastic Soviet-bloc space pictures from the Yuri Gagarin era; this exacting disc release gives us two East German space operas from the 1970s, heavily influenced by Kubrick’s 2001 and TV’s Star Trek. Polite cosmonauts investigate a missing spaceflight in Signals: A Space Adventure, a visual effects showcase filmed in 70mm. And intrepid space diplomats respond to a distress signal in In the Dust of the Stars and land on the very odd planet of TEM 4, in the midst of some suspicious politics. The disc set comes with authoritative essays and extras assembled by the DEFA Film Library of Amherst, Massachusetts.

The Spectacular Sci-Fi Visions of East German Director Gottfried Kolditz
Signals: A Space Adventure and In the Dust of the Stars
Blu-ray
Deaf Crocodile
1970, 1976 / Color / Deluxe Edition / Street Date February 25, 2025 / Available from Deaf Crocodile / 44.95
Co-written and Directed by Gottfried Kolditz

The Spectacular Sci-Fi Visions of East German Director Gottfried Kolditz is a long title for a pair of Soviet-bloc space operas. The first was produced in the wake of Kubrick’s  2001: A Space Odyssey. The second appears to be a collectivist answer to the internationally popular Star Trek TV show.

We’re big fans of films from the Cold War era, and the older page DVD Savant covered quite a few East German DVDs from the DEFA Film Library. The Deutsche Film-Aktiengesellschaft studio turned out hundreds of pictures, all controlled by the Communist East German government. Few were released in the West. The Soviet-bloc space movies are also unknown here save for Tarkovsky’s  Solaris, but several Russian, East German and Czech pictures were ‘adapted’ for release in the West as juvenile fare:  Die Schweigende Stern,  Nebo Zovyot,  Planeta Bur,  Mechte navstrechu.

The Deaf Crocodile people have concocted a new logo for this Deluxe Edition Box, ‘DEFA Crocodile.’ The company has been releasing a steady flow of Eastern bloc fare — costume fantasies, animation and obscure Sci-fi pictures. This set features impressively remastered encodings of space dramas from another political culture. Incidental story details show more of the filmmakers’ ideology than do the occasional overt political references. The initial impetus in both of these shows is an intercepted radio signal, either from a planet or a lost space ship.

Signals: A Space Adventure
Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteur
1970 / 2:20 widescreen / 86 min.
Starring: Piotr Pawlowski, Evgeniy Zharikov, Gojko Mitic, Alfred Müller, Helmut Schreiber, Irena Karel, Soheir El-Morshidy, Karin Ugowski, Iurie Darie.
Cinematography: Otto Hanisch
Special Effects: Stanislaw Dülz, Kurt Marks
Costume Design: Günter Schmidt, Marianne Schmidt
Film Editor: Helga Gentz
Original Music: Karl-Ernst Sasse
Written by Gottfried Kolditz, C.U. Weisner from the novel Asteroidenjäger by Carlos Rasch
Produced by Artistic Working Group ‘Roter Kreis’
Directed by Gottfried Kolditz

In the original 1959 East German space adventure  Die Schweigende Stern (‘The Silent Star’) a rocket to Venus is manned by multi-ethnic, ‘morally responsible’ comrades. A constant line of dialogue scolds the United States, blaming capitalist greed for atomic crimes and world unrest. All that strife is seen as old history in 1970’s laid-back space adventure Signals: A Space Adventure. The 1.5 hours spent aboard the spaceship Laika is mostly a business-as-usual affair. In the midst of a long-range rescue mission, possible radio transmissions from an alien life form are detected. But the cosmonauts spend more time discussing philosophy and exchanging gossipy small-talk. It’s a small crew, after all. Is it good that the commander keeps some mission secrets to himself?  How will that young cosmonaut fare, the one who had the mental issues?  Did the radio officer miss a crucial SOS from the lost, possibly destroyed, spaceship Ikaros?

The Signals of the title also refers to possible signals from an alien life form. As these are trained professionals, nobody gets too worked up about such issues. Instead, the wise commander is berated for avoiding his daily space exercises. An exercise area that looks like a weird wind tunnel has an ordinary stationary bicycle … but the cosmonauts also wear wristwatches that measure blood one’s pressure and pulse. The personality chit-chat on the Laika includes a lot of strained exposition. The direction seems intent on downplaying emotions at all times. One young spaceman lost a girlfriend on the Ikaros, and there is some suspense and anticipation when a rescue seems imminent. But the reunion is so subdued, you’d think the lost comrades had just taken a later bus.

