Anyone who has read my profile or who has caught a glimpse of my bookcase knows I have fairly dilettantish interests. In amongst the books on American mid-century furniture design or 1970s Europorn, there will the odd book on Soviet space exploration or doomed Antarctic expeditions led by clueless Englishmen with names like Hall and Oates. So it shouldn't surprise anyone who knows me and my better half, Muddy Karpitz, that last Sunday we checked out Star Voyager: Exploring Space on Screen at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image.
As the tagline to the exhibition says, it's a "journey through the fact and fiction of space exploration from Fritz Lang to the moon landing, to Star Trek and Total Recall."
In short – this is a real nerd-fest of Asimovian proportions.
Highlights include an extraordinary piece of silent film from Denmark, Himmelskibet (A Trip to Mars) (1918), beautifully restored by the Danish Film Institute; archival footage from the Soviet Union in which we catch the briefest glimpse of Sergei Korolev, the elusive and enigmatic "Chief Designer" of their space program, whose identity the Soviet government kept secret until years after his death, and a copy of correspondence between rocket engineer Werner Von Braun (AKA NASA's favourite Nazi) and a young fan-boy from America's mid-west who would later emigrate to Australia and settle in Horsham!
As expected, iconic SF films like Stanley Kubrik's '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) and Andrei Tarkovsky's 'Solaris' (1972) get a look in, but for a really haunting cinematic experience, the experimental film "Star City" by British filmmakers Jane and Louise Wilson, a four-screen installation piece depicting the now empty and ghostly Russian cosmonaut training facility, is worth the price of admission alone.
The exhibition finishes this weekend, so use your Australia Day holiday to check it out. Kids holiday workshops like Kids in the Studio - Space Explorers: The Ultimate Space Adventure - finish on Friday 27 January 2012.
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