Take One Space Special

space special t a k e o n e c f f . c o m

INSIDE: Wyndham Wise reviews GRAVITY Silents in Space Boffins on Rocket Science in film Aliens! Aliens! Alien!

Alfonso Cuarón’s

GRAVITY

GRAVITY opens with one of the most masterly 13-minute continuous shots in cinema history. Four hundred miles above Earth, Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), is a NASA medical engineer on her virgin voyage into space. Her mission is to help repair the Hubble telescope. Tethered to a shuttle, she struggles with the equipment while veteran astronaut Matt Kowalsky (George Clooney) cheerfully circles her with his new toy, a jet pack that allows him to float in space without a tether. “You’re the genius out here,’ he tells her while listening to a country tune. “I just drive the bus.”

GRAVITY is a scary amusement thrill ride set in real time.

The camera is in constant motion from jaw-dropping wide shots to extreme close ups on Bullock’s tense face behind her helmet, with the blue Earth providing a stunning backdrop.

Mexican-born director Alfonso Cuarón (CHILDREN OF MEN, HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN), his regular cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and visual effects supervisor Tim Webber have collaborated to make us feel we’re floating above the Earth, no questions asked. Their opening shot brilliantly sets the stage for a 90-minute, gripping, edge-of-your-seat ride through outer space.

Inevitable comparisons with Kubrick’s 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY have already circulated the blogosphere, but apart from being set in space, comparisons end there. This is not a stoned metaphysical journey through time and space in search of the meaning of life. Instead, GRAVITY is a scary amusement thrill ride set in real time. When Kowalsky transmits the message, “Houston, I have a bad feeling about this mission,” you better believe him. (The voice of Mission Control, in a nod to another space-disaster movie, APOLLO 13, belongs to Ed Harris.) A few minutes later he receives the news that a Russian spy satellite has exploded and the debris is heading straight for them. [cont’d on page 9]

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Silents in Space If proof were needed that the early days of cinema saw the medium at its most magical, then look no further than the works of Georges Méliès. As the resurgence of interest in silent cinema continues, fuelled by 2011’s double whammy of HUGO and THE ARTIST, it’s the sheer ambition of the Parisian filmmaker that continues to impress. THE EXTRAORDINARY VOYAGE charts the restoration of his most famous work, A TRIP TO THE MOON. Returned to its original colour scheme, this pioneering and iconic picture has never been more beautiful.

Méliès put the spirit of ‘Abracadabra!’ into the world of movies.

Méliès, a magician and theatre manager by profession, was one of the first to realise the potential that cinema offered. His output was prolific to say the least: after seeing the first Lumière brothers films in 1895, he quickly bought a camera, built his own studio and set about making his own movies. He churned out more than 500 from 1896 until 1913, when he went bankrupt and was forced out of the industry.

Rejecting the documentary-style subject matter of the Lumière films, Méliès turned cinema into the medium of illusionism. He invented many basic tricks of the trade – slow motion, the dissolve, the fade-out, double exposure – in order to dazzle his audience. THE LIVING PLAYING CARDS is a perfect example: the director conjures the Queen of Hearts into reality from his giant deck of cards, before turning himself into the King of Clubs.

Though most closely associated with his early Jules Verne inspired pictures A TRIP TO THE MOON and THE VOYAGE ACROSS THE IMPOSSIBLE, which are as much elaborate fantasy as they are science fiction, he dipped his toe in to other waters as well. CLEOPATRA was a very early precursor to horror classic THE MUMMY, as the Egyptian queen is resurrected in modern times. DIVERS AT WORK ON THE WRECK OF THE ‘MAINE’ was one of several attempts to present topical issues of the day before the advent of newsreel, such as this incident during the Spanish-American War. He even branched out into Shakespeare, producing one of the very first versions of HAMLET. Méliès was fortunate enough to be recognised within his own lifetime as a true pioneer of cinema. Louis Lumière himself awarded Méliès the Légion d‘honneur in 1931.

Though many of his films are now lost forever, enough survive for us to enjoy and celebrate the man who put the spirit of ‘Abracadabra!’ into the world of movies.