The idea must have been to create a humanist response to Kubrick’s awe-inspiring 2001, a much-admired picture that was nevertheless criticized as intellectually frigid. Signals has no political speeches, and instead offers the example of an ideal cooperative future world. Every so often someone mentions ‘a problem we no longer have to deal with.’ As in Die Schweigende Stern a number of Asian and African spacemen are present, but they’re all minor characters. The rigors of command come down to bureaucratic issues: knowing that red tape will delay an official rescue, the commander of the Laika disguises his mission as a maintenance cruise. The storyline could have been written by a committee with a list of collectivist virtues to check off. The good commander is out of action for the final part of the mission. No problem: ‘the team’ takes over, functioning as a naturally optimal collective.

Signals was filmed in 70mm, as were many Soviet films of the time. The cinematography of the outer space vehicles is clean and crisp, but the show in no way challenges the refined work of the Kubrick effects team. As this is 70mm, there are no conventional dissolves or optical transitions — and no complicated motion-control optical matching of mattes and hold-out masks.

The large models mostly move left-right in the frame; the animation of docking procedures, etc., looks motorized, as if the large miniatures were attached to worm-gear animation positioners. Some very large full-sized mockup sets are a good match for the models. A view through the cockpit of a ‘hummingbird’ shuttle craft shows what looks like a large mockup of the mother ship sliding by. It appears to be a full live action setup, as Walt Disney pulled off so well in his pioneering TV show  Man in Space, from 1955.

As in Kubrick’s film the 70mm images look very clean. The main 2001 lesson learned by the Germans was how to light things in outer space. All the miniature and spacewalk scenes have hard lighting from one direction, and no fill light. There may not be too many double exposures — the starfield backgrounds are sparse, and come and go between shots. Shafts suspending the large miniatures might be arranged to always be behind the models, which may account for the limited camera angles.

The same applies with scenes of weightlessness — we always feel we’re looking at the suspended cosmonauts from angles that hide the cables on which they are hanging. Some of the actors make zero-gravity look pretty natural, and others not. People also walk with velcro shoes — the ship’s radio nook appear to be in a non-gravity area.

The least appealing part of the DEFA shows are the designs: the interiors, costumes and hairstyles. On-deck spacewear is a soft Trekky jumpsuit; some women wear odd caps patterned after old leather flying helmets. Fashions, makeup and hair styles are pretty much in line with what we were seeing (or avoiding) on fare like  Space: 1999,  UFO and movies like  Journey to the Far Side of the Sun. It’s a pre-Disco world of synthetic fabrics and close-cropped hairstyles, without the Disco beat.

We see the gym area and some living quarters, but don’t get much of an idea how big the ship is, what people eat or how the place is kept so clean. The elaborate technical equipment aboard the Laika has the old modular ‘IBM’ look with lots of shaped sections, flashing lights, and video screens that mostly display meaningless oscilloscope waves.

Remember the interior sets in Peter Hyams’ 2001 sequel, The Year We Make Contact?  Moody lighting made the best of modules borrowed from audio mixing boards, etc., but when one looked close it was possible to spot consoles made of plywood, covered by contact paper. The East Germans had a lot of sets to build for this show. Hollywood wasn’t at its best in 1970 either, what with the too-slick, unlivable ‘futuristic’ designs of  The Andromeda Strain.

To celebrate the birthday of a middle-aged space engineer (perhaps modeled after James Doohan’s Scotty on Star Trek ) the crew puts together an animated cartoon that makes fun of the man’s love life. The engineer also has an R2D2-like rolling robot, that helps out on a spacewalk mission. ‘Fun’ sidekick robots are featured in both Die Schweigende Stern and the Czech masterpiece  Ikarie XB 1.

The number of themes repeated from earlier films suggests that East German screenwriters did so to ‘play safe,’ duplicating ideas that won’t cause controversy. Radical creativity could become a problem in the East German arts scene. What writer wants to risk some Stasi cop or Party apparatchik suddenly deciding that his ‘new and original idea’ is politically offensive?

The movie begins and ends with the cosmonauts vacationing together on a beach, riding horses and walking on their hands — the rage of the 21st century?  One of their kids plays with a drone toy. It’s not very inspiring, even if it must have looked nice on a 70mmm screen.

