I love legends. I love the way they have a life of their own, growing in unexpected directions, sometimes appearing, sometimes hiding as you look for them, changing shape according to your viewpoint and to who is talking to you, I like the element of mystery, and faith, without which they couldn’t exist. They are the game of the broken telephone brought up to global best-seller standards. The little tailor that killed seven in one shot. Seven what? Haven’t you heard? What? Oh yes, seven giants? I love it.
Let’s take a modern tale: the landing of the American astronauts on the Moon, mankind’s greatest achievement to date. Did it or didn’t it happen? Opinions are divided, with those of us who were alive at the time sticking firmly to our story. It did happen. We all remember exactly where we were when we first saw the fuzzy footage of Armstrong putting foot on the Moon and we all heard him saying his thing about “giant step for mankind”. (I was very hungry, nursing a cup of coffee in a bar in Pigalle, Paris) Other people have succumbed to the various conspiracy theories that abound on the Net and deny it, while an increasing number I believe couldn’t give a damn one way or another. “Who cares?” It was too long ago and they are busy watching other conspiracy theories centered mostly on Kardashian-type reality shows and their global-regional offshoots and their two minutes of attention span on the subject were spent long ago.
Not in my case. Every time I have come across the subject I have found something new in it, I have learnt something valuable about the psyche of the masses, of individual men, of me.
ME
Let’s start with this picture. That’s me in my empty studio on the day I ceased being a commercial photographer. Commercial somehow implying a financial gain from the profession, a distant memory in my case thanks to the rise of digital photography and self-service Internet imagery.
It was taken by my good friend and enormously talented photographer Jorge Rubia. I look a bit puzzled in it because I am wondering why he is rocking back and forth while shooting furiously with his Leica. “I am using my new lens and at f1 I cannot be sure of my focus so I move a little in and out. The depth of field is only a couple of millimetres so if I shoot a lot something will be sharp” “F1?” I thought “That is a Leitz Noctilux!” I had never seen one before, and it is a thing of beauty this big chunk of glass, the stuff of legends. Technically it is described as having an aperture of 1:1. That is only a physical measurement, it means that the size of the apparent aperture as measured on the front element is equal to the focal length of the lens from its nodal point to the film plane. Pretty boring and obscure stuff, especially in a day where few actually understand the words “film plane”, “nodal point” or even “film”. In practical terms it means that it has the highest light-gathering capacity of any lens manufactured today. It is a “fast” lens. Also because of its narrow depth of field (band of sharpness) a very narrow area of the face is sharp, maybe from tip of the nose to the ears and the background details become as creamy as peanut butter spread on toast!
Its great claim to fame for me was that the legendary director Stanley Kubrik had used one of these beauties specially fitted to a movie camera to film the candle-lit scenes in his 1975 masterpiece Barry Lyndon. And that was the thread that caught my attention when many years later, probably in 2004, people started again talking about the supposed massive CIA and NASA cover-up that was the landing on the moon. It was nothing new, really, lots of people had already had a go at it. I was even shown an area called Moon Landscape near the Goanokontes Oasis (in Namibia!) that the locals swear was the backdrop for the moon landing pictures. Well, it is desolate enough but does not really look like the images on TV. So the idea of a fake movie had even reached the deserts of Africa!
Then one day my youngest son announced that the Moon landing had definitely not taken place at all, it was all a hoax and the images that we had seen of the event had been filmed by Stanley Kubrik in the MGM movie studio in England. He had seen a documentary about it called “Dark Side of the Moon”. That settled it for him.
Stanley Kubrik? What did he have to do with the moon landing conspiracy?
