Al Reinert, For All Mankind, 1989, (detail), still from a color film, 79 minutes.

Published as “Step Children” on Artforum.com on July 12, 2009. To see the review in context, click here.

In the spring of 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would send a man to the moon by the end of the decade. It was an act of hubris: When he spoke, the country’s astronauts had logged only twenty minutes in outer space. Billions of dollars and a little more than eight years later, on July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong hopped off a lunar module nicknamed Eagle and pronounced the occasion “one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.” Live television images beamed back to Earth’s surface transfixed the nation, momentarily stitching together a public torn apart by the Vietnam War, violent inner-city unrest, campus protests, and much else besides. The achievement seemed not only a victory in the country’s war-by-any-means-but-war with the Soviet Union—the USSR’s own unmanned lunar explorer crashed into the moon while Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were there, asleep in their landing module—but also to augur a grand age of space exploration and scientific breakthroughs. Yet the last human to set foot on our moon’s pockmarked surface, Eugene Cernan, did so less than five years later, at the end of 1972.

The fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission offers an opportunity for reconsideration of the Apollo program; even Aldrin has gotten into the act, publishing Magnificent Desolation, his second memoir. Criterion has contributed to the effort by releasing on DVD and Blu-Ray Al Reinert’s magnificent 1989 documentary For All Mankind. To make the film, Reinert, a journalist with no prior filmmaking experience, trolled through millions of feet of official Apollo 16-mm footage, then combined his selections with audio recordings extracted from hundreds of hours of interviews with astronauts. The lunar missions are collapsed into one epic journey, from pre-flight training to command module splashdown, narrated in the southern drawls and flat Midwestern accents of the men who rocketed out of Earth’s orbit.

The figures onscreen and those recounting their experiences are never properly identified, a decision that aims to emphasize the communal nature of the entire lunar enterprise. This directorial sleight-of-hand ensures that the focus remains on the images, which cannot be matched by the descriptions offered by those who captured them. But it also effaces the huge effort required to make the footage possible. Not only were there ten Apollo missions prior to Armstrong’s fateful steps, but also hundreds of men and women who worked at the command center in Houston, and thousands more that dedicated millions of hours of labor to create, ex nihilo, the physical infrastructure necessary to get Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon’s ash-colored surface. For All Mankind, then, is hampered by its narrow focus. But what magnificent footage it presents! There is the slow-motion infernal blaze of engines propelling rockets into the air and the still uncanny sight of flashlights, slices of bread, and other everyday items floating languidly in zero gravity. There is the Earth seen from a distance and rising above the moon’s horizon, an image that helped spark a nascent environmental movement; there are the astronauts themselves, snow-white Michelin men bouncing and stumbling giddily across the knobby, lifeless gray expanse.

Many people, reflecting on the dubious Cold War inspiration for NASA, or lamenting its ratio of cost to demonstrable benefit, or chastising the always malfunctioning, dangerous shuttles that arrived in Apollo’s wake, will use this anniversary to criticize the entire enterprise. Their claims are often legitimate. But the velvet blank amplitude of outer space, the backdrop for most of the film, reminds viewers of one Apollo program legacy still to be puzzled out. The inky, airless expanse that is so palpable a presence in For All Mankind is an indication of the deep ontological shift represented by traveling so far into the unknown. Irrespective of politics or science, forty years later, the mind still stutters when trying to grasp precisely what it means to have been to the moon and back.

For more information on For All Mankind, click here to visit the Criterion Collection’s website. To read Caryn James’s 1990 New York Times review of the film, click here. To read a 1973 essay by Al Reinert on the space center in Houston, Texas, click here (free registration required).

Jia Zhang-ke, 24 City, 2008, still from a color film in 35 mm, 112 minutes.

