Lt. Sam Ratanarat is one of two astronauts going to Mars in A SPACE PROGRAM (photo by Josh White)

A SPACE PROGRAM (Van Neistat, 2015)
Metrograph
7 Ludlow St. between Canal & Hester Sts.
Opens Friday, March 18
212-660-0312
metrograph.com
zeitgeistfilms.com

In the late spring of 2012, I wandered through the vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall at the Park Avenue Armory, accumulating experiences so I could become officially indoctrinated into artist Tom Sachs’s massive DIY installation, “Space Program Mars.” I was unable to attend the actual lift-off and exploration of the Red Planet that concluded the month-long show, but Sachs and his longtime collaborator, Van Neistat, have captured that special event in the new film A Space Program. With his crack team of artisans, New York City native Sachs, whose inaugural “Space Program” in 2007 at the Gagosian Gallery in Los Angeles went to the moon, has built nearly all the functional (if not precisely space-worthy) elements needed to send two women to Mars. But Sachs’s method is as much about process than anything else, insisting that the labor reveals itself, that his decidedly low-tech practice be evident everywhere. “Our space program is handmade, guided by the philosophy of bricolage,” deadpan narrator Pat Manocchia explains early on. Sachs’s method relies on bricolage, which he defines as “repair or creation with available resources.” The first part of A Space Program reveals how it all was built, using found materials, items bought in a regular hardware store, metal, and lots and lots of plywood. Then the team — consisting of Echo Mike (Evan Murphy), Charlie Bravo (Chris Beeston), Poppa Mike (Pat McCarthy), November Delta (Nick Doyle), Kilo Hotel (Dr. Kevin Hand), Juliet Lima (Jeff Lurie), Juliet Victor (Jared Vandeusen), Gulf Mike (Gordon Milsaps), Bravo Poppa (Bill Powers), and Sierra Victor (Sarah Vasil), each of whom has a very specific job to do — comes together to send Lt. Sam Ratanarat and Cmdr. Mary Eannarino into space in the life-size Lunar Excursion Module. The attention to detail borders on the obsessive as well as the whimsical, but Sachs has made sure to include every possible element, from a working toilet to a shelf of booze. In his first feature film, Neistat, who has made many shorts with his brother, Casey, and Sachs — Sachs also appeared on several episodes of the brothers’ wildly inventive HBO show, The Neistat Brothers, including those involving the cult-favorite miniature boat races — follows all the action centered around Sachs’s fully operational (yet forever grounded) Mission Control setup, where multiple monitors track the women’s progress, and emotions heat up when problems arise.

It all plays out like a real mission with real consequences, and that’s exactly how Sachs and Neistat see it, and want you to see it. But as much as it’s about the space program — as you watch the film, you’ll find it hard not to think about how much the government has cut funding for NASA, even though that’s not the point Sachs is trying to make — it’s also about the creation of art, about the handicraft of making things. Sachs previously worked as a welder and an assistant to Frank Gehry, so he demands that his art be functional as well as artistic. In the past, his work has concentrated on branding, merging high-tech and low-tech ideals and culture in such pieces as “Chanel Guillotine,” “Prada Toilet,” and “Hermés Value Meal” (okay, those might not have been fully functional) as well as his “Bronze Collection” series, consisting of large-scale bronze sculptures of Hello Kitty, My Melody, and Miffy, painted white to look as if they’re made purely of lightweight foamcore. With A Space Program, Sachs, who cowrote the film with Neistat, who serves as director, cinematographer, and coeditor (with Ian Holden), took all of those methods and put them to fascinating use, immersing the viewer firmly into NASA’s world of space exploration, with all the same fears and hopes as if you’re observing an actual mission, complete with the requisite potential danger. On the film’s official site, there’s a twelve-point list titled “How to Watch This Film.” Number 1 says, “This movie proves that you don’t need an education to understand — or to make — art,” number 3 explains, “This movie is NOT A DOCUMENTARY. It’s an INDUSTRIAL film like the safety videos they make you watch in high school shop class so you don’t cut your fingers off. Some say it’s a comedy,” and number 10 points out, “This movie is a love letter to the analog era.” It’s also a love letter to the power of the imagination and just what you can accomplish when you put your mind — and your bare hands — to it. A Space Program launches March 18 at the brand-new Metrograph movie theater on Ludlow St., where Sachs and Neistat will be on hand for opening-night screenings at 7:00, 9:00, and 11:00. Starting next week, you can catch Sachs’s “Tea Ceremony,” which developed out of “Space Program,” March 23 through July 24 at the Noguchi Museum, the first solo show there by an artist other than Isamu Noguchi, while “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective, 1999-2016” comes to the Brooklyn Museum from April 21 through August 14.