Moonwalk One: The Director’s Cut
Directed by Theo Kamecke
(Produced by The Attic Room Ltd., 2009; $33 for 2 disks; see www.moonwalkone.com for more.)
Review by Betsy Robinson

Forty years ago when NASA enlisted filmmaker Theo Kamecke to make a documentary about the first moonwalk, the only instruction was “to make a time capsule.” So says 72-year-old Kamecke in the 26-minute Director’s Commentary to the digitally remastered version of his 1970 film. The thinking was that by the time the film was ready, the public would be fed up with the space project. For Kamecke, this was license to take the widest-angle perspective possible — almost projecting himself into the future — to look at a moment when, on a massive scale, we humans ventured beyond what we knew.

Bracketed by scenes of Stonehenge (“sitting there like a thought … an assertion of human will,” says Kamecke), the film celebrates the millions around the globe who gathered in front of TVs, the thousands of campers who made the pilgrimage to Cape Canaveral even though TV offered a closer view, the half-million people who made the launch happen, and the three billion earthlings who went about their daily lives unaware of the event. “They were involved even though they didn’t know they were,” says Kamecke in the commentary. “They were the same humans.”

Cool technological scenes of NASA scientists and the astronauts (Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins) are balanced with warm-blooded real life — people and Nature awakening around the globe and going about business. Adding to the transcendent feeling of this film is a narration that is arguably one long poem, from the start of launch day (“Around the world, another morning, not so very different from the morning before, or tomorrow morning.”) to the moonwalk (“It was a moment sensed more than understood.”). And there is a visual section that Kamecke calls “an earth poem” — scenes of animals, mountains, oceans, a lone bird, a spider’s web glistening with dew — that makes your heart flood with love for our “fragile bubble of life, afloat on a sea of nothing.” All this is juxtaposed with scenes of the astronauts so far away from home, representing all of us as we precariously explore the unknown.

The events of July 20, 1969, were the culmination of 25 centuries of dreams. We see flash-cuts from Marconi to JFK, and vintage cinema of Robert Goddard, the rocket pioneer, disparagingly referred to in the 1920s as “the moon man.” We see primitive science fiction movies as well as crisp footage of the real thing. Kamecke carefully planned a shot where we would see Apollo, the sun, rising behind Apollo, the space craft, the day of the launch. He thought it would be the most copied shot in the film, but clouds got in the way.

What he created is so much more compelling: the launch, the faces of the people watching the launch, the reflection of the launch in their sunglasses, the reflection of us all — a species that can imagine knowing more than we know, that craves answers. Over and over, Moonwalk One whispers the questions: What are we? Where are we in the context of limitless space? What is the source of life? Where have we come from? Where are we going?

Perhaps to know where we’re going, we have to know where we are. Thirty times, astronaut Collins watches the earth rise over the moon’s horizon as he orbits, waiting for moonwalkers, Armstrong and Aldrin, to reunite with him for the trip home. Says the narrator: “It is good to see the whole earth, to see the earth whole.”

With a film score by conceptual composer Charles Morrow that sounds contemporary — sometimes spine-tingling, sometimes unexpectedly sacred or silent — this visionary film makes you feel as concerned today for the astronauts’ welfare as the world felt forty years ago.

Remembering that day, Kamecke says two thoughts occurred to him. The first: “It takes so much effort to put tiny little earthlings into all this machinery, with all these hundreds of thousands of people involved and all this noise, just to get them off the surface of this planet.” The second: “Isn’t it marvelous that these little creatures can think of something like this and put themselves at the end of fire and shoot themselves off their planet?”

Betsy Robinson has been on the staffs of Parabola and Spirituality & Health magazines. She writes a blog called Notes from a Crusty Spiritual Seeker at www.BetsyRobinson-writer.com .