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Two DEFA Sci-Fi Films by Gottfried Kolditz
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Deaf Crocodile Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (6th June 2025). |
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The Film
 "Journey to outer space and behind the Iron Curtain with this pair of wild 1970s space operas produced by East German state run studio DEFA." Signals: A Space Adventure: When explorer ship Ikarus searching for signs of intelligent life just outside the orbit of Venus receives strange signals just before encountering an occluded meteor shower and breaking up, no manned or unmanned vehicles have been able to find them and they are written off by Space Security Headquarters as a mystery until Commander Veikos (Deluge's Piotr Pawlowski) makes a special request to do another search more than half-a-year later under the guise of doing routine repairs lest he get the hopes up of his specially-selected crew which includes colleague Konrad (The Rabbit is Me's Alfred Müller) who has been doing revolutionary radio wave research and has been trying to translate the recordings of the signals he made when his own craft was in the vicinity of the Ikarus shortly before impact and Pawel (Ivan's Childhood's Evgeniy Zharikov) who had a nervous breakdown and had been institutionalized since the disappearance of his fiancee Krystina (Karin Ugowski) aboard the Ikarus. The commander of Luna North (Iurie Darie) suspects that Veikos has other reasons, especially given some of his other choices like Juana (Irena Karel) who has demonstrated her expertise at remote maneuvering of crafts but has yet to prove herself in space, veteran Gaston (Helmut Schreiber) who is celebrating his twenty-fifth year of service but may no longer be physically suitable for space travel, Terry (Old Shatterhand's Gojko Mitic) who dabbles with robots and is rather cavalier with regard to regulations, and physician Samira (Soheir El-Morshidy) who has already noted irregularities in Veikos' vitals. The mission starts out routine with each of the crew attending to their duties and getting accustomed to working with each other, but Pawel is tormented by his memories of Kristyna and wants to know to things: how and why Veikos got him back into active duty for a repair mission, and whether Konrad's radio wave experiments had anything to do with the reason why Space Security never received an emergency distress call from Ikarus (which is as simple as pressing a single button). When they start picking up the alien signals again and they pick up the ID of Ikarus, they are uncertain whether they have found the remains of the ship and possible survivors or whether an intelligent life form is using their own ship's memory data to draw them in and trap them. East Germany's answer to 2001: A Space Odyssey from director Gottfried Kolditz who had helmed a number of large budget comedies and westerns at the time, the Polish co-produced Signals: A Space Adventure is stunning to behold in terms of its visuals – the special effects crew obviously studied the model film's innovative special effects closely in terms of its miniature effects and zero gravity scenes – and the hybrid orchestral/electronic scoring of Karl-Ernst Sasse but its attempts to emulate Kubrick's clinical detachment has resulted in film that is rather dull in dramatic and action terms. Tonally all over the place with cutaways to a futuristic seaside beach party – which might be Party "healthy living" propaganda or a parody thereof – and some zero gravity scenes that feel more Barbarella than "Blue Danube" some of this is at least justified by most of the crew members believing that they are on a routine mission that includes an anniversary celebration for Gaston featuring a cartoon that looks only looks "primitive" until the viewer realizes that in this world joker Terry must have realized it not by hand-drawing cel animation but via "futuristic" computer technology considerably less advanced than what even a novice can attempt on a consumer-level setup these days. Left to the imagination is the composition of this world which seems both multi-ethnic, egalitarian, and seemingly without any geographic borders anymore given the mix of surnames despite most of them being played by German and Polish actors. In spite of attempts to drum up some drama with crew suspicions about one another and some of the sparest character development as each crew member shows their expertise in solving problems, the film drags with a heavy emphasis on the aforementioned routine repairs that seem less like foreshadowing to the climax and more excuses to show off the film's effects work. The third act twists and the "action" climax fall as flat as what is intended to be the emotional resolution. Although Kubrick's film was released in East Germany and no doubt overshadowed Signals: A Space Adventure as it had most other like productions in other countries, the film must have performed well enough for Kolditz to be able to mount another sci-fi epic later in the decade with In the Dust of the Stars just before Star Wars set a new bar for sci-fi effects films that was even harder to match.  In the Dust of Stars: A ship from the Cynro base commanded by Akala (I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen's Jana Brejchová) answers a distress call on a distant planet called Tem-4, nearly crash-landing in the process. Exploring the desert surface, they discover that the atmosphere is breathable without their suits when they are welcomed by Ctha (Aurelia Dumitrescu), a young woman who escorts them in a land rover to their underground kingdom where seeming leader Ronk (She Devils of the SS' Milan Beli) reclines and offers them aerosol spray refreshment before informing them that they are not in need of help, and that their distress call was part of a series of experiments with newly-installed radio equipment. Akala accepts Ronk's hospitality for the three to four days during which they must ready the ship for launching again, but Suko (Alfred Struwe) who has remained on-board has intercepted radio communication between Tem-4 and Tem-3 that indicates that their near crash-landing was engineered by the Tems. When he confides this in Akala, he is shocked that she does not seem to believe him, nor do his shipmates Thob (Knife in the Water's Leon Niemczyk), Rall (Rock'n Roll Wolf's Violeta Andrei), Miu (Regine Heintze), and Ilyk (Silvia Popovici) when they return from Tem-3's lavish welcoming festivities. Although they all suspiciously use the same phrases in describing the Temians as "fun and a little crazy" Suko is unable to find anything in the food they have brought back with them. When Suko takes an exploratory probe out himself to investigate the