Out of the Present
Germany/France/Belgium/Russia 1995
Reviewed by Kim Newman
Synopsis
Our synopses give away the plot in full, including surprise twists.
May 1991. Anatoli Artsebarski, a colonel in the Soviet Air Force, commands a rocket flight to the Mir space station. Also aboard are flight engineer Sergei Krikalev and British researcher Helen Sharman. Krikalev takes with him a 35mm camera to record his time in space. Through a radio hook-up, the cosmonauts speak with Soviet premier Mikhail Gorbachev. Sharman returns to earth after eight days, but Artsebarski and Krikalev remain on Mir, carrying out a programme of experiments. They are joined by researchers from other nations.
It was originally planned that both Artsebarski and Krikalev would return to earth after six months. However, politics require that Toktar Aubakirov, a Kazakh researcher, be included on a mission because Star City, the Soviet space centre, is in Baikonur, in soon-to-be-independent Kazakhstan. This means Krikalev must remain on Mir for a further four months. While he is in space, the Soviet Union is transformed by the events of August 1991: Gorbachev is replaced by Boris Yeltsin; the cosmonaut's birthplace is renamed from Leningrad to St Petersburg; and the USSR itself becomes the CIS. When Krikalev returns to Earth in March 1992, he is greeted by Artsebarski, now a colonel in the Russian Air Force.
Review
The opening of this discursive documentary is a stunner, perhaps deliberately designed to evoke the bone-spaceship match-cut of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). A grey, grainy video image shows numbers and Cyrillic symbols scrolling across the screen, clustering around a Japanese ideograph-like shape we slowly realise is the Mir space station. Then, a cut from a degraded space image to a crystal-clear 35mm image of Mir in orbit, with the blue-green Earth as background, shows how well-lit near space differs from the deep-space darks we know from numberless science-fiction films. The camera closes in slowly - accompanied by throbbing techno music - to dock with the station. Later, Mir morphs into an approximation of the circular space station from 2001 as a Strauss waltz plays, evoking Kubrick's film, while a superimposition of effects footage on one of the interior screens of the real spaceship makes it seem as if Mir is docking with the fictional station. The frisson this evokes in westerners may even be matched for Russian audiences by a similar bit of poaching, involving an actual film clip rather than a recreation as Mir hovers over the sentient surface of Solaris, the planet from the Tarkovsky 1972 epic of the same name.
Though narrated by Anatoli Artsebarski in Jacques Cousteau-style, this documentary refrains from personalising its characters, perhaps out of political tact as much as deliberate distancing. Sergei Krikalev, the 'hero' and almost auteur (he shot the space footage) of the film, is a clean-cut, uncomplaining young man who is unable, when repeatedly questioned by the press, to say what he feels about the changes that have taken place on Earth in his absence. Instead, he talks about an astronomical phenomenon observed from space. We see him on an exercise treadmill (another echo of 2001) and giving a comrade a haircut in zero gravity (after which he pretends not to recognise him, joking, "ah, an alien"). But how or whether he was really affected by his ten-month isolation from the Earth is never revealed. Much of the footage taken inside Mir consists of holiday-snap-style snippets of the cosmonauts and researchers just floating around (Helen Sharman in a pink nightie), or chasing blobs of Coca-Cola and hanging strands of spaghetti (like Homer chasing crisps in the space-shuttle episode of The Simpsons). The only actual experiment observed is a picturesque failure, as an atmosphere-collecting balloon is deployed and bursts. From this document, it is impossible to tell what Mir is actually for.
Between the lines, we can pick up a few strange hints. Clearly the cosmonauts use the expression 'researcher' as a synonym for 'tourist', applying it to the British, Russian or Kazakh astronauts ferried up to Mir as much for publicity and fund-raising purposes as for any real scientific reason. Once there, the researchers seem rather in the way, inconveniencing the hardy, military souls who actually fly spaceships (the endearing Kazakh plays with a toy plane that hangs weightless). We observe such odd little Russian rituals as giving wormwood twigs (ominously called 'chernobyl' in Russian) to the departing space voyagers, and offering bread and salt to new arrivals on the station. Meanwhile, the return-to-Earth protocols involve hauling the cosmonauts out of their spent bullet capsules and ferrying them off in stretcher-chairs like invalids because of their unfamiliarity with gravity.