From afar, it is easy to imagine the spectacular economic gains in capitalist China as being created ex nihilo, the cumulative effect of a magical reserve—millions of laboring bodies. How else to explain the recent double-digit GDP growth, year after year? Yet as both history and everyday life remind us, with every gain there is a concurrent loss. It is one of the virtues of Jia Zhang-ke’s recent film 24 City (2008) that he focuses on particular losses: the psychological and physical wounds inflicted upon the employees of Factory 420 in Chengdu, first under Mao’s regime in the 1960s and 1970s, and then during the shift from a planned economy to a market economy, the effects of which are still being felt today. The factory, recently purchased by a real-estate development company that will replace the warren of brick structures with gleaming high-rise condominium towers, is the nucleus for diverse lives, many marked by quiet tragedies.

As the complex’s buildings are emptied of their machines, stripped for copper wire and other materials, and finally demolished, a handful of workers—chosen from among the 130 Jia interviewed—tell their often painful stories. Unflagging dedication to the Factory 420 enterprise seems invariably to conflict with personal ambitions, leading to the separation of family members and the frustration of efforts to find love. It may be difficult for Western audiences to understand the seemingly extreme sacrifices made by these people. But the employees of Factory 420 forge and repair aircraft parts used by the military, and the exigencies of national defense—first against Chiang Kai-Shek, then during the brief Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979—compel submission. (The film’s opening shot is telling: Heated ingots of steel, glowing orange, are one by one pounded into shape.) Job security is not necessarily offered in return: Wartime needs slacken, the factory shifts to the production of consumer goods, and one middle-age woman recounts being laid off in 1994 despite never missing a day on the floor.

Jia has deliberately woven fictional narratives into his documentary structure as an acknowledgment of the imprecision of memory and the instability of any “truth”—whether state-mandated or private and emotional. This is an unacknowledged point in the film itself, and the plausibility of the fictional monologues and the restrained performances of his hired actors render it fairly moot. 24 City does not seem primarily a commentary on the mutability of history; that is only one of its themes. Here I agree with Kevin B. Lee’s assessment in Slant: “What emerges in 24 City is a moving three-fold meditation: on the many stories of a bygone era, both epic and banal, that are bound to be left untold and forgotten; the many fictions woven—whether by the media, by our ancestors, or by ourselves—into our understanding of reality; and a dying ideology’s legacy on how its people tell their stories.” That the coming order, no more than a shake of the kaleidoscope, is bound to produce its own difficult stories and complex legacy is apparent in the monologues delivered by two characters—a television news presenter and a personal shopper—representing a younger generation.

Jia Zhang-ke, 24 City, 2008, still from a color film in 35 mm, 112 minutes. Hao Dali (Lv Liping).

This is all communicated with commendable formal control: Jia intermingles lovingly framed slow tracking shots of the factory buildings and Screen Test–style silent portraits of anonymous  workers with his talking-head interviews. The images of the disheveled environment linger just long enough to communicate pathos without becoming treacly; the additional silent protagonists radiate dignity and imply all the other stories for which Jia’s interviewees stand in as representative examples. (The soundtrack, too, is relatively discreet: two brief compositions—one for a solo trumpet and another, more plaintive one, for strings—recur throughout.) 24 City does justice to the particular histories of a few individuals without forfeiting an important larger narrative about the country’s experiences under its various political and economic regimes. This is no small feat in so giddily unsettled an environment as twenty-first-century China.

For additional reviews, see David Hudson’s roundup at The Daily. 24 City runs through June 18 at IFC Center in New York, and opens soon in Columbus, OH, Chicago, Denver, San Francisco, Boston, and elsewhere. Click here for more information and to watch the trailer.

Artist Lawrence Weiner in Herb & Dorothy.

“Every culture needs its Vogels,” says Lawrence Weiner near the end of the documentary Herb and Dorothy (2008). “They’re friend collectors, not collector collectors,” clarifies another artist. Not long after they purchased a small, untitled sculpture by John Chamberlain in 1962, the pint-size duo recognized that what they were buying was better than what they themselves were making as “wannabe artists.” So they lived frugally on her librarian’s salary, bought art with his earnings at the post office, and spent all their time in artists’ studios, galleries, and museums.

