Teens in the Universe (Russia, 1975)

I was hampered in my efforts to get you up to speed on the adventures of Moscow Casiopea’s crew of teenage cosmonauts by the fact that that film’s sequel, Teen in the Universe, came to me without the benefit of English subtitles. This was not as much of an impediment as you might think, however, because Teens, compared to it’s predecessor--which was a solemn chronicle of heroism and sacrifice in the face of the unknown--is markedly sillier and more dependent on timeworn space opera tropes—tropes that George Lucas would make even more timeworn just a couple of years later.

The film begins with the family of space-borne adolescent Sereda (Misha Yershov) celebrating his 40th birthday in absentia. This slightly awkward fete is intruded upon by I.O.O. (Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy), a character of vaguely defined magical abilities whom the first film taught us to view as a Willy Wonka-type figure with ambiguous morals and motives. I.O.O. proceeds to disgorge a veritable K2 of dialog that I presumed was meant to recap the first film while at the same time explaining the time-space paradox that required a sextet of middle schoolers to be blasted into space in the first place.

Meanwhile, back on the spaceship, we find that Sereda and his crew, though close to their destination planet Alpha Cassiopea, are in fact celebrating his 14th birthday. This is due to a mishap by stowaway Lobanov (Vladimir Boson) that caused the ship to travel at hyperspeed and get to Alpha Cassiopea much sooner than planned. This begs the question of why the powers-that-be, given they were already sending these kids on a probable suicide mission, didn’t have them travel at hyperspeed in the first place. It would be hard to argue that it was out of an abundance of adult concern.

Here I have to confess to having had a bit of trouble telling the young actors in Teens in the Universe apart. This is largely due to the two male leads looking virtually identical. Some intensive Google imaging eventually led me to understand that the one of these who was not Misha Yershov was Vladimir Savin, who plays Misha, the other square-jawed hunk at the command console. Vladimir Boson, who plays Lobanov, was easier to keep track of, given he is blond, gangly, and ruddy of complexion. The girls were an even easier matter: Varya, played by Olga Bityukova, is the icy blonde; Katya, played by Irina Savina, wears a pigtail and an expression of perpetual astonishment; and Yulia, played by Nadazhda Ovcharova, reminds me of the cartoon character Daria.

Making those identifications was crucial, because they now enable me to tell you that Sereda, Lobanov, and Varya head off in the ship’s shuttle toward Alpha, leaving Misha, Katya and Yulia in the plush, earthtone-leather-upholstered confines of the ship’s control room. They arrive on the planet to find it a sureal wasteland with odd, futuristic towers placed randomly along the horizon, and a peripheral herd of squeaking, bubble-like creatures that look like Rover from The Prisoner.

Finally they find a narrow white column from which a pair of odd, mime-like robots emerges. These wear tight, flare-legged jumpsuits and move with an exaggerated pimp walk , as if they were Tony Manero triumphantly stepping out onto the dance floor. After attuning their translating machines to the robots' language, which consists solely of whistling, the cosmonauts find themselves charmed by them enough to accompany them into their subterranean home. This, of course, turns out to be a really stupid thing to do.

Meanwhile, the remaining ship’s crew has encountered the noble, purple-haired original inhabitants of Alpha, who have been driven away by the robots and now live in a giant orbiting space station. Apparently, the robots have turned those inhabitants who stayed behind into robots whom they force into working in their robot factories--because that's how capitalism works in space. Sympathizing with their plight, Misha, Katya and Yulia take charge of another shuttle and take off for Alpha. Joining them is a bald headed dude whom I have to assume is some kind of soldier.

Once this team hits ground, all those old space opera cliches really come into play. First of all, Lobanov and Misha learn to disable the robots by addressing them with paradoxical statements (basically the Russian version of “everything I say is a lie.”) This, as you’ve probably already guessed, causes smoke to shoot out of the robots’ ears, after which they completely disintegrate, which is a nice touch. This leaves behind the robots’ helmets and sweet jumpsuits, which Misha and Lobanov don in order to infiltrate the factory, where they repeatedly escape discovery by the skin of their backs.

As for the other members of the crew, they don’t seem to be feeling too much pain, as they’ve been confined to a spacious and well appointed cell where the robots keep them soused on an endless supply of intoxicating libations. That is, until the robots reveal their plan to turn the girls into lady robots, kicking off a breathless race-against-time climax that somehow makes it seem as if the makers of Teens in the Universe were trying to make money.