terrain, Ronk returns in his place but is prevented from entering the ship. When Suko is returned to the crew behaving differently, the rest of crew start to question the real intentions of the Temians. An original script by director Gottfried Kolditz, In the Dust of the Stars looks on the surface like a campy Star Trek or Space 1999 episode with a villain whose hair dye color changes with each scene, on-demand scantily-clad girls doing expertly-choreographed numbers – dancer Heintze also does a silhouetted nude dance presumably under the influence of the Temians – mod space-wear, and mind control. Although the villains are decadent (and chauvinist), the Cynro crew themselves do not appear entirely free of old prejudices with what first appears as a battle of the sexes between Akala who stresses diplomacy and Suko who seems joyless and distrustful (with his noted position as more of a historian than an engineer emphasizing the need to remember and not repeat history). The representations of both opposing parties as East and West becomes more obvious once the story twists late in the film reveal the film to actually be a colonial allegory, with the Tems justifying their subjugation of the planet's original inhabitants for their resources by describing them as having "no culture" and worshiping Gods rather than technology (the set's extras noting that techno-centric science fiction was generally associated by the East with capitalism). The weakness of the film is that it sort of peters out, with the action climax seeming to simply wrap things up predictably rather than engender any real suspense. Having realized that their programme of 70mm, six-track productions was not financially feasible with most venues having to screen 35mm reductions with mono sound, DEFA drops those embellishments for In the Dust of the Stars but the flat 1.66:1 mono imagery is still stuffed with psychedelic eye-candy – which would have seemed incredibly outdated had the film reached the West in the mid-seventies – even if the amount of visual effects has been scaled back and more natural locations utilized in Romania. The film was Kolditz's second-to-last work, but his final film The Thing in the Castle appears to have been in a similar quirky fantastic vein. 
Video
Presumably due to its dated sixties look and sub-2001: A Space Odyssey effects, Signals: A Space Adventure was not picked up for theatrical release in the U.S. or U.K. The film came to DVD in Germany in 2014 and France in 2020, neither of which were English-friendly as expected. Although the film received a 4K restoration from a 6K scan of the original 70mm negatives last year, the film made its Blu-ray debut earlier this year in the United States from Deaf Crocodile in a limited edition Gottfried Kolditz double feature with In the Dust of the Stars with multiple cover choices available directly from Deaf Crocodile while the standard edition under review here is available from a wider range of retailers. Eureka's British release as part of the Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA boxed set with this disc's co-feature and the films The Silent Star and Eolomea came from the same master but differs dramatically from the Deaf Crocodile presentation. While Eureka has admitted that the master for In the Dust of the Stars had been run through Topaz AI before it came to them, their release of Signals: A Space Adventure has matted the 2.20:1 70mm aspect ratio to 2.35:1 (technically how territories outside of East Germany and the Soviet Union may have seen it as a 35mm anamorphic reduction but not a choice that should have been imposed on another entity's restoration) and featuring slightly darker grading that also loose a tad more saturated with skintones looking a little more pink-to-tan and grays a bit blue. While that could be more aesthetically-pleasing, the Deaf Crocodile is preferable in representing the restoration (as opposed to both companies receiving a raw or minimally cleaned-up graded scan and doing their own work on it). Even in Deaf Crocodile's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.20:1 transfer blacks occasionally take on a hint of gray or blue (exacerbated in the Eureka grading) in the space miniature shots and occasionally a wire is visible – in the Eolomea documentary on the U.K. release and some of the earlier DVD editions of that film, the effects cameraman discusses Signals: A Space Adventure and how some shots of the rockets lifting off were done with the set upside down because viewers would not look for wires underneath objects, but it appears they could not do this for shots that included actors – and however much the film is influenced by the Kubrick film, but even without the additional grading of the Eureka, this is a generally more eye-popping universe in terms of color when it comes to the ship decors and wardrobe of the travelers.  Unreleased theatrically in the U.S. or U.K., In the Dust of the Stars first appeared on DVD in Germany followed by a U.S. DVD, both non-anamorphic and overmatted to 1.85:1 but the latter including English subtitles. The 2021 German DVD – a double feature with Signals: A Space Adventure finally featured an anamorphic transfer in the original 1.66:1 aspect ratio but the film's Blu-ray debut came from France in 2024. For their aforementioned U.K. boxed set release, Eureka conceded that the master had been run through Topaz AI with "minimally invasive" upscaling but what looked like green artefacting in blacks of some of the clothing might be some kind of glittery trim but this seem more pronounced in other black areas of shots including the underground mines where the Eureka's blacks are deeper than those of the Deaf Crocodile 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen encode that has a slightly grayer bias next to the pillarboxing mattes. The background on the Eureka also looks a tad softened compared to the Deaf Croccodile which themselves might be a bit sharpened in keeping with an older scan along with some edge-enhancement haloes which AI seems to have slightly softened. In both versions, there is a shot of Ronk firing his mini-laser where the rapid movement goes smeary for a few frames which might be evidence of some noise reduction done to the master pre-Topaz. Casual fans might not be bothered by the anomalies of the Eureka set and, while we recommend the Deaf Crocodile video for both of these films – particularly for the original aspect ratio and grading on Signals: A Space Adventure – the set holds value for including the other two films (we have no idea if there are planned releases for those stateside) and the set's roster of excellent extras while more dedicated fans to German and Soviet science fiction may want both for the Deaf Crocodile video and its own exclusive extras (see below). 
