cinemattraction

It seems hard to imagine now, but only 50 years ago the moon had the Earth’s orbit to itself and space flight had never been achieved, save for one German V-2 rocket during WWII. While NASA, satellite communications and Neil Armstrong have become inextricably woven into our modern lexicon, and ventures into space now barely rate front-page news, there was a time in which such notions remained the stuff of pure science fiction. Couple the natural human inclination to fear the unknown with the Red Scare’s predominance in 1950s America, add to it the launch of the Russian satellite Sputnik, and you’re left with a recipe for a milieu more ripe for paranoia than any other in American history.

In Sputnik Mania documentarian David Hoffman seamlessly links the earliest days of the space race to the heightened Cold War tensions prevalent throughout the late 1950s. In doing so, he evocatively captures one of the seminal moments of the 20th century, in terms of both its scientific and geopolitical significance. His is a movie attuned to the magic and majesty of mankind’s pursuit of the heavens and the very real, often unintended consequences such lofty, groundbreaking achievements hold for everyday lives. With a remarkably wide range of archival footage and comic book style interpretations, apt contextualizing from his talking head subjects and Liev Schreiber’s poetic narration, the filmmaker presents a fascinating document that’s as much of our own time as any.

The film opens by mirroring the sudden shock felt by Americans of all walks of life when they learned, on Oct. 4, 1957, that the Soviet Union had launched a satellite into orbit. The surprise and awe quickly transformed into terror, as pronouncements from all levels of the U.S. government raised the prospect of the communists arming their new technology and firing missiles from space. Hoffman glides through the hysterical overreaction to what should have been seen as a universally positive development, the frantic scientific search for an American response and the Soviets’ skilled PR manipulation of their triumph. Finally, he traces the emergent debate over the proper purpose of space exploration and pays tribute to the roles President Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev played in determining the tone and scope of its future.

Sputnik Mania reverberates with the sense of history coming alive, a rare filmmaking achievement. Hoffman’s reliance on such primary sources as newsreels, man-on-the-street segments and anti-Soviet propaganda films has the effect of putting his audience squarely within the mindset of an average American of the period. The movie does not have the tenor of a dated history lesson; the interview segments help shape our understanding of the footage at hand, rather than the reverse. Instead, the material maintains an immediacy that effectively draws out the visceral response felt by many when first encountering these monumental developments. The director palpably conveys their emotional significance while fluidly drawing the timeline at hand. Collectively, his efforts reveal Sputnik’s profound impact: the formulation of a new and disquieting culture of fear, the fundamental reshaping of American defense policy and, finally, the opening of a new global frontier for the good of all humanity.

© 2008 Robert Levin. All rights reserved.

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