Woman in the Moon 1929

The story

A professor, Georg Manfeldt (Klaus Pohl), is laughed at for his theory that the far side of the Moon holds gold. The businessman Wolf Helius (Willy Fritsch) believes him and pays for a rocket. A criminal gang forces its way into the project, and a stowaway boy joins the crew. Among the crew are the engineer Hans Windegger (Gustav von Wangenheim) and Friede Velten (Gerda Maurus).

On the Moon the crew find breathable air and gold. Then come a fall, a shooting, and damaged oxygen tanks. There is room for only some of them to fly home, so they draw lots. Helius means to stay behind, and Friede stays with him.

It was written by Thea von Harbou, Lang's wife, from her own novel, and Lang produced it himself through his own company, working with Ufa. Shooting ran from October 1928 to June 1929 at the Neubabelsberg studios near Berlin.

A real rocket scientist on the set

Lang took the science seriously. The credits name Hermann Oberth, one of the pioneers of spaceflight, for scientific collaboration. Reference works add Willy Ley, a young spaceflight enthusiast, as a consultant. By one account Ley brought Oberth into the project, and by another Ley suggested the publicity stunt below.

The rocket in the film, the Friede, is said to follow a design from Oberth's own book Die Rakete, with an extra stage added. The film shows a multi-stage rocket assembled indoors and moved to its pad, and the TCM writer Sean Axmaker adds liquid fuel and a figure-of-eight path between Earth and Moon to the list of things the film got right. Axmaker reports the film historian Phil Hardy calling it the first real space travel movie.

Ufa also wanted a real rocket. According to TCM, the studio paid for an experimental liquid-fuel rocket, designed by Oberth, to be fired before the premiere as publicity, and the launch failed. By another account, Oberth and his colleague Rudolf Nebel built a rocket about two metres tall for the premiere, and it did not work. Other accounts say only that time and technology kept Oberth from building a working rocket at all. Sources differ on how far it got. Young members of the German rocket society, among them Wernher von Braun, are said to have been caught up in the effort, and the film is said to have fed the enthusiasm of the German rocketry amateurs of those years.

The countdown

The film is often credited with the first countdown to a launch: the intertitles count down, ten, nine, eight, to zero. The Jerusalem Cinematheque lists the countdown among Lang's accurate ideas, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction credits the film with introducing it. No earlier count to zero is generally cited, but the claim always comes with an "often", and that is the right way to hold it.

Lang's own reason, as it is usually retold, was dramatic, not technical: counting up would not tell an audience when the rocket leaves, and counting down does. He is also said to have called it a matter of necessity in a silent film. An American University library note puts it plainly: it was "entirely a filmmaking technique to build tension in the absence of sound". Whether anyone had counted down before, or whether real rocket engineers took the idea from Lang, is the part sources do not settle.

A silent film in the year of sound

The film passed the German censors on 25 September 1929 and opened on 15 October at the Ufa-Palast am Zoo in Berlin. The Deutsche Kinemathek holds a photograph of the cinema's front, where the announcement for the film shared the facade with advertising for The Singing Fool, an American musical with some synchronised sound. The first sound films were arriving in Berlin at the end of the decade.

By most accounts Ufa executives wanted sound effects added at the last minute, and Lang refused. It was his last silent film, and his last for Ufa. Critics were not unanimous. Lang's biographer Patrick McGilligan is reported to judge it a commercial disappointment. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says it was long overshadowed by Metropolis, and that the pre-flight scenes are praised while the drama on the ground is found tedious.

After 1929: the ban story and the restoration

The story people search for is that the Nazi government withdrew the film because it was too close to Germany's own rocket work. TCM says Hitler suppressed it in 1937 while the V-1 and V-2 were under way, and the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says the Nazis "soon withdrew" it and destroyed the rocket model. Other accounts give other years, and one library note says it has "no idea if that's true". That the film was withdrawn is plausible; the reason given rests on accounts that repeat one another. A related tale, that the first successful V-2 at Peenemünde carried the film's emblem, is best taken as a story too.

For decades only shortened prints circulated. The Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Stiftung restored the film in 2000 from a camera negative in the Bundesarchiv-Filmarchiv in Berlin, rebuilding the intertitles from flash titles found on the negative, with the work done at L'Immagine Ritrovata in Bologna. That restoration is the basis of the DVD and Blu-ray editions.

Copyright is two answers. Duke's Center for the Study of the Public Domain says that works published in 1929 entered the US public domain on 1 January 2025, and warns that later versions with new material may be protected. In Germany the term follows Lang's death in 1976, so it runs to the end of 2046, as for Metropolis. Von Harbou died in 1954.

Why it matters

It put a rocket scientist on a film set. A real adviser, a real design and a real, failed attempt at a publicity launch: few silent films were this close to the engineering of their day.

It is the film the countdown is credited to. By Lang's account a trick to build tension in a silent film, the count to zero has since become how the world waits for a launch.

It is the other Lang science fiction. It is quieter than Metropolis and less famous, but in the pre-launch scenes critics find what they were looking for. Its Moon trip follows A Trip to the Moon by twenty-seven years, and it arrived as The Jazz Singer was ending the silent era.