Dark Side of the Moon (film)

This article is about the mockumentary. For other meanings of "Dark Side of the Moon", see Dark Side of the Moon (disambiguation)

Dark side of the moon
Directed by	William Karel
Produced by	Arte France / Point du Jour
Narrated by	Philippe Faure (French) / Andrew Solomon (English)
Starring	Buzz Aldrin, Christiane Kubrick, Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Vernon Walters, etc.
Cinematography	Stéphane Saporito, A.S.C.
Editing by	Tal Zana
Distributed by	Point du Jour International
Release date(s)	16th October 2002, France
Running time	52 mn
Country	France
Language	French / English

Dark Side of the Moon is a French mockumentary by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick. It features some surprising guest appearances, most notably by Donald Rumsfeld, Dr. Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Vernon Walters, Buzz Aldrin and Stanley Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick.

The official presentation of the film says: "Filmmaker William KAREL pursues his reflection on the relation of the United States with image, cinema and their capacity to produce "show". What other story can lend itself to such a examination but the space conquest, a war of image and show more than anything else. What if it was just a huge hoax initiated by the two great powers? Between lies and truths, this film mixes actual facts and others, completely trumped-up. Playing with irony and lie, its purpose is to entertain and raise the question of the use of archive, which can be made to tell whatever you want".

Production

William Karel had just completed "Hollywood", a film based on lie, when he and the Documentary Unit of Arte had the idea of making a mockumentary, to play with the serious tonality of Arte but also for pleasure, and to make a funny film based on the idea that one must not believe everything that you are told, that witnesses can lie, archives can be tricked, any subject can be twisted by misleading subtitling or dubbing. They looked for a topic that would be universal and historical but not sensitive like a war. Hence the choice of the moon landing, which had been since 30 year a topic of debate regarding the reality of these images. They found it was a fairly funny topic.

The film uses three main types of elements:

• Karel interviewed Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick, and his surviving brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, pretending he was making a documentary on Kubrick, his film "2001: A Space Odyssey", the moon or NASA, and asking intentionally vague questions. Karel also interviewed Edwin Aldrin, his wife and some NASA personnel, also under the pretext of making a real documentary.

• He used recycled footage of staff of President Richard Nixon, including Rumsfeld and Kissinger, taken from his earlier documentary Les hommes de la Maison Blanche and edited in order to twist their words.

• Other "witnesses" are played by actors to make the connections between the sentences pronounced by "real witnesses" and make a credible story. Among many giveaways (mainly in the second half) that the entire film is a hoax in jest, these "staging" witnesses are named after characters in Kubrick and Hitchcock films, such as a film producer named "Jack Torrance" or Nixon's secretary called "Eve Kendall".

Other elements appearing in the second half are "borrowed" from various documentaries that are mentioned in the end credits. These are the only parts of the film in which deceptive subtitling is used. The photo showing a portrait of Kubrick on the lunar soil is the only image in which special effect was used.

The arguments regarding the impossibility to operate a camera on the moon were found in websites.

Plot summary

The first part tells in an apparently neutral way the inception of the NASA lunar programme, emphasizing the issues related to its funding and the necessary public support to the programme. NASA regards Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as the prototype of the show that the space programme needs to be in order to gain this support, leading them to pimp up the spacesuits and vessels and even to hire 700 Hollywood technicians, making all of Hollywood stop working on other projects. But the outcome of Apollo 11 is disappointing: although the landing is successful, Neil Armstrong makes a fool of himself and not a single shot of the moonwalk is usable.

The incapability of shooting images on the moon had been anticipated by Richard Nixon and his staff who had decided to fake the pictures on the moon, using the props of 2001 that were still available in London. Kubrick had first refused, then accepted and finally directed the fake footage himself, appalled by the lack of skills of the CIA crew. KGB soon realized that "the whole thing was a hoax", that Apollo 11 had indeed landed but it was physically impossible to make pictures in the lunar environment. Besides, they had found a photo showing a portrait of Kubrick lying on the false lunar soil in the studio.

