Rockets from Russia: great Eastern Bloc science-fiction films

If we can begin with a sweeping generalisation, American science-fiction movies are usually distinguished by a fast pace that gets faster and ends with an enormous bang. Not all: George Lucas's THX 1138 and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey are different. But these are exceptional even within those directors' work: Lucas's other sci-fi films being fast-moving toy-operas, while Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove and Clockwork Orange are relentless in their irony and forward movement.

Partially, I think, this is because US sci-fi films were born of very low budgets in the 1950s, in the hands of independents such as Jack Arnold. They were often parables about the danger of nuclear testing, which caused men to shrink, or ants to grow giant, or prehistoric sea-beasts to carry off swimsuited girls. Films such as Creature from the Black Lagoon and Them! relied on visual effects, but those effects were pretty cheesy, and couldn't be on screen for long – so, cut to the scientist and his daughter, and on to the explosion.

2001 is, by contrast, famously slow-paced and enigmatic. Its meaning remains unclear four decades on, and it still resembles its own seamless monolith, "its origin and purpose a total mystery". In its pace, its attention to the mechanical detail of space flight, and its memorable computer, 2001 is, in some ways, the perfect Russian science-fiction film.

I say this because many film enthusiasts will have seen the film the Russians actually made, Tarkovsky's Solaris. It is an extraordinary film: not as fine as Kubrick's in its special effects, but much more complex in its depiction of human beings captured by aliens and placed in an imaginary world based on an incomplete understanding of their memories. 2001 is about the big picture – the great gas planets turning, the vast space station wheeling around Earth – while Solaris deals with little things, like why a man can't undo his wife's dress, or why it's raining indoors.

Now we have a unique chance to view some less familiar artefacts from another world, via the BFI Southbank's celebration of Eastern Bloc science fiction. Strangest of these is the 1924 silent Aelita: Queen of Mars, in which the human pastime of kissing creates turmoil on the red planet.

But it was the Gagarin space launch that triggered a profusion of Soviet-era social dramas with a cosmic backdrop. The Russians may have dropped out of the race for the moon, but their cinema took up the slack. Here, space missions of the boldest kind were launched, and a flourishing film industry united to promote man's destiny among the stars.

Both Silent Star (1959) and Planet of Storms (1962) depict missions to Venus in this heroic vein. Each features a cast of cosmonauts, male and female, and a cute robot – inspired by Robby the adorable android from Forbidden Planet. These are mainstream adventure movies, yet each is pessimistic in a very fundamental way.

The East-German-Polish co-production Silent Star, based on a Stanislaw Lem novel, tells the story of a multi-racial, United World Government space mission to find intelligent life on Earth's sister planet. Thus described, it sounds like one of those Japanese movies such as The Mysterians – but it's more complex and morally ambiguous. Just before the ship is about to land on Venus, the cosmonauts learn of a Venusian plan to destroy life on Earth. Unable to contact home, they carry on with the mission rather than return to Earth and warn humankind. Luckily, it turns out the Venusians have destroyed themselves by over-weaponising their fragile planet. Silent Star's images of melted cities and crystallised forests, overhung by swirling clouds of gas, are masterpieces of production design. The scene in which three cosmonauts are menaced, halfway up a miniature Tower of Babel, by an encroaching sea of sludge may not entirely convince, but it is still a heck of a thing to see.

Planet of Storms is a Russian version of these same events, beginning with a shot of three immaculate Soviet spacecraft nearing Venus – one of which is immediately atomised by a passing meteor. The surviving cosmonauts, though grief-stricken, elect to press on to Venus at great risk. We then embark on a surprisingly madcap story of interplanetary exploration. There are giant carnivorous plants, man-size dinosaurs and octopus things. The cute robot fells trees and plays big band music. And in its final minutes, Planet of Storms takes an extraordinary turn. It turns out there is intelligent life on Venus after all, which is revealed in a clever and surprising way. I shall not spoil the secret, but it's worth the wait.

Planet of Storms had an unfortunate subsequent history. It was bought for US distribution by Roger Corman, who proceeded to cut it up and use the pieces for two other films, an act of cinematic cannibalism that gave us Curtis Harrington's Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet and Peter Bogdanovich's equally classic Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women. So it's good to see at last what director Pavel Klushantsev intended.

By the early 1960s some conventions for Soviet sci-fi movies had developed: in addition to the space mission and the cute robot, the spaceship was always run by a computer; one cosmonaut had to keep a log book. Jindrich Polák's Icarus XB 1 (also known as Voyage to the End of the Universe) uses every one of these conventions – yet this Czech movie remains one of the most original and exciting science fiction fims ever made.

Immaculately filmed in black-and-white Cinemascope, it is beautiful and austere. The effects are second to none: Kubrick and his visual effects genius Wally Veevers must have seen it and analysed its models and matte shots before making 2001. But there is far more to Icarus than special effects. Adapted from another Lem novel, The Magellanic Cloud, the film is packed with sublime moments unlike those of any film preceding it.

Four months into Icarus' mission, morale almost collapses. The crew cease to go to the gym. The solution – a formal dance, with white dinner jackets and dresses. The event pulls the crew together, as they drink and take 21st-century drugs, and the dancing is wonderful: hip, formal, sexy and strange. The cosmonauts' soiree is interrupted by the arrival of a derelict spacecraft, inhabited by something so strange I can only say it seems to have drifted in from a Buñuel film, and is both chilling and entirely appropriate.

And the film gets better. Radiation poison from a dark star nearly kills the crew. One goes mad (yes, Icarus anticipates Solaris, too). Yet the outcome of this strange sleeping sickness is splendid: perhaps the best finale of any science-fiction film, ever. Like all the other films here, it is a visual experience to revel in.

All of these films have merit. But Icarus XB-1 is something else again: a game-changing film that profoundly influenced the genre and showed that science-fiction movies weren't only about special effects; they were also high art. Of the hardest and most admirable kind.