Having avoided a “prescriptive” set of instructions for his international collaborators, O’Sullivan’s film features all kinds of representations of the moon and of moonlight.
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Having reached out to archives all around the world, To the Moon incorporates footage from dozens of countries and sources, including film from Mosfilm Cinema Concern, the National Film Archive of India, the National Archives of Latvia, the Film Archives of Estonia, the George Eastman Museum, the National Film Board of Canada, and even the Disney vaults. The scope of O’Sullivan’s lunar mediation cannot be overstated. All the folklore and the imagination that has been obscured by the scientific exploration.” I wanted to look at all the things that have been a little bit lost about the moon.
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It’s something that I thought about when I was writing the film. From my own kind of reading and thinking, there is a line from Columbus and other colonisers through to the moon landings, via people like Jules Verne, and adventuring Victorians who first suggested voyaging to the moon, and how that fed into the collective imagination, particularly in Germany in the early 20th century, which, in turn, led to Werner von Braun and the science underpinning Nasa. “You have this timeless symbol of femininity, and especially to have six white Americans go plant a flag – it is a kind of imperialist gesture. “You could argue that it’s the most literal gesture humankind has ever undertaken, to actually go to the moon and turn on the lights and demystify it,” says O’Sullivan. To the Moon makes for a fascinating voyage, albeit one of the figurative rather than literal variety. If anything, the director’s new, poetic mediation on everyone’s favourite satellite, characterises the scientific exploration of the orb as a near-imperialist venture.
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These contributors, however, were not at all what Tadhg O’Sullivan had in mind. Stronge, having just enjoyed an award-winning run with Emer Reynolds’s Voyager probe documentary, The Farthest, had made invaluable contacts in Nasa during her investigation of the two robotic interstellar probes and the Golden Record. When producer Clare Stronge first sat down with film-maker Tadhg O’Sullivan to discuss his exquisite new work, To the Moon, it seemed like perfect timing.