After the success of the fake footage, Nixon gets scared that the truth might be discovered, and in a drunken state asks CIA colonel George Kaplan to dispose of the whole film crew. The next morning he tries to cancel the order, but it's too late: meanwhile Kaplan has gone mad, sent his killers and disappeared. The death squad goes to Vietnam where the film crew has seeked refuge, but is immediately caught by the villagers: despite perfect accent and disguise, their commanding officer was black. Nixon decides to pull out the big guns and sends 150,000 men and a half of the 6th fleet to find and kill the four members of the crew. They fail. CIA takes over and assassinates them all but one, who takes shelter in a yeshiva in Brooklyn where he dies ten years later. Only Kubrick is spared.

Five years after Apollo 11, Kubrick calls NASA to borrow the top-secret wide-aperture Zeiss lens he needs to make Barry Lyndon. As a results, Nixon's successor decides to get rid of him as the last witness of the conspiracy. Informed of the threat to his life, Kubrick locks himself up in his home and never leaves it until his death.

As a conclusion, General Vernon Walters accepts to reveal the secret of Kubrick's demise, but unexpectedly dies the next evening: he has accepted to break the CIA rule of silence and anonymity.

It is finally revealed that this is a mockumentary as the end credits roll over a montage of blooper reels, with the main participants laughing over the absurdity of their lines or questioning if particular ones would give the joke away too soon. Besides being a comedic documentary, it is also an exercise in Jean Baudrillard's theories of hyperreality.

Giveaways

In addition to the increasingly incredible claims made as the film progresses, several factual errors of note are introduced by the narrator, perhaps intended as clues for the viewer:

• John F. Kennedy’s “We choose to go to the moon” speech was in 1962, not 1961 as was claimed.
• Luna 9 landed on the moon in February 1966, but the narrator states it was in January.
• The narrator states that Apollo 11 was launched on July 17, 1969, when in fact it was launched the day before on July 16.
• Korolev died following surgery to remove a polyp from his intestines, not from a tonsillectomy as is claimed.
• Lyndon Johnson is said to have been the Governor of Texas – an office he never held.
• Likewise, Richard Nixon is erroneously stated as having once been the Governor of California.
• The narrator implies the Cape was selected in part due to the George Bush family influence in Florida, yet no Bush had any connection with Florida until 1980 when Jeb Bush moved his family there. The Cape, however, had become the new missile test facility by 1950.

Several of the fictitious interviewees, such as Dave Bowman, Jack Torrance, and Dimitri Muffley are named after characters from movies directed by Kubrick. There are also references to films by Alfred Hitchcock, as both Eve Kendall and George Kaplan are character names in North by Northwest, and Ambrose Chapel is a location in the 1956 remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. The fictitious characters used in the interview are listed in the credits along with the names of the actors portraying them. For example, the rabbi is listed as W. A. Koenigsberg (W. A. indicating “Woody Allen,” as Koenigsberg is Woody Allen’s birth name) and the character is played by Binem Oreg.

The soundtrack also includes the song "The American Dream" from Wag the Dog by Barry Levinson, a fiction feature about a secretly government-commissioned Hollywood production of a fake war. At one point, footage featuring the military boarding a plane is underscored by the "right, left, right, left" of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman (R. Lee Ermey) from Kubrick's own film, Full Metal Jacket.

The most obvious giveaway appears in the closing credits with blooper reels showing the characters, real and fictitious alike, laughing over their lines or over their inability to remember them. But there is a final trick here, a "hoax within the hoax": the real characters are shown joking, giving the false impression that they are voluntarily part of the hoax. In fact at least one of these "jokes" - Kissinger saying that he would do it all over again - appears in Les hommes de la Maison Blanche where he turns out to be actually talking quite seriously about the war in Vietnam.

