A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z
|
|
|
World of Westfahl |
Encyclopedia Introduction |
All Entries |
Acknowledgements
A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
(1857–1935). Russian scientist and author.
Officially, the film is
described as an adaptation of Tsiolkovsky's novel Beyond the Planet Earth,
or Outside the Earth (1920), but just as another pioneering film about a
voyage to the Moon, Destination Moon (1950) bore little relationship to
its purported source material, Robert A. HEINLEIN's novel Rocket Ship
Galileo (1947), Vasili Zhuravlyov's film bore little relationship to
Tsiolkovsky's saga of an international crew of adventurers who settle down for
an extended stay in a space habitat before moving onward to the Moon and Mars.
Rather, it was an obvious imitation of Fritz LANG's Woman in the Moon
(1929), a straightforward account of a first flight to the Moon featuring three
crew members clearly based on screenwriter Thea
VON HARBOU's characters: an
elderly scientist, a beautiful blond woman, and an adorable little boy who
stows away on the spaceship. (Entirely omitted, however, were the machinations
of evil capitalists and the competition between two other crewmen for the affections
of the woman; presumably, the governing dogma would be that such conflicts
could never occur in a worker's paradise like the Soviet Union.) But even if
there is little in the way of conventional drama, Tsiolkovsky ensured that the
technical aspects of the film would be superb, including a aerodynamically
sound spaceship launched from an immense ramp, a common scheme also observed in
Rudolph MATÉ's When Worlds Collide (1951), and
realistic-looking spacesuits (and, unlike Lang's more lenient advisor Oberth,
Tsiolkovsky would tolerate no dubious assumptions about finding a breathable
atmosphere somewhere on the Moon, requiring Zhuravlyov's space travelers to
wear their suits throughout their sojourn on the Moon). More impressively,
while Lang emphasize only the practical allure of finding tons of gold on the
Moon, Tsiolkovsky understood that the true value of space travel would lie in
the delightful freedom it would provide: there are long scenes of the space
travelers happily flying back and forth in their improbably roomy spaceship
(almost recalling similar scenes in J. M. Barrie's play Peter Pan
[1904]), and they also move about the Moon by means of immense leaps from rock
to rock. Overall, thanks to Tsiolkovsky's influence, Kosmicheskiy Reys qualifies
as the first completely realistic film about space travel, not to be surpassed
until Destination Moon. Ironically, though, Tsiolkovsky may have never
seen the final fruits of his labors, since he died before the film's release.
Since his death, as his
works have become better known, Tsiolkovsky can be appreciated as the man who
anticipated, even if he did not directly influence, scores of space voyages in
fiction and in reality. He would have appreciated, more than others, the
austere beauty of Stanley KUBRICK and Arthur C.
CLARKE's 2001: A Space
Odyssey (1968) as an appropriate evocation of the truly alien nature of
outer space. Later, a lesser work, the television series Star Trek: The Next
Generation (1987-1994), would pay explicit tribute to Tsiolkovsky by naming
a spaceship after him in the episode "The Naked Now" (1987), but Tsiolkovsky
himself would have scoffed at the implausibly Earthlike actions and lifestyles
of its characters. For Konstantin Tsiolkovsky understood, long before anyone
else, that life in outer space would inevitably be utterly unlike life on the
planet Earth—an insight that to this day still eludes most people, including
most people who make science fiction films.
|
||||||||
To contact us about encyclopedia matters, send an email to Gary Westfahl. Hosted & Designed By:
If you find any Web site errors, typos or other stuff worth mentioning,
please send it to our Webmaster.
Copyright © 1999–2018 Gary Westfahl All Rights Reserved Worldwide
