A parody of science, an anti-imperialist satire and a legacy of féerie, the early fantasy film Le Voyage dans la Lune (Georges Méliès, A Trip to the Moon) was first screened on 1 September 1902 at the Théâtre Robert-Houdin in Paris. Sixty-seven years later, when the Apollo Lunar Module Eagle landed on the Moon, that impossible journey became reality. On the fiftieth anniversary of that event, the documentary Apollo 11 (Todd Douglas Miller, 2019) and fiction film First Man (Damien Chazelle, 2018) returned to the unfolding of the historical landing; Apollo 11 consists solely of archival material focusing on the lift-off at the Kennedy Space Centre (Merritt Island, Florida), the landing of the Eagle on the Moon, its reconnection with the Columbia spacecraft, and its re-entry into Earth's atmosphere. The landing of the Eagle is also staged in the long sequence of First Man where the action is intertwined with scenes showing the family of astronaut Neil Armstrong (Ryan Gosling) and which is followed by archival footage of the crowd watching the event on a large screen in Trafalgar Square, London. The combination of archival footage and fictional re-enactment emerging from these cinematic narratives of the Moon landing captures a historical moment rooted in space and articulates a visual memory of Armstrong's first step on the Moon or, as Roger D. Launius has put it, ‘the climax of humanity's greatest adventure to date.’

The Moon landing was a major triumph for the United States in the space race against the Soviet Union and a pinnacle of that process which, since the turn of the century, had seen technological advancements exponentially invade everyday life; its imagery offered a glimpse of that future which was predicted by those who lived immediately before the First World War and which was expected to be defined by a proliferation of technological progress. And yet, had the future offered a glimpse of itself to those who lived at that time, the Moon landing and other achievements would have been dwarfed by a much darker picture of things to come.