Film programme accompanying the exhibition “Cosmos Calling! Art and Science in the Long Sixties”

The Silent Star
dir. Kurt Maetzig
Poland, East Germany, 1960

The first film adaptation of Stanisław Lem’s prose (the novel The Astronauts, 1951). Shot at the East German DEFA studio, the Eastern bloc’s leading producer of science-fiction cinema outside the Soviet Union. It was sold for international distribution but in a dubbed and much shorter version, renamed as First Spaceship on Venus. When compared, the two versions clearly reflect the Cold War division of the world. The heroic and peace-loving cosmonauts, saving the world from nuclear destruction, become brave Western astronauts. All politically sensitive subplots are reversed in meaning or deleted. The soundtrack differs too, the original version using Andrzej Markowski’s experimental electronic music with effects by Eugeniusz Rudnik (both associated with the Polish Radio Experimental Studio), while the English-language one has received a classic orchestral score.

Film screenings in the garden next to the Club/Café Eufemia (the rector’s building of the Academy of the Fine Arts, Krakowskie Przedmieście 5), entrance from Wacław Niżyński passage
entrance free