Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou were married from 1922-1933. During those eleven years, they collaborated on a number of remarkable films: Lang as director and von Harbou as screenwriter. In 1927 Lang directed and von Harbou wrote the script for Metropolis, one of the best SF films ever made. Shortly afterwards, von Harbou wrote a novelization of the film. I have a copy but I haven't had a chance to read it yet. Perhaps I should rent the film again and then read the novel.
In 1929, Lang directed and again von Harbou did the screenplay for another SF film, The Woman in the Moon, which was based on a novel she had written the year before. Then, in 1931, Lang directed von Harbou's script for M, starring a young Peter Lorre as a serial child murderer, whom the police seem unable to capture. So, the criminal underworld, disturbed by the attentions of the police, decide to take a hand. This is one of Peter Lorre's finest performances.
As I mentioned above, The Woman in the Moon was produced several years after Metropolis. It is a different sort of SF film in that it appears to be set in relatively contemporary Germany. At least there was nothing that I could see, except for the space ship of course, that couldn't be found in Germany in the late 1920s.
Wolf Helius is an engineer and the prosperous owner of his own firm. He is the friend and sole support of a disgraced scientist, Prof Manfeldt, who years ago had theorized that there was considerable gold on the moon. When he propounded his theory at a scientific meeting, he was laughed at and ridiculed, and his reputation destroyed. However, Helius believed him and is in the process of building a spaceship, supposedly in search of the gold, but to Helius, the gold is really just an excuse to go to the moon.
A group of wealthy unscrupulous business folk (four men and a cigar-smoking woman) learn of Helius' plan and decide that the gold really should be in their hands and "not controlled by crackpots and visionaries," forgetting of course that it is the crackpots and visionaries who discovered the possibility of gold and who developed the nearly completed spaceship. As part of a carefully laid plot, they stole the plans and threatened Helius with destroying the ship and possibly hurting a number of people. He could prevent this only by allowing their representative to go along on the journey. He agreed, probably partially because he really wasn't interested in the gold--it was the journey that counted.
The ship's crew, therefore, consisted of Helius, Hans Windegger (his closest friend and assistant engineer and also assistant pilot), Prof Manfeldt, and Turner, the representative of the evil business cabal. Also aboard is Friede, a young astronomy student who is engaged to Windegger. And after liftoff, they discover a stowaway, a young boy who insists he an "expert" on space travel by virtue of having read numerous SF stories. One complication that emerges during the trip is Helius' undeclared love for Friede which he has kept secret from everybody, but being in such close contact with her is making it extremely difficult for him. As one might expect, this will play a significant role in what happens on the trip.
One advantage Lang had was his scientific consultant, Dr. Hermann Oberth who, along with the American Robert Goddard and the Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, is considered one of the three founding fathers of space flight.
See if the following doesn't sound a bit familiar. The ship was built in a large industrial complex, not in someone's back yard or out in the desert. Secondly it was built in a large hanger with gantries that pulled back as the ship prepared for liftoff. In addition, the ship was based on a large platform that moved the ship out of the hanger to the lifting area (launch pad in NASA terminology). Moreover, it was a three-stage rocket which discarded stages one and two after liftoff. I've seen a number of early films about space travel, and I don't remember any that suggested a multi-stage rocket, prior to the NASA program.
Trivia:
--Helsius, as they approached the time for liftoff, called out "ten seconds to go....6...5...4...3...2...1." This is the first time according to the commentary that a countdown had been used in a film.
--At the end of the film, they discovered that they didn't have enough oxygen for the return trip. Somebody was going to have to remain on the moon (Destination Moon?) But, since the moon had a breathable atmosphere, there was a chance that the one who remained could be rescued if the ship could be quickly readied for a return flight. After all, there was gold in them thar' lunar hills.
--When I discovered the the film was based on von Harbou's novel, I immediately went looking for it. Amazon.com had nothing available while abebooks.com had two available: a French language version for $2000+ and a second copy for over $9000 dollars. Needless to say I'm not going to have my own copy soon.
I don't particularly care for silent films and normally give up after about 30 minutes, or even less sometimes. However, I found this film to be interesting enough to be able to watch it in its entirety. Another exception to the rule is Metropolis. Both are SF films and both are directed by Fritz Lang. This may not be a coincidence. Overall, this is one of most technically accurate films of space travel I have seen that was made long before the actual trips to the moon.
