For All Mankind

Directed by: Al Reinert - 1 hour, 19 minutes - 1989 - USA - Color - 1.33:1
Starring: the Apollo astronauts and NASA Mission Control Center staff

In 1983, Al Reinert walked into the NASA archives to research a story for his newspaper. When he found out the NASA film archivist only kept the 10 "money shots" to give to the press, he wondered where all of the other dozens of hours of footage ended up. The result is this film. These are all of the "mundane" moments on the moon that never got released - astronauts hopping across the moon giddy as little schoolboys, saying "how 'bout that" and gliding across the dust like excited children. A beautiful soundtrack by Brian Eno was released six years before the movie itself came out, in 1983. Once the movie was released, it was instantly hailed as a classic and Al Reinert was the go-to guy for space stories for much of the 90's (he was a writer on HBO's From the Earth to the Moon and Apollo 13.) Reinert edits together footage from all of the Apollo missions, with anonymous voiceovers from the astronauts, turning them into a single, collective, mission. Or to put it better:

"In a sense, though, the best joke embedded in Reinert’s bold we’re-all-going-to-the-moon-together approach is that, like the Apollo program itself, it achieves by American means something that our space-race competitor of the sixties, the Soviet Union, might have appeared better equipped to do. In the vastly complex communal enterprise of sending men to the moon (and getting them back), the individualist society somehow managed to outperform the collectivist state. And in For All Mankind, Al Reinert, from Texas, fulfills the dream of the great Soviet film artists of the silent era, the dream of Eisenstein, of Pudovkin, of Dovzhenko, of Vertov: to tell a story with a truly collective hero. No cult of personality here." - Terrence Rafferty (full essay)

For All Mankind - essay by Al Reinert
Backyard Wonders - essay by Al Reinert