Director: Ferdinand Kriwet
Year: 1969
Time: 13 mins
An attempt to fuse together the media sources Kriwet encountered on a trip to the US during the hubbub surrounding the Appollo 11 mission to the moon. Grainy television footage is cut and pasted together, paired with a soundtrack of radio broadcasts, sometimes allowed to flow, at other times cut down to single repeated words and looped announcements, to mesmeric effect.
Kriwet does not limit himself to sounds and images of the Apollo 11 mission, though, also homing in on the advertising slogans of broadcast sponsors (including, neatly enough, Brillo, a brand immortalised by Andy Warhol some five years earlier), allows the relentlessly American Superman through his filter and overlays recorded images with boldface single-word inter-titles, flashed up for just a split second: GAS, LSD, LAW, ORDER, VIET, and so on. The repeated compère’s introduction of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew and the Apollo astronauts to some celebratory function sees Kriwet complete a complex picture of the moon landing as glorious scientific adventure, all-American hero worship, and advertising-laden capitalist propaganda victory.
During the 1960s and 70s Ferdinand Kriwet made art works for broadcast, publication and performance alongside writing Concrete poetry. Apollovision also exists as a book and an audio piece documenting the Apollo 11 spaceflight in 1969. Kriwet, who was in US at the time of the launch, filmed the story via its channels of dissemination in the American media, referring to the piece as a "bild-ton-collage" or "sound-picture-collage."