Spaceship Earth

For more than a decade, the filmmaker Matt Wolf has won acclaim for his meticulously crafted documentaries that reveal lost histories through deep dives into media archives. His focus is often on radical outsiders whose projects range from the quixotic to the paranoiac. His first film, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (2008), is an exploration of the life and work of an avant-garde cellist and disco producer, while Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project (2019) examines the fascinating obsession of its subject, who recorded live television news continuously from 1979 until her death in 2012.

Wolf’s latest film, Spaceship Earth (2020), traces the activities of a counterculture collective known as the Synergists from the 1969 founding of a sustainable ranch in New Mexico through the 1991 launch of Biosphere 2, a staggeringly ambitious attempt to pave the way for human life on Mars and to learn about how to live more sustainably on Earth by building a completely self-enclosed ecosystem inside a glass pyramid in the Arizona desert. This summer, Wolf spoke to the architect and critic Julian Rose about the uncanny resonance of the Synergists’ efforts to give form to the future.

Julian Rose: One of the fascinating things about Spaceship Earth is that the protagonists were obsessively documenting their own work as it progressed, producing countless hours of film and video that captured the projects they pursued. How did you first become aware of all that archival material, and how did your film evolve out of it?

: My creative process involves searching for archives because I’m drawn toward hidden histories. Most of the preliminary research I do begins on the Internet. In this case, I came across these striking images of eight people in brightred jumpsuits,