It was a weird expe­ri­ence to finally see the orig­i­nal film for the sound­track to which I’ve lis­tened to count­less times. Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois’ Apollo: Atmos­pheres & Sound­tracks is a gor­geous piece of work, and very much col­ored my expec­ta­tions of what the film would be. Hav­ing long pic­tured a largely abstract com­pi­la­tion of oth­er­worldly lunar footage, I was sur­prised to find For All Mankind a more straight­for­ward doc­u­men­tary than what was already in my head. (Bits and pieces from the com­pi­la­tion album Music for Films III also appear.)

Unlike In the Shadow of the Moon, the 2007 fea­ture doc­u­men­tary on the same sub­ject, For All Mankind exclu­sively uses orig­i­nal footage taken dur­ing the Apollo Mis­sions, much of it by the astro­nauts them­selves. The absence of new nar­ra­tion or footage rightly places the empha­sis solely on the achieve­ments of the orig­i­nal par­tic­i­pants. But a draw­back is that the inter­vie­wees on the sound­track are not iden­ti­fied (the Cri­te­rion DVD edi­tion includes an option to dis­play sub­ti­tles iden­ti­fy­ing the speakers).

Open the pod bay doors, HAL

I have lit­tle to add to Matthew Dessem’s excel­lent review on The Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion blog, or to my own thoughts on In the Shadow of the Moon. Three small observations:

• I was com­pletely igno­rant that NASA first began space­walks dur­ing the Apollo mis­sions. I was under the impres­sion they began dur­ing the space shut­tle mis­sions of my youth. In ret­ro­spect, it makes per­fect sense that NASA would test space­walks in orbit over the Earth before attempt­ing to step out of a cap­sule onto the moon, but: Wow!
• The astro­nauts were very con­scious of Stan­ley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Each astro­naut could bring one cas­sette tape to play on a portable deck, and one chose Strauss’ “Also Sprach Zarathus­tra”. Another describes see­ing the moon sur­face up close as being like some­thing from 2001.
• Due to the film’s nature of being com­prised of orig­i­nal footage, there’s per­haps too much of the astro­nauts goof­ing off in zero-G, and not enough of the spec­tac­u­lar lunar footage. But it goes to show that even the pilots selected for being the most sane and calm peo­ple in the word still turn to excited kids when play­ing in outer space (with the rare excep­tion to prove the rule).

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Cri­te­rion DVD info: http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=54

Cri­te­rion Con­trap­tion review: http://criterioncollection.blogspot.com/2006/04/54-for-all-mankind.html

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to me.

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Related Posts:

1. 
   In the Shadow of the Moon
2. 
   Solyaris (Solaris) (1972)
3. 
   Daniel Lanois: Here Is What Is
4. 
   Solitary Confinement: Moon