That climax commences when Misha and company encounter a pair of errant domestic robots, one of whom seems to have been inspired by Rosy on The Jetsons (the implication here being that the robots rose up against their human masters; George's protestations of "stop this crazy thing" apparently went unheeded. ) These provide a way for them to enter the robots’ subterranean world, where the ass kicking begins in earnest. It is however, a very family friendly form of ass kicking, given our heroes’ opponents are machines, which means that smoke and sparks stand in for bloodshed.

Teens in the Universe is a fun, if hokey, movie—especially if you are a fan of that vision of the future peculiar to the 70s in which everything is made of white plastic and improbably spotless. This description excepts that fabulous leather upholstered control room, which is just one of the films’ many stirring design elements. The music, by Vladimir Chernyshyov, is also a delight, ranging from glacial strings in the style of John Barry to the kind of dopey Italianate scat singing (“dooba dooba do woww”) on which Pierro Umiliani would make his fortune. At a very reasonable 84 minutes, it is fast paced and easy going down, with all of those familiar plot gimmicks--which would be just as at home in an episode of Star Trek or Lost in Space—reeling out like a greatest hits collection

While by no means original or unique, Teens in the Universe resorts to outright pilfering in only one instance, which is almost absurd in its blink-or-you’ll-miss-it obscurity. During a final scene, as the repatriated Alphans emerge from a matte painting of a giant space ship in the background, a portal opens in the upper portion of the ship and the Voyager submarine from the movie Fantastic Voyage emerges and flies off to the left. This event, occurring as it does during a scene focusing on the foregrounded actors, is so pointless and unlikely to be seen that I can only view it as some kind of an in-joke among the film’s special effects crew-- especially since, given the rough compositing involved, it is probably the worst effect in the entire film.

Both Moscow Cassiopea and Teens in the Universe were popular films in their day—and apparently indicative of a consequent wave of kids-in-space movies, as a very similar sounding film, Bolshoe Kosmicheskoe Puteshevkie, aka The Great Space Journey, was released the same year. It’s easy to see why. There is enough evidence of good humor between the two films to indicate that, in the waining days of the space race, the Soviets—or their filmmakers, at least-- were not taking the whole project entirely as seriously as they once did. For a Russian populace beleaguered by the stagnation and scarcity of the Breshnev era, it’s hard to imagine such a relaxed stance not being a breath of fresh air.

Moscow - Cassiopeia (Russia, 1974)

Sending teenagers on a lifelong journey into space is an idea many parents would endorse, as well as, I’m sure, more than a few teenagers. Judging by Moscow – Cassiopeia and its immediate sequel, Teens in the Universe, it was also an idea that had some purchase in mid-70s Russia, where the (deep breath) Maxim Gorky Central Movie Studio For Children and Youth Films produced them with the presumed goal of turning teens libidinal energies toward the exploration of space and other science-y stuff.

Like virtually every Soviet sci-fi film, Moscow – Cassiopeia begins with the receipt of a mysterious distress signal from somewhere deep in space. This trope is so prevalent that there must be a concrete reason for it. My guess is that the Soviets were eager to present their interests in space as altruistic rather than imperialistic--unlike you know who. I mean, I guess it’s conceivable that the U.S. might spend billions of dollars in order to respond to an anonymous call for help from billions of miles away, but would you want to tell the ghost of Kitty Genovese that? (Google it.)

It is eventually determined that the signal comes from the planet Alpha in the remote star system of Cassiopeia. This leads into a conference at which teenage scientist Sereda (Misha Yershov) presents his plan to build a rocket with engines that work on the principle of “annihilation” (which is somehow supposed to be less polluting than a normal engine.) This rocket could travel the distance necessary to investigate the signal, although such a trip would take 27 years. For this reason, Sereda suggests a teenaged crew be selected for the mission. This way they will be young enough upon their arrival not to be soaked in their own incontinence.

