Moonlanding/Janus Head [Films in Progress]

Having emigrated from Europe in 1968, Maria Lassnig likened her arrival in New York to landing on the moon. Combining found footage of a spacecraft’s arrival on the moon—suggestive of the iconic 1969 televised broadcast of NASA’s Apollo 8 moon landing—with the artist’s own footage, Lassnig conjures the sense of wonder, discovery, and alienation that accompanies new experiences. Sequences of merged faces invoke Janus, the ancient Roman god of beginnings and transitions, to illustrate the thrill and confusion inherent in change. This change is also decidedly technological; Moonlanding/Janus Head emphasizes the televisual medium of the broadcast image and the picture plane of the screen, where the vastness of planetary space seems just as near as it is far, bringing outer space into one’s living room. Through glimpses of Hollywood classics like Spartacus (1960) and Gone With The Wind (1939), Lassnig shows how this phenomenon also works with time; these films transport the distant past to a present-day in which the viewer is left to sort fact from fiction. (Jocelyn Miller)

Rough cut by Maria Lassnig. Color correction and final cut completed posthumously in accordance with Lassnig’s original editing concept by Mara Mattuschka and Hans Werner Poschauko. Soundtrack composed of a sound collage of Arnold Schönberg’s Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene, Op. 34, Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16, Morton Subotnick’s Touch, and an original tape recording by Maria Lassnig.

Digitization by the Austrian Film Museum. This film was preserved and restored by the Maria Lassnig Foundation in collaboration with the Austrian Film Museum.