Arts

19 Jun 09

Launch of Apollo 11 - Credit NASA

Forty years ago, Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin heralded the start of a new chapter in the history of human exploration when they landed on the moon.

Now an Oxford academic is playing a key role in celebrating this occasion by looking back at events leading up to 20 July 1969 and how our comprehension of space travel is influenced by the moving image.

Senior research fellow in fine art studies at the University of Oxford, Paul Bonaventura is guest-curating One Giant Leap for the British Film Institute (BFI). This will be a season of documentaries, feature films, television and artworks focusing on the dream and reality of space travel, the Cold War space race, and the American space programme of the 1960s and 1970s. It will look at how factual and fictive approaches to making films have articulated humankind’s aspiration to colonise space, and investigate how our desire and ability to break free of the earth’s gravitational field have stimulated some of the most creative thinkers from the worlds of cinema, television, and the visual arts.

'The moon landing arguably attracted the biggest live audience in history, and news coverage from around the globe indicated that it was seen as a triumph not just for the Americans, but also for humanity,' said Paul Bonaventura. 'Nonetheless, barely five hundred people have been into space and only twelve individuals have ever set foot on the moon. Although this number is sure to increase in the near future, the rest of us have had to be content with a mediated experience. Collectively, our comprehension of space flight in general and the moon landings in particular is inextricably linked to film and video.

'The irony of the Apollo programme and perhaps its greatest legacy is that it has made all of us increasingly aware of the fragility of our own planet. The still and moving images that the astronauts sent back of a jewel-like earth hanging in the ineffable blackness of space focused the world’s attention on the precious lump of rock we call home like never before… It still comes as a shock to realise that the first manned moon landing took place half a lifetime ago, and the actual, grainy footage from that era comes suffused with a fabled aura. The best documentaries make use of this material in ways that transport us into the heavens alongside those intrepid flyers.

A wish to see footage on an appropriate scale has encouraged the BFI to come up with this documentary-rich project, which will show everything from Tony Palmer’s The Space Movie (1979) and Al Reinert’s For All Mankind (1989) to Stanley Kubrick’s seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). There will also be an exclusive preview of Moon (2009), introduced by its director Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie), as well as free screenings and exhibitions.

Paul Bonaventura said: 'Assuming we are still looking at films in 2059, there is every chance that the movies documenting the next half-century of space travel and lunar exploration will be even more spellbinding than the first.'