If this was a Japanese sci-fi movie, Sereda would be ten and clothed in disturbingly snug micro-shorts, and the adult authorities would nonetheless endorse his plan without question—as the Soviet authorities do the plan of the less alluringly garbed Sereda. Thus is a mission team selected that is comprised of three dashing young boys and three winsome young girls. These all present as ideal Soviet youths by virtue of being perpetually grim faced and task-bound—except when their captive sexual tension results in some jealousy-fueled tussling. This, I think, is supposed to be funny, as are some other ostensible comedic moments in the film that are as impenetrably mysterious as the signal itself. At certain points, everyone starts laughing and whimsical music plays on the soundtrack, and you will just be like “…what?” This includes a lot of the putative antics surrounding Sereda’s attempts to find the author of an anonymous mash note he has received.

Also on board is the accident-prone Lobna, who is played by future TV director Vladimir Basov Ml. in his first film appearance. As a mischievous stowaway, Basov essentially plays the Dr. Smith role in this film, although without being a hysterical gay caricature. It is Lobna's combined inquisitiveness and gracelessness that ends up causing the ship to accidentally go into light speed and reach Alpha well ahead of schedule. This is fortuitous, because there's no novelty in seeing a bunch of forty-somethings farting around on an alien planet set. Unfortunately, we have to wait until the next film, Teens in the Universe, to see the sexier alternative.

Another character I should mention is a mysterious older gentleman, played by Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy, who refers to himself as "I.O.O.", which stands for "Executorial Official of Elucidation." I'm tempted to see that title as a satirical jab at Russian bureaucracy by some upstart screenwriter, but then I might just be projecting. Anyway, this figure provides our introduction to the film, speaking to us directly as he informs us that the story we are about to see is true, although it took place in the future--a statement seemingly designed to explode the mind of a teenage pothead. From there, he pops up throughout the narrative and at times seems to be controlling events through some unknown means (communism, perhaps?), something that the sequel will hopefully shed some light upon.

And will I watch the sequel to Moscow - Cassiopeia, you may ask? Of course, I will--as will I report upon it to you. I found the film engaging and thoroughly charming. The young cast is appealing, the soundtrack--a mix of bleep-bloop electronic music, Russian folk songs, and swinging 70s soft rock--is awesome, and the 70s sci-fi set design is enough to please any fan of Space: 1999, Logan's Run, or any other entertainment in which future people appear to be living inside a pricey refrigerator. Simply stay tuned to this frequency for my next mysterious transmission.

Vynalez Zkasy, aka An Invention of Destruction (Csechoslovakia, 1958)

Vynalez Zkasy (released in the U.S. as The Fabulous World of Jules Verne) may represent Czech FX pioneer Karel Zeman’s quest to emulate the style of 19th century fantasy illustration—to the end of presenting the future through a Victorian lens—at its most extreme. That does not mean that it is any less fascinating than, nor nearly enchanting as, films like The Stolen Airship and Cesta do Praveku/Journey to the Beginning of Time. It only means that there is a vague miasma of obsession that threads through the movie’s general air of wonderment.

Like The Stolen Airship, Vynalez Zkasy is based primarily on one of Jules Verne’s novels (in this case 1896’s Facing the Flag) while liberally borrowing elements from another (in this case, most noticeably, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). The story is narrated by Simon Hart (Lubor Tokos), the dashing young assistant to Professor Roch (Arnost Navratil), who, at the film’s opening, is confined to an insane asylum. It is during a dark and stormy night’s visit to that asylum that both Roch and Hart are kidnapped by a band of pirates lead by Captain Spade (Frantisek Slegr). Spade is in turn acting on orders from Count Artigas (Miloslav Holub), a wealthy scoundrel. You see, Roch’s current work has seen him unlock “the secrets of matter”, a discovery which he sees as only to the benefit of mankind, while Artigas sees its potential for providing the destructive power of a humongous gun which he will use to make the leaders of the free world wet themselves in fear.

Spade and his men herd Roch and Hart aboard their schooner and sets sail for Artigas’ hideout, which we eventually learn is housed, Blofeld-style, within a dormant volcano. On the way, they use a stolen submarine to ram unsuspecting merchant and passenger ships and rob them of their treasure. The scene of the pirates donning deep-sea diving gear and trudging across the ocean floor to pillage the hold of a sunken vessel provides the impetus for some delightful puppet animation, very reminiscent of the moon walking scenes in the Soviet silent Cosmic Journey. Zeman even throws in a fight with a giant octopus for good measure.