- Gavin Midgley

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Nichola Bruce’s

MOONBUG “I take photos to show another world,” explains Steve Pyke, opening up his documentary MOONBUG, and with a subject of astronomy, you’d expect this to be quite fitting. Unfortunately, a documentary about space exploration it is not; it’s an astronomically claustrophobic look into the world of Steve Pyke.

Living his dream, he gets to meet the greatest heroes of the early space missions. However, with this mighty subject he takes us into the tiny viewpoint he has of the tale. Steve is a portrait photographer, and it is purely the faces of these heroes that seem important to him. Sometimes a photo of their feet, if they’ve touched lunar ground. There are very sparse golden anecdotes: Eugene Kranst tells us that the first thing the crew of Apollo 11 were scheduled to do was to sleep. Having anticipated a journey into the unimaginable world of space documentary, I now felt like the same was scheduled for me.

The heroes in front of Pyke’s camera were showing great patience, more often talking about the equipment he was using than about the subject I was on the edge of my seat to hear. The director is following a photographer

“You went on a space walk, what was that like?” here, and although a photographer is rarely documented, the wrong questions were being asked – an interviewer he is not. At one point he asks a lunar walker, “You went on a space walk, what was that like?”. Every time a new portrait is snapped, a powerfully doom-laden powerpoint sequence begins, like the title sequence of Lost, music and all. Of course, this happens a dozen times throughout the film, being the least repetitive part of it.

Pyke says he uses a Rolleiflex camera, whose viewfinder system uses a 45-degree mirror and is viewed from above at waist-level. Pyke finds that the subject-facing viewfinder of a standard camera is aggressive. Nevertheless, he is happy to thrust his tripod between the legs of an astronaut, to compensate for the lack of zoom, whilst snapping the soles of their bare feet.

Nichola Bruce tells us that it’s taken ten years to get her archive footage together for two reasons: firstly because no-one would fund it, and secondly, because she had no idea what to turn her archive footage into. Both of these statements are regrettably evident in this experience.

- Ferry Hunt

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The Lebanese Rocket Society Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s

Higher and higher, bigger and bigger. That was the Lebanese Rocket Society’s motto in the early to mid 1960s. A motto that was aspired to and upheld. But hang on a minute – THE LEBANESE ROCKET SOCIETY? Sounds improbable at best.

Few people know of this forgotten footnote in Arab history, but this documentary, part of a wider education project, seeks to and succeeds in instilling in our memory the heyday and technologie de pointe of pre-Civil War Lebanon, the so-called Switzerland of the Middle East. The premise: Why the hell has no one ever told their story?

Immediately, an animated rocket cuts across a blank white screen as recollecting voiceovers speak of pursuing dreams and scientific revolution. That’s what this film is really about. Realising your wildest of dreams. Revolving around the life and studies of the twice-named ArmenianLebanese Manoug Manougian, now a Maths professor in the States, here today at Cambridge Film Festival for a Q&A, this is a film for high-powered visionaries and lost, battling imaginations.

He was inspired to launch rockets by reading ‘1,001 nights’ and ‘From The Earth To The Moon’, not exactly scientific bibles. Born in Jerusalem, he moved to Lebanon, a country with no funding and no propellants, unlike major Western powers. But after years of determination his dream became a reality. Rockets were fired 600km into the air.

Spacecraft propulsion is quite hard to get into, if you don’t know where to start.

Spacecraft propulsion is quite hard to get into, if you don’t know where to start. And the film – co-directed and narrated by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, two Parisian filmmakers intrigued by a ballistic image they spotted on a Lebanese stamp – traces the story from beginning to failure: from a pioneering student body skimping on lunch-breaks to intervening army officials, from rocketry to weaponry. But it all started at Haigazian College (whose Armenian demographic provides an interesting aside on the early 20th century genocide), where Manougian taught. Whether it’s firing a toy-sized rocket into a mountain-side (a nearmiss with a Greek Orthodox church), hand-making rocket fuel, or nearly accidentally sinking a Cypriot boat, a sense of peaceful if amateurish delight seeps through the project’s roots. Understanding the scientific methodology of space exploration was the sole aim. Violence was a no-go.

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[cont’d on page 10]

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Mark Levinson’s

particle fever

Science and the popular press have become somewhat uneasy bedfellows over the last few decades. With the halcyon days of space exploration behind us, the forefront of scientific endeavour now lies below the ground, attempting to understand the early formation of the universe and the building blocks of matter itself.

