The visually stunning and informatively awakening Unseen Skies is the fruit of an incredibly well-crafted collaboration between filmmaker Yaara Bou Melhem and artist Trevor Paglen, presented in the CPH:Science section of CPH:DOX 2022.
Just because you cannot see something, does not mean it is not there. In fact, it may be all around you, all around the world. And likely, it may even see you, be watching you.
The visually stunning and informatively awakening Unseen Skies, director Yaara Bou Melhem’s feature-length debut, is a cinematic portrait of American photographer, artist, geographer, and, above all, provocateur Trevor Paglen. In his own words, Paglen “makes art of government secrets.” His work questions the use, accuracy, and ethics of technologies – AI, wiretapping, surveillance cameras, satellites – used by the world’s powerful – governments, the military industrial complex, Google, Facebook, to name a few.
Naturally, the film profiles most heavily on Paglen’s work and career, with little if any focus on his personal life. That is because Paglen’s work is his life. He has dedicated his existence, after a youth fittingly spent in the punk-rock scene, to photographing and thereby exposing satellites – military satellites, communication satellites, reconnaissance satellites, and so on. He is a very likable man, a cowboy-hat wearing guy who sits outside while others discuss his work at gallery and museum openings. He traverses the globe, though mostly based in the southwest deserts of America, to investigate the intrusive mismanagement of the shared resource of outer space. “The occupation of the sky,” Paglen calls it. He explains the chronological thread from invention of photography to state surveillance, to warfare technology, to this celestial occupation, to nuclear weapons and artificial intelligence (which, as he shows, may not be quite intelligent after all). Paglen posits there would have been little motive to explore space, even today, had it not been for the Cold War and its subsequent Space Race.
Unseen Skies follows Paglen as he works on his project “Orbital Reflector,” while also documenting his simultaneous work on several other projects around the world. The goal of this project was to launch a reflective, nonfunctional satellite into Earth’s orbit. Sunlight would reflect onto the satellite, making it visible from Earth with the naked eye, unlike the thousands of others above our heads at this very moment. In his own words: “Orbital Reflector was designed as a provocation. An opportunity to think about outer space, the geopolitics of the heavens, and the militarization of earth orbits. It’s a project about public space, and a project about who gets to exercise power over our planetary commons, and on what terms.”
Paglen’s efforts to see this project through, from just an idea in a sketchbook to a launch up into the sky, are tireless, and Bou Melhem is there with him through the entire process. She carefully and successfully stays close to Paglen over the course of several years, catching small personal moments, while letting the artist fully engage with his craft.
After a long battle with bureaucracy and logistics, the Orbital Reflector satellite was launched from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base on December 3rd, 2018. In order to deploy the reflector, clearance from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was needed. Soon after the launch, however, the Trump Administration shut down the government over funding for building a wall along the US-Mexico border. By the time the FCC returned to work, the satellite had turned to space junk. Ironically, the border wall was a continual focus of Paglen’s work. Not saddened or disappointed by the outcome of Orbital Reflector, Paglen explains the project served its purpose: it provoked.
Unseen Skies covers a lot of ground, literally and figuratively. To the ends of the earth and up to the stars, it is an artistic investigation and cinematic resistance to the currently unchecked militarization and weaponization of the cosmos. Though repetitive at times and a handful of scenes too long, the film submerges audiences in something that is out of sight but should not be out of mind. Animation throughout the film shows viewers how we are viewed, how machines and artificial intelligence technology see, assess, analyze, turn us into skewed data, and erroneously classify and label us. A powerful but not overbearing music score, composed by Helena Czajka, exquisitely intensifies the dystopian subcurrent of the film.
The film achieves the artist’s goal: to make the invisible visible. It is an incredibly well-crafted collaboration between filmmaker and he who is filmed. The film concludes on the beginning of our new reality, the onset of the global pandemic. As the world shuts down, Paglen begins to question the function and purpose of his work. He describes his attempts to create in the present day as quixotic. The intensity of our day, he says, is greater than can be expressed or reckoned with through artwork. This is where film and subject diverge. The world premiere of this film just after one year of pandemic life says otherwise. And as I sit outside a theater in Copenhagen, at a film festival celebrating documentaries all completed in the last year, the film exists as a reminder that all we can do is create during these times. Making art may seem impractical, maybe even pointless, when the entirety of the world is under such burden. But what else are artists to do?
