Has anyone else seen the early 1960s Czech science fiction film Ikarie XB1? (Also released as Voyage to the End of the Universe).
When I was a kid, I saw a film on television that had a considerable effect on me - so much so, that at least part of it fed into Chasm City nearly thirty years later. I remember seeing this film in our house in Cornwall, and we moved out of there around about 1974. It was in black and white, but then so was everything - we only had a black and white telly. (Such is the power of suggestion, though, that when I think back to Pertwee-era Dr Who episodes I only saw in Cornwall, I see them in colour).
The film was set on a spaceship going somewhere. I have the feeling it was foreign (the film, not the spaceship). Now and then there exterior shots of the ship whizzing along at a very high velocity.
At one point a holographic clown or clown-like figure appears to give instruction to/entertain a child (see the clown subplot in Chasm City, which was a conscious nod to this exceedingly vague memory).
My key recollection, and the thing that I found quite disturbing at the time (keep in mind I would have been no older than six or seven) was that one of the crew on the ship was kept in a kind of upright black box with only his head sticking out of the top - it was some kind of suspended animation device, I think - although I remember that the crewman was conscious, or became conscious. Later I recall him breaking out of this box.
That's it. I've looked at online summaries of the plot of Ikarie XB-1, and while none of them specifically contradict these memories, nothing confirms them either. There are also lots of things in those summaries I don't recall.
Did I see this film? Did it mess with my mind and set me on the course to being a miserabilist, left-leaning SF writer?
