Annals of Light in Hannah Goodwin’s Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World M. Sellers Johnson November 2024 Book Reviews Issue 111 “What archives of humanity will exist after the end of the world” (p. 1)? This existential enquiry opens Hannah Goodwin’s monograph, Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World, a pithy and perceptive document on the nature of astronomy, cinema, memory, and archives of light. Her text accounts for the strong affinities between the cosmos and cinema and how these subjects invite imaginative promise and perspective that extends beyond the era of human existence. In doing so, Goodwin considers how “cosmic and cinematic archives are imagined as preserving some aspect of human existence in the face of catastrophe” (p. 1). In discussing visions of the apocalypse, Goodwin examines cinematic depictions of potentially world-ending disasters and how cinema addresses renderings of the past and conceptions of the future that continue past the moment of apocalypse. Through the scope of a cinematic cosmic imaginary, she analyses modes of documentary, narrative, and experimental filmmaking, in tandem with scientific study. Goodwin’s central conception of the ‘cosmocinematic gaze’ refers to a reciprocal notion of stargazing, encompassing a disembodied celestial view that is “at the heart of cinema’s potential to expose the universe, in all its sublimity and dynamism and terror, and to turn a lens back on our world, too, capturing, animating, resurrecting, and at time annihilating its sublime and spectral presences” (p. 13). Conceiving of a returned gaze to Earth raises questions of memory and preservation, which rely on the (temporary) presence of archival media. But ideas surrounding a cosmocinematic gaze also present enquiries on the endurance of such meaning and ephemeral media beyond the end of the world. From the pre-cinema technology of photography to presence of satellites, understanding cosmic cinema and the cosmocinematic gaze means contending with cinematic records and those that may extend past the point of human witness. Employing an academic perspective of Felix Eberty, Jean Epstein, Élie Faure, Siegfried Kracauer, and others, Goodwin fortifies her theoretical contention of a cosmocinematic gaze with well-established film theory. The notion of a cosmocinematic gaze also harbors an unusual and inspiring theoretical conceit. It is a great hope that records of humanity will carry on beyond our eventual extinction, via analogue or digital media. Like the Voyager Golden Records which carry archival compilations of human life, in the expanse of time and space, other media records may endure. Nevertheless, if such space probes fail to carry media archives of life on Earth, we might take solace in the notion of the emanating light that has and continues to ripple out from Earth into the expanse of the cosmos. Perhaps, as you sit here reading these words, under lamplight or sunlight, some being in a star system, lightyears beyond here and eons from now, will observe this moment as an unintentional, albeit serendipitous archive of a singular, cinema-infused moment – forged from cosmic stardust. Stardust utilizes a variety of pertinent case study films across its five chapters, including an introduction and epilogue. Beginning with science-education film during the 1920s, Goodwin explores how astronomy, astrophysics, and cinema converge in detailing Einstein’s theories of relativity. She then attends to the aerial perspective of wartime propaganda films, before shifting to the avant-garde works of the 1950s and 1960s, as postwar experimental filmmakers of the time respond artistically to the scalar presence of atomic forces. Her final case studies address more contemporary apocalyptic concerns by referring to more recent commercial, arthouse, and independent documentary filmmaking. Goodwin’s opening chapter details the cosmocinematic gaze and its media presentation surrounding important astronomical discoveries of Einstein’s theories of special and general relativity. Educational and artistic interest in these theories circulated through documentary films which greatly informed the popular imagination, while also challenging human understanding of the perceived rationality and stability of the universe. The second chapter uses military films during the Second World War to address the domestication of the sky and technologies of war that shaped our understanding of the cosmocinematic gaze in a time of upheaval and global destabilization. Chapter three focuses on the postwar instability associated with atomic warfare, where avant-garde filmmakers at this time experimented with alternative modes of filmmaking as a rejection of totalizing scientific perception and a reconfiguration of cinematic language as an artistic practice. The epilogue concludes these discussions by addressing the despair of the end times, alluding to the concurrent self-destruction through human-affected climate change, and cinema’s interest in the temporalities of outer space. Through the text, Goodwin’s theoretical arguments shrewdly and poignantly address the existential nature of cosmic cinema and human impermanence. Chapter one, “All Lights Askew: Relativity and New Astronomy on Film,” stages cosmocinematic enquires around early educational films of the