For All Mankind · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

A pencil floats in the cabin and turns over, slowly, going nowhere. Nobody reaches for it. The camera doesn't reach for it either. It just holds, and you find yourself watching the thing drift the way you'd watch dust hang in a shaft of light. In almost any other movie, a hand would close around that pencil and put it to use — a checklist signed, a course corrected, a situation met and changed. Here the gesture never comes. That small refusal is the whole film, and it's where Gilles Deleuze becomes a useful companion to watching it.

Deleuze split cinema in two. In the movement-image — most movies, most of the time — a person perceives a situation and acts to change it; perception flows into action, and editing keeps that circuit humming. In the time-image, the circuit snaps. The character can no longer act on what they see; they can only look, and endure, and we look with them. Deleuze called these moments pure optical and sound situations — opsigns and sonsigns — and the figure caught in them a seer (a voyant) rather than an agent. What's startling about For All Mankind is that it stages this break with the least passive people imaginable. These are the most trained agents alive, competence bred into the economy of every motion, men who know that a wasted gesture in their environment can kill them. And yet at the window they can do nothing. Earth shrinks. They watch. The sensory-motor link doesn't break here out of postwar exhaustion, the way it does in Italian neorealism; it breaks because the scale of what's in front of them has simply outrun the reach of any act. You can't do anything to the receding Earth. You can only let it cross you.

Then there's the matter of who is seeing. Reinert never held a camera. The cinematography — and the film treats it as cinematography, with an eye for backlight and duration and the geometry of a bootprint — belongs to machines bolted to the lunar module's descent stage, worn on chests, planted in the dust and left running. This is vision with no human standing behind it: what Deleuze, borrowing from the Soviet documentarist Dziga Vertov, called the gramme or engramme, the camera-eye as pure matter, the world more or less filming itself. For All Mankind may be the literal case of an idea Vertov could only gesture at in Man with a Movie Camera — a non-human eye, acentered, indifferent, catching a colleague's reflection sliding across a visor because that's simply what fell in front of the lens. The drift of the footage carries the same quality: weightlessness turns every shot into unanchored, flowing perception, a current with no fixed center, what Deleuze called the reume.

Where the eye lands is space that has stopped being a setting. The lunar surface — blown-out white laid against a black that registers as nothing at all, distances telephoto-compressed until a suited figure looks marooned — is close to a textbook any-space-whatever: a place emptied of the coordinates that would let action happen in it. And the film refuses to hurry through it. The passage through the terminator, from lunar day into night; the long receding view of home — these are held past the point of information into what Deleuze called temps mort, dead time, the stretch where nothing advances and the everyday is simply allowed to last. Brian Eno's score doesn't rescue you from the stillness. It doesn't swell at the landing or darken at the danger. It persists, varying only gently, and that flatness is the point: it gives you scale and silence instead of feeling told what to feel.

Here is Reinert's real invention, and it's a sly one. There is no single mission in this film. The astronaut suiting up in close-up and the one planting the flag are, by every cut, the same man — and they aren't. Reinert forged one composite voyage out of twelve missions and twenty-four men, then declined to apologize for it. Documentary runs on an old contract: actuality footage doesn't lie, the archive is truth. Reinert keeps every frame true and makes the whole false — a fiction assembled from nothing but fact. Deleuze would call this the powers of the false, and Reinert the forger: not a liar, but someone who creates a truth that no honest chronicle could reach. The archetypal journey — leave, cross, arrive, return — is realer than any one flight log. The same forgery runs through the sound. The voices are detached from any body we can name; no titles, no talking heads, just speech composited into a collective narrator, men caught in the act of telling their own legend while the radio static accumulates. Image and voice stand apart and speak across the gap — close to what Deleuze admired in Marguerite Duras, sound and picture each a whole, communicating only over the interstice between them.

The lineage is exact. From Vertov, the kino-eye that builds truth by rhythm rather than narration. From Resnais and Eisler's Night and Fog, the lyrical archive whose score is atmosphere, never punctuation. From Kubrick's 2001, score as environment rather than underscore — Reinert simply scoring the real version of the trip Kubrick imagined. From Kamecke's Moonwalk One, the Apollo footage first cut into cinema, which Reinert radicalizes by stripping the explainer's voice clean away. From Herzog's Fata Morgana and Reggio's Koyaanisqatsi, the proof that image and score alone can carry a feature with no story to lean on.

What it did to film as an art is quiet and large: it showed that nonfiction could be a pure time-image, that the false could work honestly inside the documentary, and that a director's whole authorship could arrive after the fact, in the cutting room, over events no one staged. Watch it again and notice what it never does. It never tells you anything. It leaves you at the window, in the astronaut's place, with nothing to do but look — which turns out to be the hardest and the most human thing the camera can ask.