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CHICAGO
PUBLIC RADIO REVIEW, Jonathan Miller (link
to segment)
"New
wave of indie cinema fights power of Hollywood,"
Boston Globe May 28, 2006 (link
to segment)
"A delightfully tongue-in-cheek homage
to a fictional East German space project, Jim Finn's "Interkosmos"
uses recreated newsreels combined with musical interludes to
resurrect the '70s in all its Brezhnev-era glory. Similar in
its mockumentary approach to "First People on the Moon"
but with a broader sense of wry fun, pic uncannily captures
the self-glorifying hyperbole and straight-faced seriousness
of the Communist bloc's attempts to make a splash in the race
to space. Adventurous fest auds will best appreciate this genuine
crowd-pleaser.
More a series of similarly-themed sketches than a cohesively
flowing unit, pic imagines East Germany leading the way in efforts
to colonize the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Participating in
the grand scheme for the betterment of an anti-capitalist world
are cosmonauts Seagull (Nandini Khaund) and Falcon (helmer Finn),
whose hesitant space romance, over intergalactic static, forms
the core -- a deadpan recitation of "The Trolley Song"
is priceless. Color footage is suitably tinged orange-pink with
age, and music and art direction are impeccable; as a final
tease, exit music is longer than in 'Gone With the Wind.'"
– Jay Weissberg, Variety link
Best Shoestring SciFi of 2006
"Less deep but more far out, Interkosmos also uses faux
documentary techniques to tell its space-exploration story.
The style is thrift-store vintage, with a sprinkling of communist
good cheer in a tale about a Soviet-era program. Writer-director-star
Jim Finn wrote the script after he finished filming, less interested
in building a narrative arc than in creating the proper tone.
Interkosmos includes newsreel footage of cosmonauts in training,
cheap and charming animation and several musical interludes,
including one of a field hockey team smacking balls for Marx
and Lenin.
The film's central story thread features Falcon and Seagull,
cosmonaut lovers flying separate spacecraft in parallel orbits.
Their conversations, spiked with pregnant pauses, are far more
banal than anything you'd overhear in a high-school cafeteria.
Falcon sings to Seagull ("Clang clang clang went the trolley/Ding
ding ding went the bell"). She tells him it sounds like
capitalist trash. At times, Interkosmos' hip, deadpan style
threatens to grow tiresome, but then Finn injects something
unexpected to liven it up. By the end, Interkosmos has coalesced
into a colorful portrait of an imagined time where movies and
space travel were happy, bubbly things." –
Jason Silverman, Wired link
"Jim Finn's Interkosmos, a retro
gust of Communist utopianism, is set to open the New York Underground
Film Festival on March 8. A cosmonaut romance set aboard a 1970s
East German space mission to colonize the moons of Saturn and
Jupiter, Interkosmos weaves together lovingly faked archival
footage, charmingly undermotivated musical numbers, propagandistic
maxims ("Capitalism is like a kindergarten of boneless
children"), stop-motion animation (of a suitably crude
GDR-era level), a Teutonic (and vaguely Herzogian) voiceover,
and a superb garage-y Kraut-rock score (by Jim Becker and Colleen
Burke). Finn's deadpan is immaculately bone-dry, and his antiquarian
fastidiousness is worthy of Guy Maddin." –
Dennis Lim, The Village Voice link
"Poker-faced, often hilarious, and endlessly
inventive, this minimalist mockumentary by Chicago filmmaker
Jim Finn uses a few established facts to invent a wild narrative
about an international communist project to establish colonies
on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Finn gets some of his giddiest
effects filming his own animals and SF miniatures, imagining
a letter written by an Indian astronaut on holiday to a colleague
("P.S. I have bought a hammock that smells of goat and
Mexico"), and creating a solemn radio communication about
"The Trolley Song." In short, this is very special.
Colleen Burke and Jim Becker wrote the delightful percussive
score." – Jonathan Rosenbaum,
Chicago Reader link
"...American Jim Finn's Interkosmos,
an unnervingly odd mock-doc about a putative East German space
program, filled with Seventies 'staches, synth-beep semaphores,
celestial rim-shots, poetically charged interstellar tine-can
transmissions, and a string of autistically choreographed in-flight
exercises..." – Chuck Stephens,
Film Comment
"...the debut feature film from Jim Finn....will
undoubtedly become a cult classic. ...an almost anally-retentive
eye for the iconography and fashions of the Soviet-era Warsaw
pact countries, and a great ear for both the comedy intrinsic
to Socialist propaganda dialogue - and pauses - this film is
a serious rib-tickler for those who can appreciate lines such
as "Capitalism is a kindergarten for boneless children",
delivered deadpan." – Matthew Tempest, The
Guardian link
Interkosmos, the first feature from experimental
shorts director Jim Finn, successfully bridges the gap between
the filmmaker's noggin and the comprehension of the audience.
