Core Curriculum
For All Mankind (Reinert, 1989)
The original “wow” Apollo documentary from 1989 sets the tone for the modern incarnation of a space flight film. What made it special was that it was the first movie to really present the footage shot on the Apollo (and Gemini) missions in beautiful, speed-corrected, motion-stabilized large-format film. Director Al Reinert (a magazine writer originally) encourages us to simply regard much of this material and contemplate its beauty and magnificence. There’s no narration, and instead the soundtrack is compiled from hours of interviews with the astronauts, some of who are ruminating for the first time on the spiritual significance of their experience. But above all, the selling point of this film is the music, by Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois. If it seems familiar, it’s because hundreds of shows over the years have re-used bits of it to milk some of its haunting, lyrical quality. The associated album, Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks, is a must-hear for anyone interested in ambient music.
In The Shadow of the Moon (Sington, 2008)
This covers much the same grounds as For All Mankind, but seen through British eyes (this is a UK documentary), it comes out as less “lump in the throat/hand on the heart” grandstanding and more of cool, human professionals having the adventure of their lives. Interviews with the astronauts as old men are tremendously affecting, and the film takes time to explore what they’ve done with their lives after the moon. (Some may surprise you.) It even finds time at the end to address this ridiculous and insulting “moon landing hoax” nonsense.
When We Left Earth (Discovery Channel 2008)
The NASA-approved history, complete with pounding, soaring patriotic music and sonorous voice-over. What lifts this series above the pack is the beautifully re-mastered high definition images of the space missions (these images have never looked better) and some current interviews with the astronauts left out of In the Shadow of the Moon. It’s also expansive in a way the others aren’t. This film tells the whole story, from Mercury through to the ISS, although it gets the future wrong by parroting the Project Constellation line, a forgivable offense for the time.
“Space Shuttle Disaster” (PBS NOVA 2009)
Honest, frank and not at all NASA-approved, this one-hour NOVA episode is really all you need to hear about the Space Shuttle. Pay close attention to Story Musgrave, one of my favourite astronauts, and one of the most outspoken.
Advanced Study
If you’re into retro-documentaries, this is a good one. Epitomizing everything about a certain kind of film in 1969, this is slightly pretentious, arty, self-aware, thunder-voiced documentary at its best. (It starts with a shot of Stonehenge and proceeds to ruminate on the significance of the moon. Yes, it’s that kind of film.) But, it does have “first day” priority, in the sense that it was made at the time of Apollo 11 and to be fair, the filmmaker was told to make it a “time capsule” of everything about the Apollo experience as it was happening. Much of what was shot for this film was re-used in For All Mankind to different effect.
“Moon Machines” Series (Science Channel 2008)
If you’d like to go deeper into the engineering and manufacturing side of Apollo, here’s your chance. Some of these men (and women) have funny, dramatic and moving stories tell about building the engines, the capsules, the clothing, the computers and all the other equipment that got Apollo to the moon. Think of it as the “inside out” version of NASA history, from the perspective of people who have probably never been asked about it before.
The Red Stuff (De Boer 2000)
A Dutch documentary about the Soviet space program does some of what In the Shadow of the Moon does for that part of space history. You get interviews with many of the important surviving cosmonauts (including a gregarious Pavel Popovich and a tough, unrepentant Gherman Titov), but little real sense of the history of the program. For otherwise informed viewers, this isn’t a problem, but for the uninitiated there will probably be some confusion.
“The Russian Right Stuff” (PBS NOVA 1991)
Made just as the Soviet Union was collapsing in the 1989-1990, this is a key bit of space history that’s fallen out of print. (I have an old video tape from 1991 which has my own off-air copy of it.) Narrated by Sgt Stedenko himself, Stacey Keach, this three-part series is largely based on James Oberg’s Red Star in Orbit, revised with new information that came to light after the fall of the Soviet Union. It features Alexi Leonov prominently and follows him through his major post-space activity: designing and running the definitive cosmonaut school in Star City, Russia. (Though Leonov has since moved on, the school is running strong and even training the recent crop of space tourists.) It also features the late Vasili Mishin, whose recollections of the disastrous Russian moon program of the 1960s and 1970s form the key narrative of the middle episode, “The Dark Side of the Moon”. This film is part of my basic understanding of manned space history, although we know much more now and in retrospect. (For example, Mishin and Leonov are both biased, unreliable historical witnesses, and we now have detailed records of the then-mysterious N1 moon rocket.)
“Astrospies” (PBS NOVA 2008)
This recent NOVA episode was a bit of a revelation for me, as I always knew about the MOL (Manned Orbiting Laboratory) program and the Almaz program, but I never put the two together. Much of what’s presented here about these military space stations is newly declassified and quite fascinating, especially to hear from the astronauts and cosmonauts who trained for, and, in the case of the cosmonauts, flew these missions of space espionage. In fact, plans called for much more than espionage, and the Soviet station even featured a machine gun, which was indeed fired in space, a rather “mixed” space legacy to say the least!
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