Shooting the Moon by Brian Willems (review)

In Le Voyage dans la lune (A Trip to the Moon; Méliès France 1902), Georges Méliès depicts the Moon in four different ways: first, as a chalk drawing on a blackboard; second, as a fuzzy object in the night sky; third, as a leering pasty face, into the eye of which plunges Professor Barbenfoullis's lunar projectile; and finally, as the fantastical landscape where the Selenites dwell. Such concatenations of multiple and not-exactly-compatible visions recur, Brian Willems argues, throughout more than a century of films concerned with our nearest astronomical neighbour. However, 'as soon as you put the moon on the screen it is lost' (1), and as images of our natural satellite proliferate, so the Moon itself is obscured. However, through the asymptotic approach these excessive and contradictory representations construe – in the gaps between them – something of the real Moon, of lunar truth, emerges.

Barbenfoullis's elongated telescope and its mirror image, the massive space cannon from which the projectile is fired, are figures of the cinematic apparatus, respectively magnifying and projecting, while the cinema itself shows us what is not actually there. When we see the Moon represented, we see an apparently unified object rather than its many sensuous qualities; when we see the Moon represented in several hard-to-reconcile or irreconcilable manners or modalities, we are given the opportunity to see beyond the reified object, albeit often unclearly. Borrowing terms from Graham Harman (one of a familiar object-oriented ontology/speculative realist roster that includes Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger, Quentin Meillasoux, Steve Shaviro and Eugene Thacker), Willems distinguishes between 'vertical' strategies that open up the tension between the quotidian Moon as we unthinkingly experience it and the 'always-beyond-our-reach object hiding underneath the surface of everyday use' (10–1), and horizontal strategies, which exclude the 'real' object entirely and instead open up the tension between the quotidian moon and 'its own "everyday" qualities' (11). He offers the useful analogy of a cubist painting 'where an image of a face is in tension with its cut-up and rearranged image: there is no "real" face involved here, everything takes place on the surface' (11).

Returning to Le Voyage dans la lune, he argues that the two versions of the lunar landing each counters any claim to truthfulness the other might make, but go beyond merely offering different perspectives on the event to instead reveal some of the Moon's 'multiple modes of being' (15–16). The splashdown in the Moon's face represents a fantastic experience, whereas the second landing – while in some ways just as fantastical – 'represents an effort to present a more proper lunar experience by differentiating what is found on the moon from the kinds of objects that are known on Earth' (15). This second landing also represents an attempt to move beyond the surface of the object to its qualities, even though those qualities can only be represented by the surfaces of other objects. Since the Moon's barren surface is all too familiar, the film – like many other lunar texts – locates Selenite society underground. However, this effort to reveal more about the Moon through creating terrestrial contrasts simultaneously removes it even further from human understanding. The far side of the Moon typically performs the same function.

Having established this framework, Willems then analyses an array of other lunar films. Frau im Mond (Lang Germany 1928) incorporates into its diegesis footage of the far side shot by an unmanned rocket which orbited the Moon. This emphasises the universe that pre-exists (and will far outlast) humanity, and that exists outside of human perception and thought. Although Willems does not pursue the parallel, in Lang's technological imaginary, there is clearly a resonance between vision-without-eyes and the recurring figure of the acoustmêtre, the voice without a mouth. Kosmicheskiy Reys (Zhuravlov USSR 1936) does not so much present the Moon – views through the rocketship portholes are fuzzy and unclear, the mission lands on the unmapped far side...