In the aftermath of one of their attacks, the pirates take aboard a comely female survivor, Jana (Jana Zatloukalova), whose obligatory role in Vynalez Zkasy is underscored by just how little she is given to do throughout the rest of the film. Once arrived at the hideout, Roch is quickly seduced into aiding Artigas in building his super gun, at which point Hart, no longer of use, is banished to a rundown shack on the outskirts of the villain’s high tech manufacturing facility—which begs the question of how a sharecropper’s cabin ended up inside a volcano. As for Jana, she immediately busies herself with tidying up around the place and, from that point on, is not seen without being in the midst of one of the many domestic chores that come up when one is confined within a cyclopean high-tech lair.

Being a guy, Hart doesn't bother to clean his hovel and instead tasks himself with finding a way to foil Artigas’ plan--while, of course, taking time out to put some gentlemanly moves on Jana. Eventually, he ties a note to a weather balloon and sets it assail. Normally, we would see this as a poignantly futile gesture, so destined to fail that no further mention need be made of it. But then we consider that this is a film set in a Jules Verne universe, in which Victorian gentlemen in bowler hats happily traverse the skies in pedal-powered airships, and so it should be no surprise when the balloon, with note attached, quickly lands in the hands of the British Military. An attack is planned, of which Artigas is quickly notified, and the rest of the movie plays out as a race against time with Hart and his allies rushing to dismantle the gun before the forces of order arrive.

With its stylish interpretation of what is basically a boy’s adventure yarn set amid an anachronistically tricked-out turn-of-the-century, Vynalez Zkasy couldn’t help but remind me of Aleksandr Gintsburg’s The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin. However, while I enjoyed Vynalez Zkasy a lot, I have to say that I enjoyed Gintsburg’s film more. That is because, amid its visual dazzle, Garin is anchored by the sterling performance of Evgeni Evstigneez in its title role. The performances in Vynalez Zkasy, by contrast, are generally competent but flat (reportedly at Zeman’s instruction), which leaves the performers constantly at risk of being upstaged by all the visual sorcery that surrounds them. Also working against them are all of the fetishistically ornate sets and background mattes (Zeman went so far as to paint costumes and set elements with striped rollers to emulate the unique crosshatching used by Verne illustrator Jules Ferat) in which they are placed, which threaten to render them little more than minor design elements.

While echoing certain generic elements of Engineer Garin, Vynalez Zkasy also shares with it the creeping nuclear dread of its era, which was perhaps inevitable. This stands at odds somewhat with Zeman’s normally whimsical tone. Nonetheless, the film retains a certain, inimitable integrity. That is because it is a document of a very specific and deeply personal aesthetic, one that Zeman struggled so hard to keep consistent that he frequently employs animations using photographic cut-outs of his actors for matching shots. If, in this case, that aesthetic becomes a bit claustrophobic in practice, that is to be begrudgingly forgiven. Suffering their occasional indulgences is the price we pay for having artists of such unique vision in the world.

If you want to learn more about Karel Zeman, please see my friend and colleague Keith Allison’s fantastic overview of his career over at Teleport City.

The Friends of 4DK: Elomea (East Germany, 1972) by Keith Allison

As other, non-4DK related matters have been making demands on my time of late, I've reached out to some friends in the blogosfear to contribute guest posts. The first comes from my esteemed friend, colleague and boss over at Teleport City, Keith Allison.

Of the three science fiction films produced by East German studio DEFA that found their way to the United States, Eolomea is often considered the least of the three. It lacks the 1950s pulp appeal of The Silent Star and the eye-popping disco style of In the Dust of the Stars. Compared to those two brightly colored space adventures, Eolomea is a more somber affair set in a lived-in solar system where the wonder and daring of space travel has been replaced by workaday drudgery and blue-collar boredom. The space stations are less wonders of futurist architecture and more akin to a grubby bachelor pad. The cosmonauts of Eolomea are not bold venturers into the great beyond; they are mostly irritated guys who just want to do their time and get home, like a crew stationed at some remote Antarctic outpost.