silent era, namely David Fleischer’s The Einstein Theory of Relativity (1923) and Hanns Walter Kornblum’s Wunder der Schöpfung (Our Heavenly Bodies, 1925). Through inventive animation techniques, these films aspired to make scientific education and Einsteinian theories entertaining and comprehensible to the mass public. Kornblum’s film is considered influential in later documentary series like Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980-81) and even Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Goodwin’s case studies here demonstrate the confluence of the scientific and the imaginary that, at once, destabilizes and invigorates popular understandings of the cosmos and how light emanating from our planet plays an encouraging role as a conceptual archive of humanity, even in the afterglow of an apocalypse. Still, these films instil evident limitations in their creation for global audiences, as they appear geared primarily for white, European audiences. This, of course, also reflects the industrial and global dominance of the West during the early twentieth century. These films also betray certain imperialist attitudes inherent in the photography expeditions of Sir Arthur Eddington, who confirmed Einstein’s theories often at the expense of the local indigenous communities where he toured. In one such instance, an Eddington expedition to Príncipe relied infrastructures of a local plantation, the headquarters of the Sociedade de Agricultura Colonial, and the labor of formerly enslaved persons to support their ventures. The various photographs of local communities taken during these visitations also suggests a cold or removed perspective, cataloguing anonymous and “exotic” persons, rather than inquiring into their histories or experiences. Put plainly, Goodwin writes that “these expeditions depended on and attempted to reinforce global networks of imperialism” (36). While the works of Fleischer and Kornblum seem to alleviate “apocalyptic anxieties,” they also erase “the apocalypse wrought by” colonialism and its continuing decimation of humanity here in real time (p. 63). Goodwin postures that while Western cinematic narratives of the apocalypse often view it as an unambiguous external, cosmic threat, this perspective also ignores the slow apocalypse of self-destruction that humanity imposes on itself environmentally and ethically, through continuing modes of imperialism. Our Heavenly Bodies Her second chapter, “New Constellations: Aerial Cinema in the Second World War,” takes to the skies as military technologies and aerial warfare inform cinematic content surrounding another global conflict. The chapter limits its purview of aerial documentaries and commercial films to Great Britain to focus more specifically on the film production of a nation that had a strong documentary presence during the interwar period, and whose films projected a strong global imaginary, due to its colonial global presence. Given the innate conflict between cinematic preservation and destruction in documenting World War II, the notion of archiving itself entailed intrinsic acts of violence. In considering these British documentaries and propaganda films, Goodwin writes that “the raw footage of aerial war provides a new kind of cosmocinematic archive, one that is situated, partial, and linked with destruction” (p. 78). However, fiction narratives, like The Archers’ A Matter of Life and Death (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, 1946), also spurred cosmocinematic fantasies of time travel and heavenly transcendence. In such commercial fare, “we also see how apocalyptic anxiety at a planetary scale is mapped onto the individual scale, with individual psyches reflecting the tumult, rupture, and nonlinearity of apocalyptic time” (p. 79). Both documentaries and fiction films thus explore the psychological aftermath and fragmented experience of war from different cosmocinematic perspectives. A Matter of Life and Dead Chapter three, “Destroyer of Worlds: Cinema of Atomic Experimentation,” concerns the conditions of cosmocinematic filmmaking after the nuclear bombings that were a shocking punctuation to the end of World War II. Goodwin positions film theorist Jean Epstein and his charge for aesthetic experimentation in cinema as a response to the destabilization and displacement of science as a protective field against apocalyptic conditions, in the wake of nuclear arms. She writes that Epstein’s artistic appeal for a “second reason,” reflected the “disordered rather than [the] systemic” (p. 95). That cinema could experiment with spatial and temporal forms to “upend a sense of normalcy, and to give sensory expression to the uncertainties of the postatomic world” (p. 95). In doing so, Goodwin also aligns postwar American avant-garde movements, centred around Cinema 16 (1947-1963), with that of the recorded filming of 210 atmospheric nuclear tests conducted by the United States between 1946 and 1962. In the postwar era, some American avant-garde filmmakers sought to renegotiate filmic expression in a precarious, now-atomic world of scalar scientific might and existential anxiety. Avant-garde pioneer Maya Deren advocated for spatial and temporal mobility as modes of aesthetic experimentation in cinematic practice. Goodwin envisions a similar perspective shared by theorists Élie