Not every notion fully registers, but Finn scores enough hits
to mark this poker-faced saga of far-out space nuts as a transcendent
goof.
Shot in an artfully cruddy mix of Super 8 and 16 mm, the film
purports to tell the story of the theoretical East German space
program, complete with a series of hilariously low-rent training
programs and stress tests (watch out for the tarantula). From
this fertile premise, Finn constructs a rather astonishing replica
of boxy '60s Soviet style and tone, bolstered by a series of
barely-there special effects (the Tinkertoy space colony is
a particular delight), and a propulsive, gloriously kitschy
soundtrack. The absurdly extended end-credit/musical coda sequence
alone may be enough to warrant admission.
Narratively speaking, the film focuses on the burgeoning romance
between female cosmonaut "Seagull" and the fiercely
mustached "Falcon," mainly conducted via intercom
from their respective orbits around the moons of Jupiter and
Saturn. Any real semblance of plot, however, is continually
at the mercy of whatever the director feels like riffing on
at the moment, be it a digression on the socialist nature of
dolphins, or stop-motion animation of a guinea pig in a spacesuit,
or, in what may be the film's highlight, a gloriously lead-footed
musical number performed by rival field hockey teams. Taken
individually, these scattershot non sequiturs don't always fly,
with perhaps one too many musical interludes. On the whole,
however, Finn's seemingly random whims combine to form some
sort of wobbly, infectious gestalt. "Capitalism is like
a kingdom of boneless children," Seagull wistfully intones
at one point. Trust me, it works in context.–
Andrew Wright, The Stranger (Seattle) link
“Everything does make sense in this
movie,” claimed Chicago-based filmmaker Jim Finn when
he introduced his experimental, pseudo-documentary film, Interkosmos,
at the 2006 International Film Festival Rotterdam. Finn seemed
to be preempting criticism that his 70-minute feature, part
of the IFFR’s Sturm and Drang program of features and
documentaries by young filmmakers investigating new angles in
cinematography, was confusing or even disjointed¬—not
the sort of introduction that usually inspires audience confidence.
Yet, viewed from the right figurative angle, Interkosmos was
an intriguing genre-bending fantasy. It posited the existence
of a secret space program of the Soviet-dominated German Democratic
Republic (a.k.a. East Germany) during the 1970s. The visual
motif was ‘70s documentary; the footage appeared to come
from the bowels of some long lost Communist film archive.
“The
real basis of the film,” says Finn, who also stars, “aside
from my obsession with Communism, was my fantasy about a utopian
space exploration program.” The general lack of knowledge
in the West about the GDR and communism gave Finn a lot of leeway
to invent his own reality. Rather than making a straight faux
documentary, however, Finn deliberately cut documentary-like
elements, aiming for a more experimental work. Add to the mix
a series of musical numbers, and it’s easy to understand
how some viewers get lost. It wasn’t a shock when the
Dutch audience not only followed the plot, but seemed quite
taken with the visual style and anachronistic musical sequences.