Audio
The German DVD of Signals: A Space Adventure featured a Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo track from the six-track materials while Eureka included both an LPCM 2.0 stereo downmix as well as a rechannelled DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. Deaf Crocodile features and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track as its sole option and it is the recommended option as the sound design is quite ambitious sometimes suiting the extensive effects sequences and the hybrid electronic/orchestral score sound truly distant here rather than just low on the track (the wordless vocals which may be an actual voice or an electronically-treated sound has kind of a spaghetti western sound). Optional English subtitles more than characterization help the viewer keep track of who is who.  In keeping with the scaled-back nature of In the Dust of the Stars, the soundtrack is mono but the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track sounds quite full with the psychedelic music doing much of the heavy lifting for the sound design with laser sound effects and explosions saved for the latter third of the film. Optional English subtitles are free of any noticeable errors. 
Extras
Both films are accompanied by an audio commentary by film historian and comics artist Stephen R. Bissette and Dr. Mariana Ivanova of the DEFA Film Library, the latter's participation through Bissette's notes and a recorded audio interview conducted on the Amherst campus, in which Ivanova discusses the concept of Utopian cinema over western science fiction, director Kolditz's casting of Mitic who had starred in the East German "Red Westerns" or indianerfilm – the equivalent of the Karl May West German westerns – and championed Native American causes – as well as the reasons why a decade passed in between The Silent Star and Signals: A Space Adventure, with the latter coming out of a new party direction to use genre cinema to both educate and entertain in that order. Ivanova also points reveals that Kolditz screened both 2001: A Space Odyssey and Barbarella? to the cast and crew, and that the "sexualized" costumes for the female characters were atypical of East German cinema in general. She also reveals that it was the film's Polish co-production side that contributed to the special effects – both she and Bissette pointing out the Polish and Czech animation of the period – as well as noting the film's Utopian ideals and happy ending in contrast to the Western dystopian science fiction (with the exception of perhaps the Czech Ikarie XB 1) which would not have been possible for an East German science fiction film at the time. Bissette also notes the signifance of the ship names with the rescue ship called Laika after the first dog in outer space while Ivanova reveals that the film was only shown in 70mm in East Germany as the format was the forefront of cinema technological development – although it was mostly likely screened as 35mm scope reductions in Poland – but she had first encountered the film on television in Bulgaria. Of In the Dust of the Stars, Bissette discusses the more fanciful and campy elements it has in common with Star Trek while Ivanova provides information on the DEFA Futurism collaborative from which this film evolved out of a handful of earlier short films envisioning contemporary issues in the future. It should be noted that the Eureka commentaries for these films take a similar approach with film historian David Melville Wingrove "presenting" the observations of fellow academic Rolland Man on the films within his own analysis and observations on the films.  Deaf Crocodile was possibly entertaining separate standard editions of both films since both discs feature "Other Worlds, Strange Dreams: The East German Space Operas of Director Gottfried Kolditz" (17:43), a video essay by Evan Chester offering an overview of both films with reference to The Silent Star and Eolomea in the context of East German science fiction films. Chester's interest is clearly more on In the Dust of the Stars as he goes from discussing the "Mid-century Modern" look Signals: A Space Adventure shares with the Kubrick film to more of a look at the second film's plot, design, campier Space 1999-esqe elements, and the Krautrock-esque score by Karl-Ernst Sasse who also scored Signals: A Space Adventure as well as his specialist instrument in the context of East Germany's contributions to electronic music. Each disc has a trailer for their film (3:15 and 3:02, respectively). 
Overall
While not as much an overview as Eureka's four-film DEFA science fiction set, Deaf Crocodile's Two DEFA Sci-Fi Films by Gottfried Kolditz provides a context for both films as well as a look at two works of an East German popular director who did not specialize in any genre and indeed felt it valuable to explore many of them.
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