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is a seventeen mile ring under the Swiss countryside that represents the most significant – and expensive – collaboration between nations in human history. Attempts to make the significance of this digestible for those outside the scientific community have led to the coining of terms such as “the God particle” to impart the significance of the potential findings, but Mark Levinson’s documentary attempts to redress that balance with an exploration of the scientific significance in more meaningful terms.

PARTICLE FEVER is a significant success in sharing the fervour of the scientists at the cutting edge of understanding.

The LHC features four separate experiments at various points on its circumference, and Levinson follows six physicists spread across various levels of the project, woven into a single chronological narrative. The history of the project has been widely covered by the media, and Levinson charts the period from the initial activation of the equipment in 2008 and its almost immediate failure, through the years of delays and frustration, to the most significant discovery so far made in 2012. The enthusiasm of the scientists is readily apparent, but so too is their knowledge and expectation that the timescales required for such a project encompass most of their careers, and with it the risk that those careers may have been in pursuit of the wrong theories.

Throughout the process, the media cast an ever-present shadow over proceedings, keen to digest the latest findings, and one group of physicists observes that the scale of the project now means that news of discoveries can be found on social media even before it’s heard through official channels. At the heart of PARTICLE FEVER is this relationship between science and the media, with the project recognising the need to explain discoveries but frustrated and often inhibited by the pressure to report them in real time to a waiting world. Neither that, nor the potentially catastrophic failure of the project’s cooling system just a few days after activation ever seems to dampen the enthusiasm of the participants, an energy which Levinson channels into the main thrust of his narrative. [cont’d on page 10]

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The Extraordinary Voyage

This slice of film geek nirvana charts the attempts to restore a colour version of Georges Méliès’ A TRIP TO THE MOON, one of the greatest and most influential films from the silent era, whose DNA can still be found in the movies of today. Shown at the Cambridge Film Festival alongside the fully restored version of the Jules Verneinspired science-fiction fantasy, it’s a fascinating story.

Beginning with an introduction to the director himself and how he got involved with cinema during its infancy (he was present at the legendary first public screening of the Lumière brothers’ films in Paris on 28 December 1895), the documentary quickly establishes Méliès’ stylistic approach. It was initially just another way for him as a stage magician to broaden his repertoire, but he quickly realised its potential. He famously invented the stop trick when his camera jammed while filming the streets of Paris, and this led to other neat tricks of the trade like double exposure, allowing him to appear multiple times within the same picture.

… they had to be individually hand-painted, making each print far more expensive than a regular black-and-white one …

Serge Bromberg and Eric Lange’s film explores both the magic and limitations of Méliès’ work.

The theatricality inherent in his movies – affectionately dubbed “moving paintings” by one interviewee – gave them an innocence and charm all of their own. This was a blessing and a curse however, for while his wild imagination continued down the same road for many years, cinema as a medium rapidly evolved and audience expectations changed with it, leaving poor Georges far behind.

The quest for a colour print of A TRIP TO THE MOON – so rare because they had to be individually hand-painted, making each print far more expensive than a regular black-and-white one – is interesting in itself. One print tracked down in Spain was considered unusable due to damage, yet with years of patience and careful work, it yielded surprising results. The finished product is worth the trip alone. It might not be the most polished documentary on the block, but its engaging approach and range of contributors (including Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Michel Gondry and Michel Hazanavicius) make it accessible and appealing to anyone with an interest in cinema.

- Gavin Midgley

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ALIENS! ALIENS! ALIEN!

I first saw ALIEN round my Aunty Pauline’s house when I was about eight or nine. I remember it vividly because I spent the next few months reliving the film’s more iconic moments in the small hours of the night. You never quite forget a film that gives you a serious bout of nightmares, and if you’re like me, that fosters a sort of fondness too.

Watching ALIEN now, on super-definition-awesomeo-scope, I am mainly struck by how fresh it still looks. This claustrophobic haunted-house-in-space tale continues to be scary and effective, and I still screamed at the same two places (I bet you know which two) even though I knew the scares were coming. The special effects, a mixture of model shots and matte paintings, are pretty much flawless, and the actors deliver eerily perfect performances as they die horribly, one by one – particularly Ian Holm, who, when he finally flips his lid, is easily as terrifying as the Space Beast itself.

