NASA

In The Shadow Of The Moon (Director: David Sington, UK, 2006): I was delighted to be able to attend the industry screening of the Opening Night film of Hot Docs 2007.

And I grew up in the 70s, when there was, uh – it was – it was a period of, you know, the – the careers advisor used to come to school and – and – he used to – get the kids together and say, “Look, I – I advise you to get a career, what can I say? That’s it.” And he took me aside – he said, “Whatcha you want to do, kid? Whatcha you want to do? Tell me, tell me your dreams!” “I want to be a space astro­naut, go to outer space, dis­cover things that have never been dis­covered.” He said, “Look, you’re British, so scale it down a bit, all right?” “All right, I want to work in a shoe shop then! Discover shoes that no one’s ever dis­covered right in the back of the shop on the left.” — British comedian Eddie Izzard

I’d ven­ture to say that all of us have “scaled it down” a bit over the years when it comes to dreams of space explor­a­tion. Why? Because essen­tially being an astro­naut now means riding in the equi­valent of a NASA minivan into low earth orbit to deliver some package for a cor­por­a­tion, or drop­ping off someone at the decrepit “International Space Station.” It’s sad when the most exciting news out of NASA in the past couple of years has been a sex scandal involving astro­nauts. Gone are the days when only the roughest and toughest test pilots would dare to strap them­selves into gigantic and dan­gerous rockets which would blast them out beyond earth’s orbit until they had to pilot them­selves down to the cold grey sur­face of the moon. There was a time when all of us thought that moon land­ings would be com­mon­place by now, and that NASA would have sched­uled ser­vice to Mars or Jupiter.

I think there are far fewer boys (but per­haps maybe a few more girls) dreaming of becoming astro­nauts now than there were when I was growing up in the 1970s, and that’s a little sad. David Sington’s beau­tiful film takes us back to the heady days of the Apollo mis­sions, when the entire world was watching as the United States and the USSR raced each other to put a man on the moon.

There have been other great films about the space pro­gram, both doc­u­mentary (For All Mankind, From The Earth To The Moon) and fic­tional (The Right Stuff), but In The Shadow of the Moon is dif­ferent in sev­eral ways. First of all, it focusses tightly on all of the American astro­nauts who jour­neyed to the moon, and gathers all the living ones (except, not­ably, the reclusive Neil Armstrong) for this film to tell their stories com­pletely in their own words. And secondly, the film is being released at a time when America has lost its once-privileged place in the world. Though its claims to be the world’s only remaining super­power are unas­sail­able, it’s a cowering and reactive beast, not the con­fident and pion­eering country it was in the 1950s and 1960s.

Each of these quietly heroic men are now well into their 70s, and it’s likely that this may be the per­fect time for them to reflect on what their achieve­ment has meant to human­kind. And, to a man, they all come across as genu­inely decent indi­viduals who also happened to pos­sess the kind of rugged indi­vidu­ality that made them first excel­lent test pilots, and then astro­nauts. Their memories are still incred­ibly vivid, and even though many of them have prob­ably told their stories hun­dreds of times by now, dir­ector Sington achieves a real sense of intimacy with these guys, often focus­sing tightly on their eyes and their age-worn faces. Their humour and unflap­pable natures come through in every moment they’re on screen, and we learn a few new things, like the fact that although Neil Armstrong may have been the first man to set foot on the moon, it was Buzz Aldrin who was the first to relieve him­self on it (in his space suit, of course). If I can use two very ironic cliches here, these guys, who have been fur­ther from earth than anyone else, are some of the most down to earth and “grounded” men I’ve ever listened to. Their voyage so far out­side of their earthly lives has taught them at once how insig­ni­ficant we are, and yet how very spe­cial. It leads to an almost spir­itual con­clu­sion about taking more care of the planet, though this is only touched on briefly.

The Apollo pro­ject was kicked off when then-President Kennedy declared in 1962 that the United States would send a man to the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade. His assas­sin­a­tion and the des­cent of the country into racial and polit­ical tur­moil and a deep­ening and sense­less war in Vietnam didn’t deter those involved in the space pro­gram. It may even have spurred them onward, to achieve some­thing hopeful and good in the midst of a tur­bu­lent decade. The very fact that most of the world shared in the joy of the first moon landing and claimed it for humanity rather than com­plaining about American imper­i­alism showed what could be accom­plished when the whole world shared a dream of explor­a­tion and dis­covery. And when American endeavour and con­fid­ence was at an all-time high.

If there is any weak­ness in this fine film, it’s in the com­plete lack of inform­a­tion on the com­peting Soviet space pro­gram. The USSR did make sev­eral attempts to fly a manned mis­sion to the moon, but all ended in failure. Thereafter, they con­cen­trated instead on achieving some firsts in the con­struc­tion of space sta­tions like Salyut and Mir. Of course, including inform­a­tion on the USSR would have made the film much longer, and so I can see why it wasn’t included, but the very real “space race” atmo­sphere was surely a factor in the United States’ rapid pro­gress and massive com­mit­ment of funds and personnel.

At one point in the film, being caught up in the ela­tion of seeing such beau­tiful images from space, I thought of how the rocket tech­no­logy pion­eered by the Nazis to create weapons of destruc­tion was turned to peaceful pur­poses, for a few shining years, before being turned to viol­ence again in the form of inter­con­tin­ental bal­listic mis­siles for deliv­ering nuc­lear weapons. NASA was a beacon, and a place where swords were actu­ally beaten into plow­shares^* for a season. Unfortunately, the arms race with the USSR drained most of the money out of the space pro­gram (after it had improved rocket tech­no­logy enough to carry nuc­lear weapons fur­ther and fur­ther), and any ambi­tions for manned mis­sions to other planets in our solar system have long since been shelved. Nowadays, the earth’s severe envir­on­mental prob­lems demand our atten­tion, and per­haps the only way we can actu­ally achieve any­thing is to learn from the Apollo program’s ambi­tion, drive, and “can-do” atti­tude. Can America or the world ever exper­i­ence that sort of hope and con­fid­ence again?

Sington’s poignant film shows us a time and a spirit that we may never recap­ture, but that is needed now more than ever before.

Note: The film was picked up for the­at­rical dis­tri­bu­tion by ThinkFilm after it won the World Cinema Audience Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

UPDATE: The film will be released in Toronto and Montreal on September 21st, with expan­sion across the country in the fol­lowing weeks. Actor/Director Ron Howard (Apollo 13) has signed on to pro­mote the film.

^* “He will judge between many peoples
and will settle dis­putes for strong nations far and wide.
They will beat their swords into plow­shares
and their spears into pruning hooks.
Nation will not take up sword against nation,
nor will they train for war any­more.” — Micah 4:3

(9/10)

Tagged as: #hotdocs07, Documentaries, Hot Docs, moon, NASA, space

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