IMAGINE OTHERWISE FILM SERIES: First on the Moon

Thursday, October 2 @ 7pm

301 Julis Romo Rabinowitz

First on the Moon, a pseudo-documentary from 2005, presents a retrofitted past in which the Soviet Union won the space race. Far before Yuri Gagarin’s flight into the cosmos, a secret space program operating in the late 1930s manages to land a Soviet astronaut on the moon thirty years before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Home base loses contact with the astronaut, and the space program is decommissioned, likely due to Stalin’s Purges. Subsequently, the “failed” mission is covered up by the authorities. It’s not until the year 2000, when a group of investigative journalists stumble across archival footage from the mission, that it is discovered that the astronaut did, indeed, return to Earth, but found it difficult to return to a changed Soviet society.

Lauded by critics for creating an entirely new genre (something the director himself at one point called “documentary fantasy”), First on the Moon plays with the concept of the archive as an unassailable source of historical documentation and bends the aesthetics of the archive toward the production of alternative paths through time. In doing so, he reignites the imaginary potential in a past which could have been otherwise.

Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (OWNER), Slavic Languages & Literatures

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