The Vogels aren’t chatty subjects, so first-time director Megumi Sasaki interviews a cavalcade of those they’ve collected over the years, including Sylvia Plimack and Robert Mangold, Chuck Close, Robert Barry, Lynda Benglis, and Richard Tuttle. All testify to the intensity of Herb’s looking and his insatiability, and to Dorothy’s sensible handling of finances—the couple always worked on the installment plan and rarely missed a payment. Their rules? The work had to be affordable, and it had to fit into their rent-controlled Manhattan one-bedroom apartment. By the time the National Gallery of Art, as a gesture of courtship, trucked everything to DC to be inventoried, the art crammed into that space filled five full-size moving vans.

It’s clear from the film’s structure and its B-roll footage that Sasaki isn’t familiar with the art world, so art-savvy audiences who know the Vogels’ story will focus on piquant details: Dorothy kept a small Carl Andre copper sculpture in a chocolate box; the couple made weekly phone calls to the artists they were close with; they often paid in cash and left with their purchases tucked under their arms. Yet fascinating stories lurk just beneath the surface. One answers the first question invariably asked by journalists: “How could they afford to be major collectors on government salaries?” In the ’60s, when no one else was buying art by young Minimal and Conceptual artists, the Vogels supported them with their (relatively inexpensive) purchases. After the market drove prices up, it seems, artists supported the Vogels, discounting their work to civil-servant prices. This is acknowledged implicitly when, during a visit to James Siena’s studio, everyone decorously agrees to discuss prices off-camera, and it’s acknowledged explicitly in a comment Dorothy makes: “The collection was built on the generosity of artists.”

In an age of speculative purchases via JPEG image, the rapport such generosity implies is cause for nostalgia. And, of course, it paid off. The Vogels understood themselves as caretakers of the art they owned, conscientiously draping their framed, light-sensitive drawings with blankets and then, in 1992, donating several thousand works to the National Gallery. The museum, to thank them, set up an annuity to supplement their retirement income. What have they done with it? Bought more art, of course.

Herb and Dorothy opens June 5 at Cinema Village in New York and July 10 at Landmark Nuart in Los Angeles. Click here to visit the film’s website.

A shopping mall is “a place where idealism, passion, and greed can come together, all under one roof,” intones the voice-over narrator near the outset of Canadian filmmaker Helen Klodawsky’s Malls R Us (2008), her latest work. The seventy-eight-minute documentary chronicles what these feelings provoke in a diverse cast of characters: megalomaniacal ambition in real estate developers, utopian fantasies of behavior engineering in corporate architects, slightly smug moralizing in critics of consumerism, and rousing antimall activism in environmentalists and labor activists. Klodawsky’s cameras alight on one luxury megadevelopment after another. Some are still in the making, whether being built by hundreds of workmen or existing solely in artists’ renderings; some are gleaming and overrun with glassy-eyed shoppers; a few older examples are kept alive by a handful of lingering tenants, like patients in a terminal ward. The film suggests that the geographic trend in mall development is toward the Middle East, India, and Asia. It also suggests that the lifespan of these projects, despite the billions of dollars and the thousands of hours of labor that go into them, is approximately thirty years.

Helene Klodawsky, still from Malls R Us, 2008.

Though Malls R Us dexterously balances seduction and repulsion, it’s not necessarily due to Klodawsky’s attempts at neutrality. One senses that her fascination is morbid and her intent exhortative, not least in a scene in which Canadian developer Rubin Stahl is caught, in an outsize sporting-goods chain store he hopes will anchor his new project, holding an automatic weapon that an off-camera store employee informs him is “meant for humans.” Yikes! The moment precedes a crescendo of crosscuts that juxtapose starkly the cross purposes of Stahl; Eric Kuhne, a London-based American architect at work on a million-square-foot project in Dubai; and Vikram Soni, an Indian environmental activist attempting to halt a development that will trample the Delhi Ridge Wilderness Preserve.

