The Silent Star

In 1985, engineers involved in an industrial project to irrigate the Gobi Desert accidentally unearth a mysterious and apparently artificial "spool". When found to be made of a material unknown on Earth, the spool is circumstantially linked to the Tunguska explosion of 1908. The spool is seized on as evidence that the explosion, originally blamed on a meteor, was actually caused by an alien spaceship.

Professor Harringway deduces the craft must have come from Venus. The spool itself is determined to be a flight recorder and is partially decoded by an international team of scientists led by Professor Sikarna and Dr. Tchen Yu. When radio greetings sent to Venus go unanswered, Harringway announces that a journey to Venus is the only alternative. The recently completed Soviet spaceship Cosmostrator, intended to voyage to Mars, is redirected to Venus, a 30- to 31-day journey. During the voyage, Sikarna works furiously to translate the alien message using the spaceship's computer.

When their spaceship nears Venus, radio interference from the planet cuts the crew off from Earth. By then, Sikarna's efforts lead to a stunning discovery: The spool describes a Venusian plan to irradiate the Earth's surface, with the extermination of mankind being the prelude to an invasion. Rather than containing a "cosmic document", as had been expected, the spool bears a cold-blooded message of destruction. With this new information the crew decides to transmit the information to earth, believing that the information would help mankind and not cause panic. Harringway convinces the crew to press on towards Venus rather than return to Earth with news that could bring panic to mankind.

With the ship's robot, Omega, German astronaut Brinkman pilots a one-man landing craft. On the ground, he encounters an industrial complex and finds small information storage devices that look like insects. Brinkmans landing craft is destroyed in an explosion due to landing on high tension power lines. The rest of the crew lands the Cosmostrator to investigate the explosion. The Crew splits some stay at the Cosmostrator to study the storage devices while the others follow the power line to try and find the Venusians. But they find no Venusian life forms. Instead they find a large golf ball-like structure that Arsenew suggests may be a giant transformer unit, or a force-field generator. Following the power lines in the other direction, they find the remains of a deserted and blasted city centered around a huge crater, signs of a catastrophic explosion so intense that shadowy forms of humanoid Venusians are permanently burned on to the walls of the surviving buildings similar to the nuclear shadows left by the Hiroshima bombing.

The Venusians are gone, but their machines remain functioning, including the radiation-bombardment machine intended for Earth. One of the scientists accidentally triggers the weapon, leading to a frantic effort by the team to disarm it. Tchen Yu lowers Talua, the ship's communication officer, into the Venusian command center. When Tchen Yu's suit is punctured, Brinkman ventures out to save him. Before he can reach Yu, Talua succeeds in reversing the weapon. Unfortunately, this also reverses Venus' gravitational field, flinging Cosmostrator into space. Brinkman is also repelled off the planet, beyond the reach of the spaceship, while Talua and Tchen Yu remain marooned on Venus. The surviving crew members must return to Earth, where they warn humanity about the dangers of atomic weapons.

• Günther Simon as Raimund Brinkman (Robert in the US release), the Kosmokrator's German pilot
• Julius Ongewe as Talua, the African communications officer
• Yoko Tani as Dr. Sumiko Ogimura, the Japanese medical officer
• Oldrich Lukes as Professor Harringway Hawling, the American commander
• Ignacy Machowski as Professor Sołtyk (Durand, a French engineer, in the US release), the Polish chief engineer
• Mikhail Postnikov as Professor Arsenew (Orloff in the US release), the Soviet cosmonaut
• Kurt Rackelmann as Professor Sikarna, an Indian mathematician
• Tang Hua-Ta as Dr. Chen Yu (Lao Tsu in the US Release), a Chinese linguist.
• Lucyna Winnicka as Joan Moran, television reporter
• Eduard von Winterstein as a nuclear physicist
• Ruth Maria Kubitschek as Professor Arsenew's wife

Julius Ongewe was a medical student in Leipzig from Nigeria or Kenya. It turns out he was one of the two first black men to travel in space (in the movies). Another one, in the same year of 1960, was Archie Savage in an Italian film Space-Men.[5]

The story is based on the 1951 science fiction novel The Astronauts by Stanisław Lem. Lem was approached by Kurt Maezig who worked with DEFA in 1957 who had the Idea to make a film adaptation of his novel. Possibly because Lem was widely known in Poland and abroad at the time.[6] The Astronauts was likely chosen due to the recent advancements in rocket technology and the popularity of space travel in science fiction. The story also expressed many socialist Ideals[7] Which would have looked good for the state owned DEFA.

The DEFA director Herbert Volkmann responsible for finance, as well as other officials of the GDR, were strict with the project, and had idealogical concerns about the script, and new writers were brought to work on it, eventually resulting in twelve different versions of the script.[7]

In the film's original East German and Polish release the Earth spaceship sent to Venus is named Kosmokrator.

The film was shot mostly in East Germany.[8] The outdoors scenes were shot in the area of Zakopane, Poland and the airfield of Berlin-Johannisthal and special effects in Babelsberg Studio and in a studio in Wrocław, Poland. The spaceship mock-up at the airfield was a matter of a newspaper hoax in Der Kurier : the front page presented it as a failed attempt at spaceflight in the Soviet occupation zone.[9]

The film was noted for early extensive usage of "electronic sounds" on its soundtrack. Electronic music and noises illustrated the work of the computer that deciphers the alien message, the message itself, and the eerie landscape of Venus devastated by the nuclear catastrophe. Markowski, who produced the musical score, was assisted by sound engineer Krzysztof Szlifirski from the Experimental Studio of Polish Radio, with some sound effects added at the laboratory of the Military Academy of Technology in Warsaw and with post-production at DEFA.[10]

Ernst Kunstmann was in charge of special effects.[11]

It was the first film released by Poland[6] and East Germany.[11]

When first released to European cinemas, the film sold about 4.3 million tickets,[3] making it one of the 30 most successful DEFA films.[7]

In 1980 a short sequence from First Spaceship on Venus was used as a "film-within-a-film" in the low budget feature Galaxina.

In 1990 the film was featured in the second season of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and was released on DVD in 2008 by Shout! Factory, as part of their "MST3K 20th Anniversary Edition" collection.

In 2007 the film was shown on the horror hosted television series Cinema Insomnia.[16] Apprehensive Films later released the Cinema Insomnia episode on DVD.[17]

• The Silent Star is available for free download at the Internet Archive
• First Spaceship on Venus at IMDb
• First Spaceship on Venus at AllMovie
• First Spaceship on Venus at Rotten Tomatoes