Characters

Actual "witnesses"

• Christiane Kubrick is Stanley Kubrick's widow.
• Jan Harlan is Christiane Kubrick’s brother. You will find the two discussing the “plot” of the film with Christiane Kubrick sitting on the same couch with Harlan.
• Henry Kissinger, Donald Rumsfeld, Alexander Haig were members of Richard Nixon's staff while the latter was president.
• Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin was the second man to walk on the moon as LEM pilot of Apollo 11. The alcoholism and depression problems mentioned in the film are not fictitious: he discussed them in his autobiographic book Magnificent Desolation: the long journey home from the moon.
• Lois Aldrin was Aldrin's wife when the film was shot. They divorced in 2012.
• David Scott and Jeffrey A. Hoffman are both retired NASA astronauts. Scott walked on the moon as commander of Apollo 15.
• Farouk El-Baz is an Egyptian American scientist who worked with NASA on the Apollo programme.
• Richard Helms was director of the CIA during the Nixon presidency, from June 1966 to February 1973.
• Vernon Walters has a particular importance in the film because of his involvement in the moon race, and the competition with USSR. He was interviewed because of his in-depth knowledge of these aspects. He died a week after the first interview he gave to William Karel, preventing a scheduled second interview from taking place. The sentence in the New York Herald Tribune, saying that he appeared in a French television documentary, is a fake.

Fictitious witnesses

• Jack Torrance is a fictional character in Kubrick’s The Shining—not a Hollywood Producer and is played by David Winger.
• David Bowman is a fictional character in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, not a real astronaut and is played by Tad Brown.
• Maria Vargas (lead character in The Barefoot Contessa) is played by Jacquelyn Toman who is not Buzz Aldrin’s sister.
• Eve Kendall is a fictional character in Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest and was not Nixon’s secretary (that woman's name was Rose Marie Woods) and is played by Barbara Rogers.
• Dimitri Muffley is a play on the names from Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (Soviet Premier Dimitri Kisov and American President Merkin Muffley) and is not a “former KGB agent.” He is played by Bernard Kirschoff.
• Ambrose Chapel is the name of a place in Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, not an “ex-CIA agent” who is played by John Rogers.
• George Kaplan (mentioned by narrator) is a fictional character within a fictional character in the Hitchcock film, North By Northwest.
• W. A. Koenigsberg (W. A. is for “Woody Allen,” as Koenigsberg is Woody Allen’s true name) The character is played by Binem Oreg.

Reception

Arte aired the film for the first time on 16th October 2002, and a second time on 1st April 2004, followed by a debate. At the press screening before the first airing, some people who had missed the beginning left the projection room infuriated.

About ten television channels worldwide aired the film on 1st April 2004, and Channel 4 aired it in September the same year. Australian broadcaster SBS television aired the film on April 1 as an April fools' joke, and again on 17 November 2008 as part of Kubrick week. It was aired again on 27 July 2009.

When the film was shown to a group of sociology students studying conspiracy theories, many mistakenly believed that this was a sincere and serious film. Furthermore, moon-landing hoax advocate Wayne Green cited the film as evidence for his views, apparently believing the out of context footage of Nixon staff was really about a moon landing hoax. Extracts ranging from a few minutes to the whole film stripped of the credits and key sequences are posted on Youtube by conspiracy theorists as "proof" that, either the images on the moon are fake, or the moon landing never happened. Karel himself received e-mails from people congratulating him for "exposing the moon landing hoax", which amused him.

Influences

William Karel indicated that he found inspiration in Orson Welles' radio broadcast The War of the Worlds, Capricorn One, and the docudramas by Peter Watkins. He refers to Dark side of the moon as a "documenteur", after the title of a film made by Agnès Varda in 1980-1981.

See also

• Apollo moon landing hoax accusations
• Capricorn One
• Wag the Dog
• World War III (film)

External links

• Opération lune at the Internet Movie Database