Poster by GRAVILLIS via Imp Awards
How do you commemorate one of the most monumental achievements of the human species? For the most part, Miller focuses on images and sounds contemporaneous to the moon landing, bolstered by a propulsive score by Matt Morton (mostly using musical instruments available in 1969). Apart from some graphics, eschewing narration, interviews, and overt retrospection keeps the viewer in a headspace that’s probably best described as “archival.” The narrative is clearly shaped and finely-attuned to details, so it’s not quite essayistic or recursive; its scope is wide-ranging, taking in home movies filmed by tourists as well as footage filmed of NASA’s computers. In that respect, it feels almost third-person omniscient in its approach.
But the careful montage technique also feels singular and focused. The sound mixing alone is incredibly layered to the point of being almost associative, pulling together the images in a way that feels stream-of-consciousness. In that respect, Apollo 11 feels like a collective memory defamiliarized and reframed. All the greatest hits images and soundbites are there (“That’s… one small step for man…”), but it’s mostly stuff you’ve never seen; at least, it’s stuff you’ve never seen all in one place, and the juxtaposition of images, sound, and music feels intimate as a result. It’s almost as if somebody asked the National Aeronautics and Space Administration itself—the institutional body—what it was like when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, and Apollo 11 is the extended flashback.☕︎
Catecinem 