The mystery was resolved for me shortly afterwards when the local TV network run the film and I could watch it myself. Simply put, faced with the uncertainty of making a successful landing on the Moon or even getting any usable footage of an event that was going to be watched live by an estimated 530 million people worldwide, President Nixon decided to play safe and fake the whole thing in a studio with the help of Stanley Kubrik. A sort of remake of Georges Melies 1902 film Le Voyage dans la Lune. People have since discovered all sorts of mistakes and anomalies in the footage that “prove” the hoax and they were all in the movie I saw: strange lights and shadows, foot-prints too deep, the American flag fluttering in the wind-less lunar atmosphere, the bit of a tripod leg in a corner of the movie frame, no stars visible in the night sky, a portrait of Stanley Kubrik carelessly dropped on to the Moon surface, you name it. But most important, there were interviews with the heavyweights of the Nixon administration calmly discussing the massive cover-up operation that culminated in the killing of the entire crew that had worked on the fake landing movie! Donald Rumsfeld, Henry Kissinger, Alexander Haig, Vernon Walters, all responding candidly to questions about this massive and unprecedented manipulation of public opinion. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin also made an appearance with his wife, as did even Stanley Kubrik’s widow Christiane reminiscing about the shoot! What was going on? I was totally gripped by the film, not knowing what to think of it as the fantastic story unfolded on the screen. The movie ends at General Walters burial ceremony, after his mysterious death the night before he was due to make great revelations about the conspiracy. I sat stunned as the credits rolled by and then I saw with disbelief all the blooper scenes as the actors forgot or fluffed their lines, some asking to read the script again, and laughing abundantly. It was a hoax of a hoax!
As a film it is hugely entertaining and director William Karel received a couple of awards for it. It is a masterpiece of disinformation showing what can be achieved with a couple of actors and a narrator to set the story going, some witnesses quoted out-of-context when responding to vague questions, all interspersed with archive footage. I believe the footage involving Nixon’s top aides came from a previous documentary shot by Karrel. They were not talking about the Moon at all!
If the film had been meant to debunk all the arguments of the conspiracy raging for over thirty years it had the opposite effect on a lot of people who, like my son, had not watched the ending. But I don’t think that was the intention, the team just wanted to have some fun with an idea not very dissimilar to Orson Well’s reading on the radio of the War of the Worlds. Create some shock, but not panic.
The so-called proofs quoted in support of a “fake landing” are really without substance and, being a photographer myself I don’t understand how people can be so taken with them. But we needn’t even go to the trouble of looking at the detail if we only use a bit of common sense. NASA was employing nearly 400,000 personnel at the time of Apollo 11 and to think that the whole operation could be kept secret from all of them stretches a bit the imagination. Especially in the United States. And even if the CIA had managed to keep it secret from the American people it would have never gone unnoticed by the opposition. I mean the Russians.
If you accept some bits of the movie as being true you unfortunately have to swallow the entire thing whole. A shoot done in one week-end in an unfamiliar studio by four people? You obviously have never been on a movie set. You would need an assistant just to find the light switch!
NASA has posted online over 14,000 pictures spanning the entire Apollo program for anybody to see and use. Did they have a permanent (and secret) studio somewhere on Earth where they churned out the stuff? C’mon! Also the conspiracy theory seems to be directed only at the first landing. What of the other five Apollo landings that brought the total of astronauts walking on the Moon to twelve? It might be that the ratings of the Great Lunar Show had dropped too low for anybody to maintain interest in it, even the “theorists”
THE LENS
One aspect of the film that I found impossible to believe from the first was the claim that Stanley Kubrik had helped the CIA in exchange for the loan of a “secret” hi-speed lens. Kubrik was at the time of the Apollo program probably bigger than NASA in terms of popularity in the space conquest because of his film “2001 a Space Odissey” and didn’t need any favours from them. Quite the reverse.
With so many search tools available today on the Net I had a quick look. The lens had really been developed at the request of NASA in 1966 to permit photography of the dark side of the moon. Hence the title of the movie. I don’t think there was anything secret about it, especially not the price! But to my great surprise it was not a Leitz Noctilux 1:1 as I had thought all the time but a Zeiss Planar 1:0.7 Out of a total of ten made the CIA received six, Zeiss kept one for their museum and Kubrik bought the remaining three. I already knew that the lenses had been extensively modified to fit into his Mitchell BNC movie camera, not the sort of thing you would do with borrowed property.
I find the idea that I carried the wrong information ingrained in my brain like a cyst for so many years unnerving. And I told everybody about it! Where I got that inaccurate information from I shall never know, probably a photography magazine, but it does show me in a very small way how legends are created: the broken telephone.
