Customer Reviews

The DEFA Sci-Fi Collection

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Just reviewed my DEFA SCI FI collection. There are a few minor points about the Amazon listing for this collection. Note that it only contains 3 discs, not the 5 as listed. All of the features are presented in anamorphic widescreen in the proper ARs.

All three films are presented in German with English subtitles. The quality is quite good overall. The weakest transfer is the earliest, SILENT STAR (aka FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS). The transfer is a bit soft and there are some occasional minor color fluctuations around reel changes. It still looks much better than Image's DVD of FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS (the only other 2.35:1 transfer of this title on DVD).

The other two films were released in 1972 and 1976. I had never seen them before and found them interesting.

The SILENT STAR disc was obviously made in cooperation with UMASS, and probably contains most of the same extras that their $185 disc contains!

For fans of Euro Sci-Fi, this is a very interesting collection that I highly recommend.

While it is wonderful to have these very interesting films available, it is a terrible shame that they are not presented anamorphically, but letterboxed. The subtitles are also infuriating - if you zoom the picture in, the subtitles on the 2 newer films lose their second line as they are not in the picture frame. Excellent prints and extras however. It's good to see a SF perspective that is completely out of the Hollywood zone.

The subtitles are almost completely useless. A shame if you don't speak German because the films are OK. With this fault in mind, the disks are a bit pricey.

The three movies on this collection represent three quite different takes on the genre. Silent Star is perhaps the best known and was released under a different title in the west in an edited form. A high suspension of disbelieve is required for this 1960 epic. The plot itself is flimsy but serves to gather an international team to confront a threat of war from Venus. Dripping with eastern block propaganda, Silent Star still manages to gather some atmosphere with some quite memorable scenes despite the wildly bad science.
In the Dust Of The Stars in some respects fairs worse. Again the underling communist social commentary is front and center but this time some of the scenes border on Surreal if not bizarre. It's worth mentioning the dream-like soundtrack - a classic Krautrock piece complete with a hypnotic reverberating guitar pattern, and a high female voice, which I believe sings - Das licht ist schneller als die dunkle. (The light is faster than the dark).
My favorite of the three is Eolomea made in 1972. The flavor of this film is somewhat reminiscent of the Tarkovsky masterpiece Solaris of the same year. Almost a decade earlier the Czech film Ikarie XB1 achieved a similar atmosphere, like Solaris adapting a story by Stanislaw Lem. While nether Ikarie XB1 or Eolomea come close to Solaris, both have considerable charm. Eolomea does not escape the propaganda machine but has some atmospheric trimming of the time. The unfortunate robot, with the inevitable square head is a forgivable Achilles heal for the time but it is adequately compensated for by the excellent shifting between Earth and Space.