Showing posts with label German SF. Show all posts
Showing posts with label German SF. Show all posts
Saturday, July 14, 2012
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Andreas Eschback's The Carpet Makers
The Carpet Makers is the first novel written by the German author Andreas Eschbach. It just happened to win the SFCD-Literature Prize, or as it is now called The German Science Fiction Award. Eschbach's second novel, Solarstation, won Germany's other prestigious SF award, the Kurd Lasswitz Award. Just to demonstrate that this wasn't a fluke, his third novel, The Jesus Video, won both awards. The film version of his third novel came out in 2002. Unfortunately I am having a problem finding it available. As far as I can find out, The Carpet Makers is the only work of Eschbach's that has been translated into English. I hope this changes soon.
The setting is perhaps 100,000 years in the future. Humans have spread throughout countless planets. This is the story of one planet, politically, culturally, economially, and militarily very insignificant, but it has one strange and remarkable export: hair carpets. The most important people on the planet are the hair-carpet makers. Each carpet maker makes only one carpet during his lifetime. It is made of the hair of his wives and daughters. The carpet maker, however, is allowed only one son; if a second son appears, one must be killed.
The reason for this is simple. By the time the hair-carpet is finished, the maker is old and near death. He gives the carpet to his son who sells it to a hair-carpet trader, when one appears. The son then takes the money and sets up his own household where he will begin making his own hair carpet, usually with the tools and equipment that belonged to his father. He and his family must live on the proceeds from the sale of his father's hair carpet. At the end of his life, when he has finished his hair carpet, he will then give it to his son, and the pattern repeats itself, as it has now for thousands of years.
Hair-carpet traders travel from small town to village, buying up hair carpets and eventually reaching the capital, where he sells the hair carpets to the Imperial trader. All hair carpets are purchased by representatives of the Emperor, who has need of an immense number of these carpets, presumably for his palace.
This has been going on for thousands of years, but now something is wrong. Rumors have sprung up that claim that the Emperor has abdicated. No one knows where these rumors come from, but everybody has heard them. Moreover, one hair carpet trader has kept records for many years and has discovered that the number of traders has diminished and the number of carpets has also dwindled considerably, and there seems no reason for either decrease.
I was confused when I first picked up The Carpet Makers. It's narrative structure is unusual, a bit disconcerting. Each chapter has a different POV character, and there are seventeen chapters. The first chapter features a carpet maker, the second a hair-carpet trader, the third a teacher, the fourth another hair-carpet maker, the fifth an old itinerant peddler woman, and the sixth an off-planet foreigner.
It wasn't until the third or perhaps fourth chapter that I finally realized what Eschbach was doing. The narrative structure is modeled on the structure of the hair carpets themselves. The carpet makers use the strands of hair to create his carpet, and each strand, although short, was intricately interwoven with other strands to create a pattern. Borlon, the carpet maker who appears in Chapter Four, has two wives, one with blond hair and one with black hair and creates the pattern in the carpet with those two colors.
Eschbach does the same with his strands/chapters of various characters. This would result in a very choppy structure, with a jerky narrative flow, except for something that Eschbach does. In each chapter, Eschbach has inserted back references and forward references to other chapters in the work. Moreover, he has included two themes that appear in almost every chapter: one is that of the hair carpets themselves, and the other is the Emperor. This helps to unify the work.
Take for example, Chapter Five--"The Peddler Woman." A peddler woman is referred to in Chapters One, Two, and Four. When she finally appears in Chapter Five, we follow her as she visits the carpet makers Ostvan, who is featured in Chapter One, and Borlon, the carpet maker in Chapter Four. She also meets the foreigner who has been referred to in Chapter Three. This foreigner becomes the POV character in Chapter Six and he refers back to Chapters Three, Four, and Five.
The narrative structure is not composed of a single thread moving forward into the future, but of numerous short threads that tell the story of the hair carpets and the Emperor. We see many people whose lives collide, intertwine, proceed along the same path for a short period of time, and then diverge as they go their own way. I don't think I've ever read another story that is structured quite this way, and I find it intriguing. I wonder if the narratives in his other novels, of which I hear there are now eight, are constructed the same way.