Indeed, Rotterdam has always focused on innovative, independent
cinema from around the world, embracing the more offbeat, non-commercial
undertakings. – Macauley Peterson, The Independent
Without question, the best avant-garde musical
ever made about the East German space program's fictitious 1970s
race to colonize Jupiter's and Saturn's moons; and I'd say that
even if there were (or would ever be) another. Writer-director
Jim Finn's one-of-a-kind film incorporates NASA footage, berserk
production numbers, high-school-play space-capsule interiors
and straight-faced newsreel footage to create a fantasy that's
at once bare-bones minimal yet weirdly grand: Rushmore's Max
Fischer Players Present Solaris. Not to mention that it's frequently
funny as hell; as when one cosmonaut (Finn) woos his chilly
comrade with a broken-transmission rendition of The Trolley
Song. – Jim Ridley, Nashville Scene link
Finally, a new work that seemed to sit between
the low-fi aesthetic of super8 and the glossy orchestrations
of Barney was the brilliant and perverse Interkosmos
by American artist Jim Finn. The film is a fictional documentary
on an imagined Communist East German space programme, told through
photographs, test and training footage and a series of infectious
specially recorded German pop songs. The film's ironic formality
and mock-seriousness creates an absurdist atmosphere. Typically
unclassifiable the film testifies to Rotterdam’s enduring
place as a home for all forms of the moving image.–
Film London link
"Jim Finn's "Interkosmos",
meanwhile, isn't quite the documentary it seems: using archive
footage to help chart an invented '70s Soviet interplanetary
programme, its witty blend of cosmic wonder and campy bathos
bears comparison with Herzog's "Wild Blue Yonder'. "
– Time Out London
"...the eclectic score - by Jim Becker
and Colleen Burke - is so evocative and perfectly-judged it
deserves a CD release of its own: this is the best krautrock-spaceopera
soundtrack that Can never wrote."–
Neil Young, Jigsaw Lounge
"A musical of sorts in its own right,
Interkosmos is a meticulously crafted faux documentary
about a fictitious 1970s East German space mission. Transcending
mere Communist kitsch, it may be the first film to thank both
Judy Garland and Hugo Chavez in the closing credits."–
Joshua Land, The Village Voice
The most pleasantly oddball film screened
was Chicago filmmaker Jim Finn's "InterKosmos," a
faux-found document which places a romance against the backdrop
of a 1970s East German space program. Finn seamlessly blends
actual space footage with his own lovingly handcrafted and carefully
art directed scenes of Eastern Block cocktail parties, field
hockey teams and space capsules. With a propulsive, playful
score by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke, as well as likely the
strangest version of "The Trolley Song" ever recorded,
the film is an endearing delight.– Mark Olsen,
IndieWire link
Interkosmos (2006) opened NYUFF and
it brings up a good question: why must the socialist musical
be a dead genre? This feature debut by Jim Finn is the much
anticipated sequel to his 2002 short wüstenspringmaus,
about the behavior of the capitalist gerbil. At the NYUFF screening,
Finn confessed to being “obsessed with Communism,”
and his resurrection of stereotypically crude Eastern Bloc propaganda
aesthetics was much appreciated by a packed house of hipster-nerds.
The mockumentary is made from “found footage” Finn
actually made himself with the help of cinematographers Dean
DeMatteis and Butcher Walsh, who screwed up the exposures to
give a faded, Cold War-era feel to the images. The title describes
a real international Communist space program from the ’70s,
but this East German Interkosmos project is invented: the characters—played
by actors, crew members, and the director (as Cosmonaut Falcon)—are
on a mission to establish a colony, as well as a library to
house Marxist materials, on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn.
Interspersed among shots of cosmonauts sleeping and NASA footage
of space are black and white snippets of a dinner party that
Finn modeled after photographs he had seen of Communist bureaucrats
actually looking like they are having fun. The soundtrack incorporates
readings from the Communist Manifesto, a Kraut-rock score (produced
by musicians Jim Becker and Colleen Burke), and even a Busby
Berkeley-ish musical number with a field hockey team creating
sickle and hammer patterns. – mondokims
link
(Falso) documentário musical sobre uma ambiciosa missão
espacial (falhada) de colonização das luas de
Júpiter e Saturno na década de 70, com números
de dança a ecoar as cornucópias visuais de Busby
Berkeley. Podia ser um sonho alucinogénico em que os
anos dourados de Hollywood se encontram com a Alemanha de Leste
comunista. Isto é INTERKOSMOS, uma fantasia em longa-metragem
realizada pelo americano Jim Finn, com um visual retro-socialista
arrojado e uma banda-sonora de excepção. Material
de arquivo, teorias da conspiração e uma história
dramática reunem-se naquilo que Finn descreveu como “uma
história de amor comunista e um hino fúnebre a
uma experiência com 75 anos”. –
c7nema link
(translation below)
(False) musical documentary about an ambitious
(failed) space colonization mission to the moons of Jupiter
and Saturn in the 1970s, with dance numbers echoing the visual
cornucopias of Busby Berkeley. it could be an hallucinogenic
dream of the golden age of Hollywood meeting communist East
Germany. That's Interkosmos - a feature-length fantasy
directed by American Jim Finn with a retro-socialist visual
style and an outstanding soundtrack. Archival footage, conspiracy
theories, and a dramatic plot combine in what Finn calls "a
communist love story and a funeral dirge to a 75-year-old experiment."
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INTERVIEW(WORD DOC.)
published in Dutch magazine Glamcult
Letterpressed Interkosmos poster designed by Dean DeMatteis and printed by Dexterity Press, Chicago dexteritypress@hotmail.com