Surprisingly, ALIENS suffers somewhat for having just watched ALIEN; whereas the first film is all model shot perfection, here there are some bluescreen shots of spacecraft floating oddly against cloudy skies that just look peculiar. Once the marines start dying hideously and the extent of the threat is revealed – lots of aliens, lots and lots of aliens – then this is a sequel that is pretty hard to beat. Aliens still embraces the horror, but it gives it an edge of action that keeps your pulse thundering in the pauses between scares.

Watching ALIEN now, on super-definitionawesomeo-scope, I am mainly struck by how fresh it still looks.

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And so on to three and four (by this point in my re-watch I’m having xenomorph nightmares again – hooray!) where everything slips a little.

ALIEN 3 is an interesting stab at a follow up, full of gothic visuals and grim atmosphere. There’s a lot of fun to be had playing “spot the British character actor” but reducing the threat back to one (slightly cute) alien doesn’t really work, and in the end you can’t feel a lot of sympathy for a bunch of murderers and rapists, even if they were in that episode of The Bill that one time. [cont’d on page 10]

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(C) TOM CATCHESIDES

At this year’s Cambridge Film Festival Toby Miller hosted a conversation with Mark Levinson (director of PARTICLE FEVER, about the Large Hadron Collider) and Manoug Manougian (the scientist featured in THE LEBANESE ROCKET SOCIETY).

Toby Miller: Where once the challenge was to make science popular enough that you could speak to Joe Public, is it now more of a challenge to fight against government cuts?

Mark Levinson: I didn’t expect to be fighting it; we’ve always had to fight it, it is a dangerous time and I’m very happy that [PARTICLE FEVER] is coming out right now because in the US as well as these other countries there are big cuts that are happening in science. In the US I’m very afraid that there seems to be an anti-science element that’s coming, that doesn’t believe in climate change, it doesn’t believe in science, so I think as important for me as a film like this is, that extols the scientific process, that shows at a basic level you have to do this, and gives respect to science. It’s very important because I think it’s always a struggle.

Manoug Manougian: I think especially in the US you have two groups of people – one you spoke of, who prefer not to get involved in funding science projects, but there is a very strong move on the part of the government right now to place whatever funds they have into science education. The term now is STEM education: Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics – and most of the funding is going into that, maybe at the expense of the arts by the way, and I see that at universities. At our university many of the arts are suffering, [but] I’m glad they recognise the importance of science education because that’s been lacking, especially in the US, for many years now. It was very well funded in the past, back in the 60s and 70s, then it simply died out, and funding dried out until very recently now, that funding for the sciences has increased. It has been recognised as an important part of educating the public and the younger generation.

ML: That’s true, I’m in a sort of divided position because I feel I do straddle the two worlds, if anything I’m more in the film/art world, but making this film reminds me that we have a struggle with science education so I’m very happy about STEM, but I also agree, I don’t want the arts to suffer either, these are things that need to be supported as basic human values, there are practical things that need to be attended to of course, but we have to devote time to things that have no overt applications, because that’s what opens us up as human beings.

There’s a woman last night who saw the film, and she’s a linguist, and she’s about 60 years old, and she said she’d had a good career and everything, but seeing this, she said, it makes me want to go back and be a physicist and start again, the excitement, I want to capture that myself too – and that’s great to hear.

Full interview at takeonecff.com.

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[cont’d from page 1] Suddenly the pair finds themselves spinning out of control, ricocheting around in a storm of debris, transformed into human pinballs. After a harrowing trip, including several minutes while Stone floats freely head over heels, they eventually make it back to the space station using Kowalsky’s dwindling power supply only to find the entire crew dead. A second wave of debris shatters the ISS in the film’s spectacular set piece of total destruction.

When Kowalsky sacrifices himself so that Stone will have a chance to survive, what began as a two-hander turns into a one-woman monologue. She is left alone to spend the rest of the movie talking to herself, trying to locate a deserted Chinese spaceship that contains a re-entry pod, which might get her home.

Cuarón is a true visionary, a master of pure cinema.

GRAVITY

will

be

in cinemas from 8 November.

Tickets

for GRAVITY 2D and 3D

are

available

now at your local Arts Picturehouse.