In the Dust of the Stars
Im Staub der Sterne
1976 / 1:66 widescreen / 95 min.
Starring: Jana Brejchová, Alfred Struwe, Ekkehard Schall, Milan Beli, Silvia Popovici, Violeta Andrei, Leon Niemczyk, Regine Heintze, Mihai Mereuta.
Cinematography: Peter Süring
Production Designer: Gerhard Helwig
Special Effects: Kurt Marks
Costume Design: Katrin Johnsen
Film Editor: Christa Helwig
Original Music: Karl-Ernst Sasse
Written by Gottfried Kolditz, Joachim Hellwig
Produced by Artistic Working Group ‘futurum’
Directed by Gottfried Kolditz

In the Dust of the Stars takes us five years later, just before the release of Star Wars. This second Gottfried Kolditz tale was co-produced by and partly filmed in Romania, using a barren ‘mud volcano’ area as the surface of a mystery planet. The casting is again multi-national; Jana Brejchová was a popular Czech star, and fans of the films of Roman Polanski will recognize Polish actor Leon Niemczyk, from the celebrated  Knife in the Water.

Kolditz’s second story is a conventional space opera. An intergalactic authority has dispatched the rescue ship Cynro in response to a distress call from the planet TEM 4. They land, and find no immediate distress. A servant named Chta (Aurelia Dumitrescu) invites them to meet with the inhabitants, the Temians (or Temers?), who claim that the distress call was an accident. The Cynro’s Captain Akala (Jana Brejchová) believes that the Temians are sincere, and agrees to bring her crew to a Temian welcome party. Akala’s more conservative navigator Suko (Alfred Struwe) stays aboard ship — he is distrustful because something tried to make their ship crash during landing.

The party is a lavish bash with drinks, food, and entertainment from a squad of Temian chorines. The partygoers are subjected to a form of hypnosis / mind control that appears to make them less curious. Suko later disobeys Akala, taking a shuttlecraft to see what’s really going on. He finds slave camp in a huge underground cavern: the Temians are not native to TEM 4, but have conquered the planet and forced the indigenous Turis to mine an important mineral resource. Suko is captured and subjected to torture while the Temians continue to entertain the crew. The Temian leader ‘Chief’ (Ekkhard Schall) strategizes how to hide their criminal exploitation from the intergalactic authorities.

In the Dust of the Stars — a poetic title — is basically a Star Trek ‘visit a planet’ episode. It’s on the books as being more expensive than Signals, owing to scenes with perhaps 500 extras in an enormous salt mine. The sets aren’t as realistic and the spaceship Laika is barely depicted. Instead of a ‘business as usual’ routine, the Cynro is manned by bright personalities that don’t always do things by the book. Akala and Suko clash now and then on basic policy.

East German films of the ’70s were trying their best to be ‘liberated’ in what was then one of the most poltically oppressive states on the globe. Dust tries to Get With It in the usual way, by peppering scenes with bits of decorative female nudity. The production designers may have had ‘far-out’ ideas, but largely lacked the resources to pull them off. We see garish party spaces with bright colors and glitter, and odd touches like large boa constrictors used for set decoration. Temians have little tubes like breath freshener sprays, that dispense either feel-good party drugs, or perhaps pleasant ‘sense memories,’ as in the Czech  Ikarie XB 1.

That Czech movie invented some marvelous futuristic dancing, while Dust gives the Temians a dance corps performing spacey moves in revealing garments. They entertain at parties and seem to be a permanent decoration in The Chief’s pleasure garden. The choreography betters that of the laughable East German teen movie  Heisse Sommer, but not by much. The dance party atmosphere is no more inspired than the lunar night club scenes in Hammer’s  Moon Zero Two.

The Cynro’s psychologist Miu (Regine Heitnze) has a scene alone in her private room, a single silhouette angle as she performs a solo interpretative dance in the nude. DEFA’s commentators remark on the scene as an expression of ‘German body culture,’ or simply gratuitous. But remember that the crew of the Cynro returns from the ‘decadent’ party dancing like the Temian entertainers … and possibly mildly brainwashed. To us it would seem logical that Miu’s party experience has awakened some erotic ideas, which she expresses in her dance.

Although it has no pro-Soviet lectures, In the Dust of the Stars echoes the Cold War stance of Die Schweigende Stern. The female Turis wear dresses resembling those of Native Americans. That they are second-class citizens becomes apparent when the Temian villain Ronk (Milan Beli) slaps the servant Chta. Only Suko suspects that the planet is an exploited colony. The Temians’ sensory entertainment and ‘recreational hypnosis’ are like decadent American advertising glitz — a calculated strategy to distract the good Captain Akala away from the ugly social injustice afoot on TEM 4.

