FIRST SPACESHIP ON VENUS SCREENING

This coming Friday (October 22nd) at 'Innis Town Hall', here in Toronto, will be a rare screening of the 1960s science fiction opus First Spaceship on Venus. My own thanks goes to film-collector Dion Conflict.

I should mention that First Spaceship is actually the 1962 American release of the East German/Polish co-production Der Schweigende Stern. The original was a widescreen and stereo-sound, prestige picture; while the 'import' was trimmed, stuffed with stock background music cues, and, of course, dubbed into English. It's a grand-looking film but also one you buy or you don't. A word of warning for some: First Spaceship on Venus has a brain in its head, which is so nice to see. This might have something to do with the fact that the story was based on a novel, "The Astronauts", written by famed Polish SF author Stanislaw Lem. (As a note, Lem did not like the film drawn from his book -- as a matter of fact, he later down-played his novel since Lem wrote it when he was still a young and, according to him, naive man. Has to do with socialistic ideals. A later novel of Lem's was transcribed to motion picture by Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky; its name, Solaris.)

The theatre is at 2 Sussex Place, Toronto (actually, you can enter off of St. George as the building is on the corner), and the start-time is 7pm...
http://cinssu.ca/