The real show here is a very fit and trim Bullock, giving her best career performance. For all its stunning exteriors, the film’s real concern is with her emotional makeup, letting her face and voice carry the burden of meaning. Some of the extended shots of Bullock’s face through her helmet visor have evoked comparisons to Maria Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s classic THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, the film that perfected the emotionally expressive close up.

Cuarón is a true visionary, a master of pure cinema, and he roots every moment of GRAVITY in a tactile present. It’s storytelling at its most simple – an ordinary woman set in extraordinary circumstances who has to summon all her will to survive – as its visuals are unbelievably complex. To achieve the photorealism the project demanded was to seamlessly combine live action, computer animation and CGI, and new systems had to be invented. One particular sequence, of Bullock gliding with weightless ease through narrow spaceship corridors is truly remarkable for its seeming effortlessness.

Canadian-born director James Cameron is one of people thanked at the end of GRAVITY, and this couldn’t be more appropriate. His groundbreaking Avatar wrote the book on the modern artistic use of 3D. Ang Lee’s masterful LIFE OF PI wrote a new chapter last year, and this film is the next chapter – the most accomplished, wonder-inducing use of that technology to date.

- Wyndham Wise

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[cont’d from page 4] That’s not what it looked like to the outside world, however. In the grubby hands of the military what had been patriotic, headline-grabbing reconnaissance missioning became diplomatic dynamite and a power-struggle in waiting, all evidence readily concealed by the government. No more space racing; martial not Martian intentions ruled supreme. Of course, the States and Russia were having none of it. Their spies knew the lot. And neither were the French, who are posited as the spoilsport nation who “requested” that the programme be called to a close.

Shame, because a national wonder was being put down.

Manougian and his companions had built a two-stage rocket with next-to-no investment – a remarkable feat in itself. A source of Lebanese pride and unification had disintegrated into the shadows of a distant past. The scientists themselves had emigrated. The Civil Wars beckoned. And as one interviewee in the film states, ‘dreaming was confiscated’.

In came oblivion.

Throughout, Hadjithomas and Joreige provide a step-by-step investigation in which archival snippets are woven together with present-day interviews. The execution is sublime and NOW SHOWING AT ARTS not for one minute contrived nor overly nostalgic. After all, PICTUREHOUSE CAMBRIDGE most people don’t have a clue this ever happened. In its essence this is surreal subject-matter and the outcome is a bridge created – or rather, restored – between the past and present, a vital monument to a forgotten part of Lebanese history and a clarion call for emancipation in the modern Arab World. As Manougian relates after the film, the spring-time revolts promised definite hope, and who knows, perhaps – perhaps – peace-loving spacecraft will be heard catapulting around Beirut’s halcyon hills some time in the near future. How alien-like that would seem.

- Huw Oliver [cont’d from page 5] Levinson has a key collaborator in harnessing that energy, in the form of fellow physics enthusiast and world renowned editor Walter Murch. While Levinson’s access to his physicists gets to the very heart of the project’s key research, Murch’s editing gives the story real momentum as it drives towards the big discoveries. Levinson also succeeds brilliantly in removing the simplification of the LHC’s impacts but still leaving it digestible for a wider audience. The ideas are well supported by clear and simple graphics which illustrate the two competing theories of existence posited by competing theorists, and the impact that the proof of one theory or the other could have on the long-term future of physics and our understanding of existence. PARTICLE FEVER is a significant success in sharing the fervour of the scientists at the cutting edge of understanding, managing to stimulate without over simplifying and it’s a fitting testament to the both the theoretical and practical achievements already produced by the Collider.

- Mark Liversidge [cont’d from page 7] ALIEN 3 is an interesting stab at a follow up, full of gothic visuals and grim atmosphere.

ALIEN RESURRECTION remains, for me, the worst of the lot. I hadn’t seen it for a number of years and had hoped that it wasn’t as bad as I remembered, but the opening shot of a gurning insect with an alien face being smooshed across the screen…yeah, it’s as bad as you remember.

Jeunet is a weird choice for director, and the slightly whimsical tone feels very odd indeed when you compare it to the cold claustrophobia of the original. Only Weaver comes out of it with any dignity, playing an alarmingly predatory Ripley that makes you wish a similar idea had been given to someone else to fiddle with.

- Jen Williams

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