If this were a first-generation Star Trek episode, Captain Kirk would sort things out in the name of Federation justice by kissing some females and knocking some heads together.  In the Dust of the Stars is more like the later The Next Generation series, in which starship captains follow a diplomatic non-intervention policy. In the TNG episode  Symbiosis, Captain Picard catches one planet cruelly manipulating another for profit … but decides that he can’t intervene, at least not directly. In the Dust of the Stars’ Akala makes a decision in favor of intergalactic stability, not starting a war to fight for the Turis. As in Symbiosis, the Turis’ redemption will have to come from within.

Dust was filmed in normal 35mm but makes no attempts at visual effects wizardry. The special visuals are practical stage effects, and all flying objects are visibly suspended. The only alien hardware we are a truck converted into a flimsy transport vehicle, and a pair of tow trucks disguised as mobile cannon. The acting is lively — Leon Niemczyk clowns a bit as the Cynro’s party boy — but some of the costumes are headache-inducing. The crew attends the first party in matching outfits, flare-cuffed reddish leather jumpsuits. The Temian ‘Chief’ is a giggling sociopath in the mold of Nero or Caligula; he wears silly capes and keeps changing the color of his hair.

In the Dust of the Stars is said to be East Germany’s final space-themed science fiction film. Director Gottfried Kolditz writes and directs decently but is no visual stylist. Each movie seems assembled as to not confuse Committee monitors with expressive lighting or bold angles. Each has a straight narrative with sincere attitudes and unambiguous aims. They of course tell us a lot about the political aims of East German movie production. The older Die Schweigende Stern and especially Ikarie XB 1 remain the top Soviet-bloc Sci-fi thrillers.

Deaf Crocodile’s Blu-ray of The Spectacular Sci-Fi Visions of East German Director Gottfried Kolditz is a definitive rendering of this pair of Brezhnev-era space pictures, made in a rigid system that steered artistic aims to comply with government policies. The transfers are immaculate, made from beautifully preserved film elements. Signals: A Space Adventure was scanned in 6K from the original 70mm negative and has a very clean look. In the Dust of the Stars was scanned in 2K from its 35mm original, and often dazzles with its bright colors.

Deaf Crocodile appears to have let the DEFA Film Library organize the extras. An illustrated booklet (included only in the Deluxe package) tells us that the movies were filmed in  Orwocolor, a process superior to the earlier German Agfacolor, which had been confiscated by the Allies in 1945. As seen in the pristine images here, Orwocolor is good enough to compete with Eastman Kodak’s products.

The shows have audio commentaries with the knowledgeable Steven R. Bissette and some excellent contributions by the DEFA Library’s Dr. Mariana Ivanova. She was raised in East Germany and offers numerous insights into the mindset of its film industry back in the Cold War years. Repeated on the discs is a nicely illustrated visual essay by Evan Chester, which suffices as a good general survey of the films’ makers and acting talent. The trailers for both films are in excellent condition as well.

The fat insert booklet has three lengthy essays that analyze the movies in interesting detail, from different critical viewpoints. We don’t mind the duplicated synopses. The director’s son Stefan Kolditz is in for an excellent 10-page interview, a capsule account of his father’s life as a soldier and filmmaker. Kolditz junior has his own long career as a writer for TV and film.

Deaf Crocodile art is always pleasing, and this Deluxe Edition’s covers are really arresting. Could the style be described as Constructivist?  Reviewers that didn’t listen in art class are curious.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Spectacular Sci-Fi Visions of
East German Director Gottfried Kolditz
Blu-ray rates:
Movies: Good + and as historical documents Better
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Stephen R. Bissette with Dr. Mariana Ivanova of the DEFA Film Library
Video essay Other worlds, strange dreams: the East German space operas of director Gottfried Kolditz by Evan Chester
Original DEFA trailers for both films
80-page illustrated booklet with essays by Rolf Giesen, Jennifer Barker, Walter Chaw; and an interview with the director’s son Stefan Kolditz
New art by Beth Morris and Steve Thomas.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: Two Blu-rays in Keep case with large booklet in heavy card sleeve
Reviewed: March 5, 2025
(7288defa)

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