The novel isn't a quick read, but it isn't a very complex work either which one must struggle to get through. It flows naturally from the small village to the large city to off-planet settings to a resolution that I did not in any way expect. This is one of the attractions of the novel: I had no idea where this story was going.
Overall Rating: a quiet story that will reward rereading. I hope The Carpet Makers does well enough to encourage translations of other works by Andreas Eschbach.
The setting is perhaps 100,000 years in the future. Humans have spread throughout countless planets. This is the story of one planet, politically, culturally, economially, and militarily very insignificant, but it has one strange and remarkable export: hair carpets. The most important people on the planet are the hair-carpet makers. Each carpet maker makes only one carpet during his lifetime. It is made of the hair of his wives and daughters. The carpet maker, however, is allowed only one son; if a second son appears, one must be killed.
The reason for this is simple. By the time the hair-carpet is finished, the maker is old and near death. He gives the carpet to his son who sells it to a hair-carpet trader, when one appears. The son then takes the money and sets up his own household where he will begin making his own hair carpet, usually with the tools and equipment that belonged to his father. He and his family must live on the proceeds from the sale of his father's hair carpet. At the end of his life, when he has finished his hair carpet, he will then give it to his son, and the pattern repeats itself, as it has now for thousands of years.
Hair-carpet traders travel from small town to village, buying up hair carpets and eventually reaching the capital, where he sells the hair carpets to the Imperial trader. All hair carpets are purchased by representatives of the Emperor, who has need of an immense number of these carpets, presumably for his palace.
This has been going on for thousands of years, but now something is wrong. Rumors have sprung up that claim that the Emperor has abdicated. No one knows where these rumors come from, but everybody has heard them. Moreover, one hair carpet trader has kept records for many years and has discovered that the number of traders has diminished and the number of carpets has also dwindled considerably, and there seems no reason for either decrease.
I was confused when I first picked up The Carpet Makers. It's narrative structure is unusual, a bit disconcerting. Each chapter has a different POV character, and there are seventeen chapters. The first chapter features a carpet maker, the second a hair-carpet trader, the third a teacher, the fourth another hair-carpet maker, the fifth an old itinerant peddler woman, and the sixth an off-planet foreigner.
It wasn't until the third or perhaps fourth chapter that I finally realized what Eschbach was doing. The narrative structure is modeled on the structure of the hair carpets themselves. The carpet makers use the strands of hair to create his carpet, and each strand, although short, was intricately interwoven with other strands to create a pattern. Borlon, the carpet maker who appears in Chapter Four, has two wives, one with blond hair and one with black hair and creates the pattern in the carpet with those two colors.
Eschbach does the same with his strands/chapters of various characters. This would result in a very choppy structure, with a jerky narrative flow, except for something that Eschbach does. In each chapter, Eschbach has inserted back references and forward references to other chapters in the work. Moreover, he has included two themes that appear in almost every chapter: one is that of the hair carpets themselves, and the other is the Emperor. This helps to unify the work.
Take for example, Chapter Five--"The Peddler Woman." A peddler woman is referred to in Chapters One, Two, and Four. When she finally appears in Chapter Five, we follow her as she visits the carpet makers Ostvan, who is featured in Chapter One, and Borlon, the carpet maker in Chapter Four. She also meets the foreigner who has been referred to in Chapter Three. This foreigner becomes the POV character in Chapter Six and he refers back to Chapters Three, Four, and Five.
The narrative structure is not composed of a single thread moving forward into the future, but of numerous short threads that tell the story of the hair carpets and the Emperor. We see many people whose lives collide, intertwine, proceed along the same path for a short period of time, and then diverge as they go their own way. I don't think I've ever read another story that is structured quite this way, and I find it intriguing. I wonder if the narratives in his other novels, of which I hear there are now eight, are constructed the same way.
The novel isn't a quick read, but it isn't a very complex work either which one must struggle to get through. It flows naturally from the small village to the large city to off-planet settings to a resolution that I did not in any way expect. This is one of the attractions of the novel: I had no idea where this story was going.
Overall Rating: a quiet story that will reward rereading. I hope The Carpet Makers does well enough to encourage translations of other works by Andreas Eschbach.
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