Nonetheless, at the end of the film there remains something to the claim made at the outset that the mall is a kind of sacred place. This is partly because of the lovely cinematography of François Dagenais, with whom Klodawsky worked on her 2005 film No More Tears Sister, about a Sri Lankan human rights activist. His images of privileged, contented young women among the seventy thousand trees planted on the roof of an Osaka megamall and of the dramatic, angular spaces enclosed with glass in Jon Jerde’s Zlote Tarasy (Golden Terraces) development in Warsaw evoke a Pavlovian response in the viewer. One almost doesn’t begrudge the young Japanese mother who blithely announces, “To be around people with the same background makes me feel at ease.”

What undergirds this ongoing romance with shopping malls, even among those whose critical faculties lead them to acknowledge the enormous fiscal, social, and environmental costs of building and maintaining them? Jerde and the writer Ray Bradbury suspect it has something to do with the mall’s ability to foster community as the downtown promenades in small American cities once did. Aurelie, a makeup-counter salesgirl at Forum des Halles in Paris, believes it’s because the shopping mall is a place where people are gratified to be on display. The elderly women who stride purposefully around a near-empty mall in Middle America, unable to imagine what they’ll do if it closes, benefit from the consistency it affords their exercise routine. One of this film’s virtues is Klodawsky’s ability, despite her own inclinations, to let viewers empathize—to some degree—with each of these positions.

Sharon Lockhart’s latest films depict employees at the Bath Iron Works in Bath, Maine. Lunch Break (2008), the longer of the two, is notable first for the artist’s decision to set the camera in motion, something she has not done in any of her previous films. (Exit [2008], a related, forty-one-minute study of repetition and difference that depicts workers leaving the facility on five consecutive days, maintains a fixed camera position.) In a long, uninterrupted tracking shot, the camera in Lunch Break traverses at midday what appears to be the spinal cord of the shipyard—a long, uninterrupted passageway—as several dozen employees eat, read the newspaper, and talk in small groups. Most of the workers (all but one are men) do not engage with the camera, perhaps a result of the fact that, as with Pine Flat (2005), Lockhart’s study of children in a small California town, the artist spent considerable time conducting quasi-ethnographic research to familiarize herself with the “community” of shipbuilders, electricians, welders, and pipefitters before capturing it on film.

Sharon Lockhart, still from Lunch Break, 2008.

Though the camera moved, the footage it gathered has been slowed down dramatically: Six minutes pass before the first figure is beyond the frame, and another seven elapse before the camera reaches the next trio of relaxing employees. As it progresses, every detail of the claustrophobically hemmed-in environment is revealed in sharp focus: dented garbage cans and putty-colored lockers, some adorned with stickers; olive-green tool chests and brightly colored plastic coolers; gauges that cling to pipes stretching from floor to ceiling; and tubes and hoses that extend every which way, all beneath drab, uniform fluorescent light. The dilatory pace emphasizes the sheer amount of material (and visual detail) packed in to this place, and highlights how successfully 35-mm film can capture that plenitude. But the unhurriedness also imparts a monumental solemnity to each of the workers’ gestures, which can undercut the film’s tight structure in both negative and positive ways. A man sitting to the left of the aisle with a water bottle in hand, momentarily looking at the floor, becomes, when slowed down, a despondent ruminator seemingly lifted from one of Bill Viola’s histrionic video installations. On the other hand, when, midway through the film, another man reaching above the lockers pulls a bag of popcorn out of an unseen microwave, the humor of his banal action deflates the portentousness that can cloud such snail-paced scrutiny.

