Reviews of silent film releases on home video. Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett and the Silent Era Company. All Rights Reserved.

Cosmic Voyage [Kosmičeskij rejs] (1936)

Thought to be the last Soviet silent film, this science fiction epic was shot in the early 1930s as a silent film but not released until 1936. Directed by Vasili Zhuravlyov, this big budget fantasy features Sergei Komarov as the big-bearded professor, with K. Moskalenko, Vasili Gaponenko, Nikolai Feoktistive and Vasili Kovrigin in support.

Imaginatively designed and staged on a huge scale, the film may be responsible of many of the science fiction tropes that would be so prevalent 15-20 years later. This motion picture stands firmly beside other early science fiction films such as Things to Come (1936) as the cinematic grandfathers of the genre. One of the stars of this film is the fantastic model work and animation by Fodor Krasne, which is quite striking in its details and scale.

Between the fun fantasy of it all — the sets, the miniatures, the costumes, stop-motion animation, and the far-fetched story itself — the film will inspire multiple viewings. It’s all here: cranky professors, rocketships, the weightlessness of space, spacesuits with weighted shoes, moon exploration and impending doom. Blast off!

— Carl Bennett

The film is accompanied by two optional music scores: an orchestral score composed by Neil Brand, and a piano score performed by Richard Siedhof. It would have been nice to have the 1936 orchestral soundtrack as a third audio option for historical purposes.

Supplemental material includes the short film Interplanetary Revolution (1924) with music by Masha Khotimski; and a 20-page insert booklet with an essay by Alexander Schwarz in German and English.

This is our recommendation as the best home video edition of the film. North American collectors will need a region-free PAL DVD player capable of outputting an NTSC-compatible signal to view this edition.

This Region 0 PAL DVD edition is available directly from . . .

This DVD-R edition has been mastered from a very-good 35mm print. The greyscale range is broad, with open shadow details and controlled highlights. The video transfer retains the dust, speckling, emulsion chipping and other flaws present in the source print. Unfortunately, the disc encoding is a bit coarse and player-based line-doubling does not entirely remove interlaced aliasing in some diagonal picture elements. English subtitles have been added over some live-action shots and can be hard to read, depending on the background. Many intertitles do not have subtitles at all because some rather lengthy subtitles communicate in advance the content of following intertitles.

The film is accompanied by an orchestral score from the 1936 synchronized soundtrack, which has the requisite amount of subtle distortion, pops and buzzes you would expect from a vintage optical soundtrack.

While this disc is not a great presentation, it is passable viewing and a better than average release from this independent home video company. This is the only NTSC home video edition of the film we know of.

USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is also available directly from . . .

Other SCIENCE FICTION and FANTASY FILMS of the silent era available on home video.