Out of the Present shrugs off imposing a narrative on the mission, and instead dumps in scratchy footage of tanks in Moscow that seems less 'real' than the clearer shots of off-duty cosmonauts floating in their tin can far above the world. This is a documentary that requires an audience willing to peer out of the window for a long flight, and capable of filling in many of the blanks for themselves. Nevertheless, it is a profoundly affecting work.
Credits
- Producer
- Elke Peters
- Screenplay
- Andrei Ujica
- Director of Photography
- Vadim Yusov
- Editors
- Ralf Henninger
- Heidi Leihbecher
- ©none
- Production Companies
- Produced by Bremer Institut Film/Fernsehen
- Co-produced by WDR, La Sept/Arte, St. Petersburg Documentary Film Studios and Harun Farocki
- Supported by Filmstiftung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Bundesministerium des Innern, AKK Energia, Energia Deutschland GmbH
- Sponsored by Daimler-Benz Aerospace
- Associate Producer
- Werner Dütsch
- Co-ordinator in Russia
- Anatoli Nikiforov
- 2nd Unit Director
- Marina Nikiforova
- Camera Operators
- Mission Vityaz 1:
- Lena Kondakova
- Aleksandr Viktorenko
- Mission Agat:
- Talgat Musabaev
- Yuri Malenchenko
- Special Effects
- Ralf Henninger
- Animator
- Raymond Seidel
- Off-line Editor
- Svetlana Ivanova
- Set Decorator
- Pavel Khurumov
- Paintings/Drawings
- Mikhail Romadin
- Title
- Designagentur Vakat
- HAL-Revisions
- Steve Bowman
- 601 Video
- Music Consultant
- DJ André Nalin
- Soundtrack
- "Sacred Cycles" performed by Peter Lazonby; "Second Introduction" performed by Temporary Items; "Yéké Yéké" performed by Mory Kanté; "An der schönen blauen Donau Walzer Op. 314" by Johann Strauss,
- performed by London Philharmonic, directed by Jacek Kaspszyk; "Computer Incantations for World Peace" performed by Jean-Luc Ponty; "Loaded" performed by Stefan Miesem; "Twist in My Sobriety" performed by Tanita Tikaram; "Shall We Dance" performed by Malcolm McLaren; "Kann denn Liebe Sünde sein" performed by Zarah Leander; "Guess I'll Hang My Tears Out to Dry", "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" performed by Frank Sinatra, Carly Simon; "Wicked Love" performed by Bass-O-Matic
- Mixer
- Christian Heinemann
- Sound Editor
- Frank Meyer
- Technical Advisers
- Valeri Ryumin
- Aleksandr Aleksandrov
- Sergei Bronnikov
- Sergei Gromov
- Aleksandr Rozhkov
- Sergei Sidorov
- Aleksandr Novoshilov
- Flight Instructor/Zero Gravity Simulator
- Viktor Ren
- Film Extract
- Solaris
(1972)- With
- Anatoli Artsebarski
- Sergei Krikalev
- Helen Sharman
- Mission Ozon
- Viktor Afanasiev
- Musa Monarov
- Mission Derbent
- Aleksandr Volkov
- Franz Viehböck
- Toktar Aubakirov
- Mission Donbass
- Aleksandr Viktorenko
- Aleksandr Kaleri
- Klaus-Dietrich Flade
- Mission Vityaz 1
- Vladimir Soloviev
- Space Control Centre
- Aleksei Leonov
- Preparation Centre for Kosmonauts
- Certificate
- tbc
- Distributor
- Downtown Pictures
- tbc feet
- tbc minutes
- In Colour
- Subtitles