1) "I wish I had chosen a film that actually takes place in the late 1980s, rather than the late 1960s and early 1970s, to get the full spectrum of life at the times the films were made."
2) "I wish I were not watching another movie about moon landings so soon after seeing (and loving) Apollo 11 last year."
Both of these regrets dissipated very quickly.
The 1989 film For All Mankind, for one, was a distinctly different document than Apollo 11. While that great film focuses only on the particular mission that resulted in the first moon landing, containing a whole bunch of footage of people watching the launch and other contemporaneous events, this one weaves all the moon missions together into one tapestry of the experience of going to the moon, as 24 different men experienced it.
And once I got a handle on how smoothly director Al Reinert was accomplishing this, including a free-flowing narration from the men who experienced it themselves, irrespective of whether they were on the first or last mission, I stopped caring that the movie was not set in the late 1980s. (I turned 16 in 1989, so I did not really need to see what the world was like then anyway.)
Indeed I think I might have liked For All Mankind as much as I liked Apollo 11, which I gave five stars (though ultimately placed just outside of my top ten last year at #13). I hesitated just enough on the five stars for For All Mankind and ended up rewarding it "only" 4.5, I think in part just because it feels strange to give out five stars on a random Wednesday night after you've had a bad night's sleep.
(But isn't that the nature of loving films, Vance? You never know when a five-star movie might strike? Disappointing.)
The point is the film is excellent. It wasn't possible to tell exactly how great the editing job is on this film, because you aren't given any kind of on-screen markers to indicate whether particular footage is from Apollo 8 or Apollo 17. There are certain details that give things away, like the rush to fix the on-board mishaps that led to disaster on Apollo 13 (in fact, Jim Lovell is one of those interviewed), as well as the famous moments of Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon and the discussion of his legendary words upon making that giant leap. For the most part, though, Reinert is not interested in trying to keep us oriented and providing us a conventional document of times and dates and people. Unless you recognize a particular astronaut's voice, you don't even know who is speaking at any given time.
This is entirely the right approach, and it elevates For All Mankind into genuine art. Documentaries can develop a certain samey-ness due to particular approaches we have come to expect from them, like on-screen graphics, title cards, and talking head interviews. Many documentaries want to document, like a newspaper documents.
Reinert wants to document like a painter documents. He wants to give us the visceral and emotional experience of being in space -- the liftoff, the initial orbit of earth, the eventual thrust toward the moon, and the landing on the moon. These are things almost none of us has experienced, and only because these astronauts are men of science, sober professionals, do their words not come across like that guy on that video seeing the double rainbow.
We feel the double rainbow as we are watching For All Mankind.
As this footage has been in existence for 50 years, we've seen most of it already. Like, I immediately recognized that above angle shot of the rocket lifting off from the launch pad that they used to use on MTV. (Of course, they also used the image of the implanted American flag on the moon.) But with a lot of it, I definitely felt like I was seeing it for the first time -- either because I was, or because the way Reinert mixes it all together bears the kind of mind-blowing experience of brand-newness.
I think it's important that this is told as one continuous story from departing Earth to splashing back down on it, because it sustains a mood -- a mood that would be broken if you were constantly going to a talking head of Jim Lovell or Michael Collins (neither Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin participated) or any of the other 11 astronauts who worked with Reinert. Their words don't need to be connected to their faces, because it is not about them. It is about any person who experienced what they experienced. Don't get me wrong, their words are an invaluable accompaniment to the images we're seeing, explaining how they were feeling in those moments, and things we could not have known just from the images. But they stay where they should, as a soundtrack reflecting on the narrative in the moment when it was occurring, never connected to an image of them in present day.
I also like Reinert's sense of playfulness. It's evident how joyous he finds the images of the men playing with objects in zero gravity, which mirrors how joyous they themselves found it. One interviewee talked about how just manipulating objects in zero gravity -- like, giving a flashlight the necessary thrust to make it travel languidly over to your colleague -- was such a distraction that they would almost forget that they had a job to do. We see all this and more. There are plenty of loving images of a tape player tumbling end over end as it spits out Frank Sinatra singing "Fly Me to the Moon." It almost seems like a disproportionate amount of time, except it completely isn't. If we mere mortals were in space, this is what we too would do.
For All Mankind *is* for all mankind, in that it gives us mere mortals our only chance to have the experience these men experienced. Maybe some of us are young enough that we will, one day, experience space travel as well. Until then, we have For All Mankind.
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As we have now reached the end of another one of my annual monthly series, I thought I'd close with a few words by way of wrapping it up. Just to remind you what I watched, here are the films in order by month -- and in chronological order by their release, which I managed to maintain from month one to month 12.
January - Nanook of the North (1922)
February - Man With a Movie Camera (1929)
March - Turksib (1930)
April - Why We Fight: Prelude to War (1942)
May - The Living Desert (1953)
June - On the Bowery (1956)
July - Primary (1960)
August - Dont Look Back (1967)
September - Gimme Shelter (1970)
October - The War at Home (1979)
November - Stop Making Sense (1984)
December - For All Mankind (1989)
I ended up tackling a good variety of subject matter, with no film seeming to duplicate what another was doing -- even the three music documentaries have distinctly different approaches and combinations of performance footage and supplemental footage. But I do feel like there were almost as many total randos as there were essential films. I set out for this series to watch films like Nanook, Movie Camera, Gimme Shelter and Stop Making Sense, and the series would have been worth it just to get those. But I felt like a lot of the time I was grasping at straws, chosing movies that I had never heard of (like Turksib and The War at Home) just to fill out the schedule. In short, I figured it would be easy to find 12 classic documentaries I had always meant to see, but I had to find some deep cuts just to get through the series.
On the one hand, that might have meant I've been doing a better job than I thought about keeping up with classic documentaries. On the other, it did make me despair slightly that there have been so many really essential documentaries that have been lost to time, either because they are no longer available, or because people don't talk about them enough for them to have been on my radar. I feel like there should have been more meat in the program and not quite so many side dishes.
That said, I liked all the movies I saw to varying degrees, and eight of the 12 films got four stars or more from me on Letterboxd. Only one received as few as three stars, which was On the Bowery -- one of the original titles I had targeted. I suppose some of the ratings I gave may result from what I have described as the high floor but low ceiling of documentaries, which is that most of those that make it out there to us are worth watching, but few are simply unforgettable experiences. But I did have at least one unforgettable experience by that defintion -- the five-star Man With a Movie Camera -- and Gimme Shelter, Stop Making Sense and For All Mankind all became instant favorites as well.
So overall I think it was really a worthwhile effort, and there's some satisfaction to knowing that I don't need to schedule another year-long series like this just to feel like I'm scratching the surface of classic documentaries. I'm a lot more well rounded in that regard now, and hope to keep on picking off solitary classics through the rest of my years watching movies, as I become aware of them.
Okay, in a few weeks I will let you know what I've got on tap for 2021. It should be good.
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