Out of the Present. 1996. Germany. Written and directed by Andrei Ujică. DCP. In Russian; English subtitles. 96 min.
Out of the Present charts the 10-month orbital isolation of Sergei Krikalev, a cosmonaut on the Mir space station who took 5,000 trips around the Earth while, back home, his native Soviet Union imploded and a rave broke out on New Year’s Eve 1991 at the Cosmonautics Pavilion at Moscow’s VDNKh, the “Permanent Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy.” Framed through the first two sequences ever shot in space on 35mm for a feature film, with guidance from Vadim Yusov, Andrei Tarkovsky’s cinematographer on Solaris, and with allusions to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solaris itself, Out of the Present oscillates between seriocomic scenes of Krikalev adrift in space—the flight engineer, a kind of good-humored Major Tom, attempts a life of normalcy in his zero-gravity tin-can space station, a gimcrack of exposed wires and floating detritus—and amateur footage of rioting Muscovites and tanks bearing down on the House of Soviets during the tumult of the August Coup. Within four breathless months, Mikhail Gorbachev would resign, and the dissolution of the USSR would be concluded on December 26, 1991. What lingers in the mind and eye, however, are the singular beauty of the cosmic perspective, a humanity that transcends petty politics, and “the smell of the earth…the feeling of being home again.”