Al Reinert - For All Mankind (1989)-Cinema of the World

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Al Reinert - For All Mankind (1989)

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This movie documents the Apollo missions perhaps the most definitively of any movie under two hours. Al Reinert watched all the footage shot during the missions--over 6,000,000 feet of it, and picked out the best. Instead of being a newsy, fact-filled documentary. Reinart focuses on the human aspects of the space flights. The only voices heard in the film are the voices of the astronauts and mission control. Reinart uses the astronaunts' own words from interviews and from the mission footage. The score by Brian Eno underscores the strangeness, wonder, and and beauty of the astronauts' experiences--experiences which they were privileged to have for a first time "for all mankind."

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As a serious student of the Apollo program, this is my favorite documentary of the program, despite its contextual fabrications and errors. The conceit is to represent a voyage to the lunar surface and back as a composite drawn from footage taken from all Apollo (and even some Gemini!) missions. As such it is in some sense a fictionalized account to begin with, thus one must look beyond this film as a simple and literal documentary, if you are willing to accept its premise. To me it succeeds at a psychological and emotional level as the film that best captures the spirit of the Apollo program, and even better, what it must have been like to have actually gone to the moon.

The footage is fantastic and rarely seen, even in real documentaries about Apollo. The pace at many points slows, and you are invited to dwell on the scenes, and perhaps even picture yourself there with the astronauts. A particular treat is that the movie is heavy on footage from the final mission involving the lunar rover, where the real exploration took place. These missions are often woefully represented, but here you get a sense of what it must have been like to have diven miles from the LM, exploring the lunar surface in complete solitude; or in other parts of the movie to have orbited alone in the CSM. Other treats are candid footage of the controllers in Houston, as well as dramatic usage of JFK's speach on Apollo given at Rice university in 1962. I will admit that the film doesn't state the true context of any of its footage, and a good portion of my enjoyment is being able to sort this out for myself; however, more than anything this program reminds me of what it was like to grow up and go to the moon with Apollo.