Dark Side of the Moon

Dark Side of the Moon (2002)

Opération Lune

Top secret.

A French documentary or, one might say more accurately, a mockumentary, by director William Karel which originally aired on Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune. The basic premise for the film is the theory that the television footage from the Apollo 11 Moon landing was faked and actually recorded in a studio by the CIA with help from director Stanley Kubrick.

Date of release
2002-10-16
TMDB
7.1 / 10 (48)
Runtime
52m
Genres
Documentary
Director
William Karel

Casting

Interesting facts

Dark Side of the Moon is a French mockumentary by director William Karel. It originally aired on the Franco-German television network Arte in 2002 with the title Opération Lune.

Production

William Karel had just completed Hollywood, a film based on lying, when he and the documentary unit of Arte had the idea of making a mockumentary, to play with the serious tonality of Arte but also for pleasure, and to make a funny film based on the idea that one must not believe everything that one is told, that witnesses can lie, archives can be tricked, and that any subject can be twisted by misleading subtitling or dubbing.

Karel took care to avoid any conspiracist tonality. In particular, at no point is it said that Armstrong did not walk on the Moon. The script just hypothesizes that the US might have wanted a contingency plan in case the first steps could not be filmed. The arguments regarding the impossibility to operate a camera on the Moon were found in websites.

Since it was impossible to know at what point of the film the spectators would start having doubts, parodic bloopers were added in the end credits to make the hoax obvious, in case someone would believe it until the end.

The film uses four main types of elements:

Karel interviewed Kubrick's widow, Christiane Kubrick, and his brother-in-law, Jan Harlan, pretending he was making a documentary on Kubrick, his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Moon or NASA, and asking intentionally vague questions. Karel also interviewed Vernon Walters, Buzz Aldrin, his wife and some NASA personnel, under the same pretext of making a bona fide documentary.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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