The classical music film

After the film’s wordless opening fifteen minutes of apes in the prehistoric desert, a ‘match cut’ between a flying bone and an orbiting satellite instantly summarizes millenia of technological progress. There is no dialogue to help us in this next sequence, either – only a seemingly baffling combination of nineteenth-century Viennese waltz (Johann Strauss II’s The Blue Danube) and futuristic vision of spaceflight. Yet it works – the docking of shuttle and space station becomes, like the waltz, a rotating dance of courtship.