Faure and Felix Eberty on the cosmic onlooker, where, by extension, “the avant-garde filmmaker embraces new cosmocinematic possibilities” (p. 104). Goodwin highlights Deren’s The Very Eye of Night (1955), as a key case study. She further situates documentary modes within the cosmocinematic perspective by discussing Roman Kroiter and Colin Low’s short film Universe (1960), which utilized “characteristically experimental” techniques to approach its didactic subjects of cosmology (p. 115). These experimental films, among others of the mid-century, provided both audiences and avant-garde filmmakers a means to evoke and reconfigure “the relationship of cinema to scientific observation and revelation” (p. 119). Goodwin begins her epilogue, “Witnessing after the End,” by introducing a salient image of the Cold War era. The famous Blue Marble photograph was taken by Apollo 17 in 1972, and many have argued that the image conveys Earth’s singularity, beauty, and vulnerability. She writes: “The Blue Marble photograph linked the distant, backward-looking gaze from above to a budding ecological consciousness – an awareness that Earth was finite both spatially and temporally, as well as under permanent threat from human activity” (p. 123). This sense of preciousness and yearning for remembrance through light archives is challenged by NASA’s product site Black Marble which uses infrared, satellite-based technology to capture images of Earth covered by night. While Blue Marble shows a sun-lit Earth, the shadow-laden Black Marble series showcases the planet illuminated by cities, industries, and natural phenomena, testing the limits of its light archives. Black Marble has since evolved into an ongoing data collection project, determining patterns of migration, energy usage, natural disasters, and light pollution, among other scientific assessments. The continuing project is a testament to our past, current, and future accounts of human activity on this planet. More insidiously, the project evokes the apocalyptic activities of overpopulation, energy consumption, and environmental disasters that also occur under the cover of shadows. Universe Despite perseverance and perceived optimism in the endurance of humanity or its archives, the final two fiction narratives in this text address humanity’s bracing for and experiencing the apocalypse. Lars von Trier’s bitter art film Melancholia (2011) gauges a range of emotional responses to finality, while Adam McKay’s black comedy Don’t Look Up (2021) takes a sardonic angle in surveying the cult of celebrity, the indifference of media and political powers, and the wilful ignorance of capitalist attitudes, in the face of finitude. Both films explore experiences of doubt, grief, despair, and resignation as the apocalypse draws ever closer. In Don’t Look Up, a sense of unified archival prosperity is undercut by the inundation of inane media fragments and misinformation campaigns, creating a “chaotic media archive” (p. 133). Melancholia takes a similarly bleak tone, however, both films present an interesting aesthetic conflict. While they each take strides to artistically evoke the unflinching end of the Anthropocene, they also create a narrative archive of humanity, despite the inevitable end. Whether the planet is destroyed by a comet bound for Earth or another planet wryly colliding with our own, both Don’t Look Up and Melancholia evoke cinematic gazes that insist on generating human-centric stories, and their experiences, right until the explosive end. In short, their very manifestation bespeaks a cinematic archive. Melancholia While Goodwin showcases a small group of case studies, she balances this by exploring a variety of educational silent films, commercial postwar narratives, avant-garde films, contemporary cinema, and, most importantly, documentaries. Her contention for the recognition of archives through traces of light holds a provocative intellectual position in both cinema studies and astronomy. As an interdisciplinary study, early cinema and its entanglement with astronomical research of the early twentieth century endures as scientific perspectives continue to inform cinematic narratives surrounding cosmic perceptions of time and memory. The light that imprints images on film stock or digital media, projects outward for our viewing experience, just as the human experience is recorded in traces of light that reverberate out into the greater cosmos. The cosmocinematic gaze is at once probing and reflective, invigorating any sense of loss or apathy of human existence, and the eventual apocalypse, by recognizing our cosmic connections to the universe through light and energy. In summary, Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World is an impressive, accessible, and luminous offering of scientific and cinematic enquiry. As an archive of its own, this book is for those who seek solace in expressions of light, in a world of ambivalent media saturation and questionable regard for humanity itself. While Goodwin’s text will inevitably grow regarding ancillary studies, this cosmic moment portends an all-human notion of self-preservation and promise, despite an inevitable end. It is a small testimony, that we once existed, and may be remembered in archives of light. Hannah Goodwin, Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2024).
