For All Mankind begins with JFK’s announcement that our technology–put together, he says, more perfectly than the finest watch–will take us to the moon. Speaking, JFK looks comfortable in a dated, ancient way. Kennedy’s announcement sets the tone for the rest of the film: it’s not laudatory or patriotic, though it depicts one of the proudest moments in American history. For All Mankind is a strangely distant film, refusing to revel in the triumph of the moon landing and instead constantly wondering what it means to have sent anyone into space anyway.

The film is an amalgamation of Apollo and Gemini missions during the ‘60s and ‘70s, painstakingly assembled from over six million feet of film footage archived by NASA. It is a collage without a documentary narrative; instead, the shots bounce off one another and emerge as a completed whole with eerie clarity. The footage is hauntingly beautiful: shots of empty chairs at mission control, the awesome fire that pours out of a space rocket, propelling it to the cosmos; lock-jawed astronauts testing their suits. Every frame is an artifact of the strangeness that was our space race, our desire to get to the moon.

The film is one of the most engrossing viewing experiences I can imagine. Everything is delightfully bizarre, like strolling through a gallery full of work by Marcel Duchamp: watching the film, you become an alien. Seeing a shot of some NASA types with IBM written on their jackets, I forgot what IBM stood for. The technicians push buttons on comically massive boxes that can’t be, yet are, computers; the astronauts themselves—eating, pissing, shitting, whirling in space—always seem to be on technological life-support, hyperaware of their reliance on the machines and space suits keeping them alive.  Wryly, they realize how alien they are.

One of the film’s most memorable moments is when one of the lunar astronauts—Buzz Aldrin, I assume—describes a dream he had while asleep in the lunar module. He dreamt that he followed a set of tire tracks with the moon rover. Eventually, he and Neil Armstrong found another rover with two astronauts, perfectly preserved, sitting inside. Upon closer inspection, the astronauts proved to be themselves; the rover, too, was theirs. It’s straight out of J.G. Ballard, who himself wondered about astronauts’ dreams.

Astronauts are a unique bunch. In their interviews, they seem to be somewhat unable to make sense of their experiences, and many of their thoughts seems centered on questions of “why me?” They must have their experiences, someone observes, as proxies for the rest of humanity: not everyone has gone to space, not everyone has been to the moon. With their suits on, it’s difficult to tell the astronauts apart, and Reinert makes no attempt to distinguish them when we hear their voice-overs. They speak with one voice: the voice of having been to space. It’s more collectivity than the Soviet Union could have ever imagined, and Reinert’s film remains the most fascinating vehicle in which it can be witnessed.