25 Pieces of Space Time
Sergei Krikalev spent 10 months on the space station MIR, while on Earth the Soviet Union collapsed. He was the last Soviet cosmonaut. In my film "Out of the Present", I reconstituted this historical mission from footage shot by the cosmonauts on video: from its start on May 18, 1991 in the USSR, until the return to Earth on March 26, 1992 in the newly reformed Russia. The prologue and the epilogue were filmed with a camera that I sent aboard the MIR station: a classical Arri 35mm. They are the first and, as of yet, the only cinematographic sequences filmed in space.
This anniversary artwork consists of the 25 photograms which make up the first second when a movie camera opened its eyes in outer space. These "25 Pieces of Space Time" are offered one by one as NFTs in a countdown starting May 18, 2021. The images are taken from the digital master of the film, corresponding to the DigiBeta standard from 1995. The Director of Photography was Vadim Yusov, who also shot Tarkovsky's "Solaris".