Lockhart’s deadpan gaze, it should be noted, is in fact far removed from Viola’s schmaltzy recent work. Lunch Break is more closely related to films such as Tacita Dean’s Kodak (2006), a poker-faced threnody that memorializes the last days in the factory in France where Dean’s preferred film stock was made, or Mark Lewis’s Children’s Games, Heygate Estate (2002), in which the camera glides seamlessly along an elevated walkway through a south London housing project, capturing children at play on the sidewalks below. All three infuse sharply delineated formal parameters with content extraneous to that structure. (As Michael Ned Holte has noted elsewhere, Lockhart does not make strictly structuralist films; the same can be said about Dean and Lewis’s rigorous work.) Lunch Break is described as part of Lockhart’s new series “about the present state of US labor,” but the film discloses little concerning this ambitious remit. (For example, nowhere is it explained that the Bath Iron Workers’ labor is put to very particular ends: The company is part of the General Dynamics conglomerate and a major supplier of destroyers to the US Navy.) The employees’ idleness might be seen as a metaphor for the way in which our economy has ground to a halt, but Lockhart remains a better portraitist and formalist than analyst or polemicist.

The same can be said of James Benning, who is perhaps the single greatest influence on Lockhart’s moving-image corpus and who edited Lunch Break and helped supervise its sound. (For example, RR [2007], his wondrous latest film, is diminished somewhat by its didactic sound track selections.) He has, with composer Becky Allen, given Lunch Break a deep, consistent, ambient industrial drone (similar to Dean’s Kodak) that is punctuated occasionally by the clang of metal against metal. Snippets of conversation and, at one point, a Led Zeppelin song bubble up to the surface of the mix as the camera passes by plausible sources for the sounds. The disjunction between edited sounds seemingly played at normal speed and a slowed-down image helps articulate the constructed nature of Lockhart’s elegant, if seemingly transitional, film.

The Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader arrived in California in the late 1960s, created a small, potent body of lyric artworks, and then was lost at sea in 1975. He has received increasing attention in recent years, yet he remains a mystery. Rene Daalder’s documentary, Here Is Always Somewhere Else: The Disappearance of Bas Jan Ader (2007), is a useful if pedestrian addition to the spate of exhibitions and publications honoring the artist, and its flaws highlight why we may never come close to understanding Ader’s fateful decision to sail across the Atlantic in the Ocean Wave (a twelve-and-a-half-foot sailboat).

First and foremost, the romance of Ader’s disappearance has seduced Daalder into inserting himself more forcefully into the narrative than his association with Ader would seem to invite. (The already brief sixty-six-minute documentary would be half as long if it focused solely on its ostensible subject.) Second, most of the interviewees—Mary Sue Ader-Anderson, the artist’s widow; Ader’s classmates and students; younger artists influenced by his work—offer little insight into his practice or legacy; only artist Tacita Dean, who made a film about the amateur sailor Donald Crowhurst, who also died at sea, speaks eloquently about Ader’s importance to younger practitioners. The film likewise neglects to situate Ader fully within his artistic context, references to Chris Burden and “macho” American artists notwithstanding.

The documentary, created at the behest of Ader-Andersen, dutifully traces the artist’s early life in the Netherlands, his passage to the United States as the only crew member on a sailboat from Morocco, his student days and marriage (and, irritatingly, Daalder’s simultaneous B-movie work in Hollywood), the travails of his short career, and, of course, In Search of the Miraculous, the three-part artwork of which his solo voyage across the sea was one part. With only this biographical material as ballast, it seems inevitable that Daalder would posit Ader’s early life as the greatest influence on his art, and indeed a children’s book written by his mother and an impromptu bicycle journey to Jerusalem taken by his pastor father are, to the filmmaker, what animated Ader’s practice and ill-fated final adventure.

It is no doubt difficult to see past Ader’s untimely disappearance to the milieu in which he worked while alive, and the temptation to see Ader’s entire career as inexorably leading to In Search of the Miraculous must be great. But working with the full support of Ader-Andersen and the artist’s estate, one would expect that Daalder could have come up with more. He presents some previously unseen footage, and the DVD edition possesses the unequivocal benefit of including several of Ader’s film works on a second disc. As it stands, though, should another filmmaker ever gain equal access to the artist’s archives, colleagues, and artistic inheritors, much remains to be explored.