Moon Landings: The Science of Fictions

Presented by the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

Part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive screening series Science Fiction Against the Margins. Learn more at cinema.ucla.edu.

Inspired by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, French magician-turned-filmmaker Georges Méliès applied his pioneering bag of cinematic tricks to a spoof of scientific pretensions and imperialist hubris and, in the process, brought a new genre to the screen. Often described as the first science fiction film, A Trip to the Moon presents its intrepid lunar explorers as a band of buffoons more enamored with militaristic pomp than anything resembling rational inquiry, as quick to bash each other in the course of debates as they are the aliens they encounter.

DCP, b&w, silent, 13 min. Director: Georges Méliès.

In 1964, the year of Zambia’s independence, Edward Nkoloso, former Zambian resistance fighter and founder of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, announced his intention for Zambia to beat the United States and the Soviet Union to the moon. His astronauts: a 17-year-old girl named Matha Mwambwa and a pair of cats. This little-known but wildly potent historical fact is the leaping-off point for Ghanaian-born writer-director Nuotama Bodomo’s captivating short that goes well beyond reenactment to capture the complex tangle of intention and emotion at work in the moment a modern myth is born.

DCP, color, 14 min. Director: Nuotama Bodomo. With: Diandra Forrest, Yolonda Ross, Hoji Fortuna.

In The Science of Fictions, Indonesian writer-director Yosep Anggi Noen channels a nation’s trauma through the traumas of a farmer who is witness to and victim of both its horrors and absurdities. An opening reference to Nixon’s gift of a moon rock to the government of Indonesia after the Apollo 11 mission leads into the moment that forever changes Siman (played by noted Indonesian author and theater director Gunawan Maryanto). After stumbling on a film set for a staged lunar landing in the middle of the forest, he is brutalized by soldiers and sent back to the village where he lives with his mother. Rendered mute by the violence inflicted on him, Siman becomes fixated on remaking the forbidden event he witnessed on his own terms. He builds his own makeshift lunar model, designs his own space suit and moves everywhere at a radically slowed pace, as if walking in zero gravity.

Noen intercuts Siman’s story with that of a figure who resembles Indonesia’s longtime dictator Suharto but who himself only seems to be play-acting the role while carrying out a real campaign of terror, everywhere followed by a camera crew. Siman’s own enigmatic efforts to process what happened to him seem to lead him only deeper into forms of performance, first with a traveling theater troupe and then as a tourist attraction. How all this relates to Indonesian history, or even when this story is taking place, is left vague as Noen emphasizes the allegorical over the actual, the constructed over the documented in the maintenance and expression of power.

DCP, color, in Indonesian and Javanese with English subtitles, 106 min. Director/Screenwriter: Yosep Anggi Noen. With: Gunawan Maryanto, Yudi Ahmad Tajudin, Ecky Lamoh.