For All Mankind (film)

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  For All Mankind is a 1989 documentary film assembled from original footage shot by the astronauts of NASA's Apollo program. It covers missions from Apollo 7 through Apollo 17, the era that carried the first humans to the Moon. But the film is not a history lesson, and it is not a mission log. It is something stranger and more intimate than either of those things.

  Director Al Reinert constructed it to feel like a single trip to the Moon, drawing on footage the public had never seen. Reinert had spent a decade getting it to the screen. Along the way, he scanned every frame by hand, conducted interviews with thirteen Apollo astronauts, and even edited a presidential speech to fit his title. How do you tell a story that belongs to all of humanity? Reinert spent ten years answering that question.

• 2. A Decade in the Making

  ›

  The project started in 1979, when Reinert was reporting a story for Texas Monthly about the Apollo program. What he found in NASA's archives startled him. Vast quantities of high-quality footage, shot by the astronauts themselves, had never been shown to the public. It sat in storage at the Johnson Space Center, unseen.

  Reinert and editor Susan Korda sifted through six million feet of footage and eighty hours of NASA interview recordings. To work with the original material, Reinert had to bring an optical printer to the Johnson Space Center and scan each frame individually, enlarging the images from 16mm film to 35mm. It took him eighteen months just to copy the eighty minutes of film that ended up in the final cut. What he initially imagined as a relatively straightforward project would not reach audiences until a full ten years after he began.

• 3. Voices from the Missions

  ›

  Thirteen of the original Apollo astronauts sat down with Reinert for interviews, and their voices form the film's entire narration. No journalist. No narrator. Only the people who were there.

  Among those heard on the soundtrack are Jim Lovell, who flew on both Apollo 8 and Apollo 13; Michael Collins, who orbited the Moon on Apollo 11 while his crewmates descended to the surface; Charles "Pete" Conrad of Apollo 12; Jack Swigert of Apollo 13; and Ken Mattingly of Apollo 16. The Criterion Collection releases of the film include a subtitle track that identifies each speaker by name, so listeners always know whose memory they are hearing. Reinert also recorded a commentary track with Eugene A. Cernan, commander of Apollo 17 and the last person to stand on the lunar surface.

• 4. What the Camera Caught

  ›

  Some of the film's most memorable images are the ones that resist easy description. Dots of fire from Bedouin encampments in the Sahara, visible as faint specks in the darkness below. Sunrise cresting the curved edge of the Earth. A tape recorder floating in weightlessness, playing the theme from Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey.

  David Scott dropping a hammer and a feather simultaneously on the Moon's surface proved what Galileo had predicted centuries earlier: without an atmosphere, both objects fall at exactly the same rate. An astronaut tripping on the lunar surface paused to consider what a ruptured suit would mean. Others sang, hopped, and gathered rocks. The film also captures the first photograph showing the Earth as a complete circle, described in the narration as "floating in a blackness beyond perception," and the moment Neil Armstrong placed his foot on the Moon for the first time.

• 5. Borrowed Footage, Hidden Seams

  ›

  Not every image in the film came from the Apollo missions. Reinert reached back to Project Gemini for a handful of shots, including Ed White's spacewalk from Gemini 4, complete with what the source calls the infamous lost glove that drifted away during the walk. One shot used to represent Trans Lunar Injection, the burn that sends a spacecraft toward the Moon, was also drawn from a Gemini re-entry sequence.

  The film's editorial logic is to create the feeling of a single continuous journey, so these seams are invisible to an ordinary viewer. The Criterion releases address this with a subtitle track that identifies the actual mission for each shot, a layer of transparency that lets the curious viewer see exactly how the illusion was built.

• 6. The Title and the Speech

  ›

  The title For All Mankind comes directly from the plaque left on the Moon by the Apollo 11 crew. Reinert also included footage of President John F. Kennedy's address at Rice University, delivered on the 12th of September 1962, in which Kennedy argued for going to the Moon "not because they are easy, but because they are hard."

  But the speech as Kennedy gave it used the word "people," not "mankind." To make the quote match the film's title, Reinert dubbed over that word with audio of Kennedy saying "mankind," pulled from a different speech. The edit was deliberate, and its source is a separate Kennedy recording rather than the Rice address.

• 7. Brian Eno's Score

  ›

  Brian Eno composed the film's original music alongside his brother Roger and collaborator Daniel Lanois. The score was released as an album called Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks in 1983, several years before the film was finished, when the project was still being developed under the working title Apollo.

  By the time the film reached theaters in 1989, some of the tracks from that album had been replaced by newer pieces from Eno and others. Those additional pieces are collected on the album Music for Films III, meaning the full musical picture of the documentary is split across two separate releases.

• 8. Recognition and Legacy

  ›

  At the 1989 Sundance Film Festival, For All Mankind took both the Grand Jury Prize Documentary and the Audience Award Documentary. The International Documentary Association named it Best Feature in 1989 as well. The following year it received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature.

  The Criterion Collection has issued the film three times: on DVD in 2000, on both DVD and Blu-ray Disc in 2009, and on Ultra HD Blu-ray in 2022. Each release carries two subtitle tracks and the Reinert-Cernan commentary. The 2009 and 2022 versions added a making-of documentary and additional featurettes. For a film that spent ten years in production and drew on footage that almost no one had seen, the film found its audience, and the Criterion releases have kept it in front of new ones ever since.