Eolomea begins with one of those multi-cultural “general assembly meeting” that are usually convened to discuss what to do about the Mysterians. Scientists and associated bureaucrats on Earth are panicked when they start losing contact with their far-flung network of space stations. Unable to figure out what might be causing this (some sort of plague is suspected), they take the emergency measure of freezing all space flights. This order sits poorly with cosmonaut Dan Lagny (Ivan Andonov), stationed on a remote outpost with only one other ennui-wracked crewmember for company. Lagny is sick of space stations and endless voids, and his return to Earth is delayed by this new order. Luckily, space -- like the Soviet Union -- is pretty big, and most of the people on the outskirts of the colonized cosmos simply ignore orders from Earth.

Thus is Dan able to escape the confines of their little station and return home, where he can don space-age (1970s) leisure-wear and yell at the sky. His retirement is derailed when he meets scientist Maria Scholl (Cox Habbema), in charge of investigating the communications blackouts and uncovering the mystery behind the single cryptic message anyone has received from the space stations: the single world “Eolomea,” which seems to have no meaning. Despite his grouchiness, Dan is pressed into service once more. The investigation eventually uncovers something sinister to do with another prominent scientist and leads Dan, Maria, and their small crew to the littered and wrecked halls of one of the seemingly abandoned space stations -- seemingly.

The dramatic change in tone that sets Eolomea apart from other DEFA sci-fi films is thanks largely to it being one of the first Eastern Bloc science fiction films released in the wake of 2001: A Space Odyssey. That film effectively ushered in a new era, one less concerned with rocket models and monsters and more concerned with human drama played against the vastness of space. The first Communist response to 2001 was 1970’s Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer, a German production that places one foot in the pre-2001 world of space pulp and the other in awkward attempts at post-2001 intellectualism. That film is largely forgotten, falling as it does in the twin shadows of both 2001 and the Soviet response, Solaris, a stark and complex film that is as well-regarded and almost as well-known as 2001. Also existing in that shadow is Eolomea, based on a book by Bulgarian writer Angel Vagenshtain, released the same year as Solaris and promptly forgotten until recently.

Although its disjointed timeline and contemplations on the emptiness of space make Eolomea a more complexly structured film than Silent Star and In the Dust of the Stars, it’s still relatively accessible compared to Solaris and 2001: A Space Odyssey. The central mystery proves more solvable than the mind-bending freak-outs that comprise the ends of either of those movies. Like Solaris, Eolomea explores the effects of space and isolation on the human psyche, but Eolomea’s themes are more proletariat than the melancholy, metaphysical weirdness of Solaris. Here, the chief human emotion is not grief, but simple everyday boredom.

It’s not unexpected that Eastern Bloc science fiction in the 1970s, buoyed by the Soviet space program, would chose to dwell on this aspect of space exploration. In oversimplified summary, while the American space program went for flight and exploration, the Soviets went for space stations and orbiting settlement. The Soviet space station program kicked off in 1971 with Salyut-1. Both Solaris and Eolomea came out a year later. The effects of living in such an environment must have been as heavy an influence on the directions of both films. Once you have guys actually up there, it tends to scrub away a bit of the polish to expose the gritty reality of day-to-day space life: less proud cosmonaut pointing toward the stars, more bored cosmonaut with holes in his socks.

It seems at first a jarring change of tone for a Communist science fiction film, so full were they of can-do attitude and faith that adherence to core socialist principles would eventually see us achieve the stars. In Eolomea, we have achieved the stars, and it turns out it’s kind of dull. It starts to make more sense as the film progresses, however, and in the end Eolomea is about the importance of not letting the drudgery and bureaucratic red tape of space travel outweigh the profundity of the pursuit. Despite similar trappings, it’s a much more optimistic view of man versus the cosmos than Solaris.

Still, despite the ultimately hopeful “to boldly go” ending, Eolomea is rather a jarring shift from DEFA’sother sci-fi films. Trading in pop-art set design for grubby space stations, primary colored space suits for more workaday realistic ones, and scantily-clad space dancing girls for irritable cosmonauts with stinky socks might be part of what keeps Eolomea from attaining the same level of love shown the other DEFA scifi romps. It’s a fascinating and ambitious science fiction film though, and as long as you don’t go in expecting the non-stop visual disco of In the Dust of the Stars, Eolomea gives you a slow burning but engrossing mystery. And hey, it’s not all depressing space grind! There’s Cox Habbema in her future-bikini, Ivan Andonov in his space leisure-wear, a reel-to-reel robot, some cool spaceship and station miniatures, and of course space vodka. Lots and lots of space vodka.