TWST takes as its starting point the arrival of the Beatles in New York for their August 1965 concert at Shea Stadium, and as its title a Beatles song that already anticipates a time when the present moment will have become a haunting past, neither retrievable nor forgettable. But the frame of reference steadily broadens. Adjacent realities of 1965 are juxtaposed—the New York World’s Fair, the Watts riots filtering through from the East Coast on television. A cast of thousands summoned up—each separate sphere, each face and place given equal weight, each instant a center. Within these domains ghostly uncorporeal presences circulate, their words audible—figures of vanished youth still inhabiting these locations whose gritty photographic textures confirm their reality. A journey to the hidden core of that world both gone and palpably present.

Cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev is the focus of this chronicle of life on the Russian space station Mir, showing what outer space is really like. In addition to the routine day-to-day activities of eating, exercising, and conducting experiments in weightlessness, Krikalev is a bystander to the collapse of the Soviet Union during his 10-month stay onboard Mir in 1991-92.