Content area
Full text
When Nasa handed Theo Kamecke $350,000 (pounds 220,115) and asked him to chronicle humankind's first footsteps on the moon, the film-maker's thoughts did not turn to Flash Gordon or the Sea of Tranquillity, or even to little Laika, barking uselessly into space. They crept towards a famous pile of monoliths in Wiltshire.
"The year before the moonwalk, I happened to be in England and persuaded some guys to drive me to see the dawn at Stonehenge," he said. "When [the film] came up, I right away saw the connection . . . It took a lot of thinking and a lot of effort and just a force of will to drag those stones to an empty field in the times when you only had deer antler to dig with.
"And it was the same kind of thing of stretching technology to its ultimate limits to be able to get somebody off this planet and walking on another one."
Kamecke's decision to cut from footage of daybreak at Stonehenge to shots of the vast "crawler" tractor dragging the Apollo 11 Saturn rocket to the launchpad at Cape Canaveral sets the tone for Moonwalk One, which has not been seen for 35 years.
Working with a reduced budget and the vaguest of briefs ("The Nasa guy said, 'Give me a time capsule' and I said, 'That's what you're going to get, buddy'"), Kamecke set out to make a film that reflected on the epochal event...