Let’s begin at the end. At the conclusion of Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World, Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011), a film that stages an impending collision between Earth and another wandering blue planet, makes a fitting appearance. The gravitational pull toward ultimate catastrophe sets the stage for human dramas to unfold. Familial tensions rise; relationships unravel; and existential dread thickens, all as the alien planet looms ever closer, finally dominating the visible horizon. Beyond encapsulating a recurrent theme in the book—the apocalyptic—Melancholia’s denouement can also serve as a gauge for Hannah Goodwin’s intervention and the broader context from which it emerges. Amid plans to revitalize interplanetary exploration, humanistic scholarship is similarly drawn skyward by a cosmos now seemingly nearer than ever. Stardust follows a parallel path. It opens as it ends, with an unsettling question: “What archives of humanity will exist after the end of the world?” (1).
In search of an answer, Goodwin embarks on a journey through a constellation of twentieth-century cinematic practices and objects, spanning the years before and at the dawn of the Space Age. She scours the seminal texts of film theorists such as Élie Faure, Siegfried Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, and André Bazin, figures who reappear throughout as her interlocutors. Goodwin demonstrates that cinema, from its earliest instantiations, has served as a profound vehicle for grappling with the cosmic—a concept that, under her expanded analysis, extends beyond the solely celestial and travels into philosophical and aesthetic realms. By extension, the cosmocinematic gaze, as she calls it, allows “a position of remote witness to moments saved from oblivion by the presence of a camera.” (3) Over the course of three richly layered chapters, the analysis shifts between ontological and historiographic reflections on moving images, astronomical inquiries, and close readings of select films.
The opening chapter delves into educational astronomical films produced in the early twentieth century, in the shadow of World War I, mapping the technological, scientific, and colonial backdrops of astronomical expeditions that sought to provide empirical proof for Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. With one 1919 image of a solar eclipse, Arthur Eddington had evidentially established, as Einstein had hypothesized, the curvature of spacetime around massive objects, like the sun. Circulating well beyond the classroom, the films that followed, such as Hanns Walter Kornblum’s Die Grundlagen der Einsteinschen Relativitäts-Theorie (The Einstein Theory of Relativity, 1922), were created to acquaint the general public with the concept of relativity—some more carefully and successfully than others. Decades before satellites would offer images of the planet from above, these films harnessed cinema’s capacity to manipulate and depict what is beyond our immediate grasp in terms of speed, scale, and perspective. These short- and full-length documentaries and the discussion around them invited viewers to venture and orbit imaginatively, and to perceive the universe outside the confines of human temporality. As the chapter illustrates, pedagogical cosmocinema is caught between the desire to cement the exactitude of scientific knowledge through spectacle and a profound sense of disorientation and instability precipitated by the post-relativistic age. Using innovative graphic techniques for their time, such as renderings and time-lapse animations, and mobilizing the authority of numbers, these films reassured their audiences that thinking through the not-yet-fully-intelligible is indeed possible—if only through advances in technologies and calculations. Goodwin’s nuanced readings review these productions for their attempts to contain the anxiety of becoming cosmic by means of awe-inducing experiments that bend linear history and reconstruct deep time.
The following chapter brings readers back to Earth’s surface and the geopolitics of the mid-twentieth century. New technologies mounted on aircraft—instruments of surveillance and destruction, such as the camera gun—brought the realities of World War II to the British home front through screenings of propaganda, documentary, and fiction films. These aerial views do not outright seek to convey transcendence in the same way as the films described above. In this category of film, the pilot initiates an epistemic operation, photographically capturing and marking targets at a distance (which are then annihilated). Between the realms of land, sea, and outer space lies the sky, artificially carved up as an extension of the national and imperial borders drawn in blood below; this horizon is claimed by human law, and enforced by modern technologies, including film and photography. Goodwin argues, however, that even this type of militarized cosmocinematic gaze is not uniform; it need not be read as purely destructive. She asserts that narrative choices and visual techniques employed in these films draw attention to inhuman forces, scales, and timelines that complicate the patriotic messages designed to rally support for the violent delineation of territory in the name of security. Without realizing it, a sense of unknowability infiltrates the very imagery intended to represent rational control.
Goodwin’s final chapter reflects on the aftermath of the postwar years, tracing atomic cataclysm on film. The iconic image of the mushroom cloud, rising after the blinding flash of the atom’s split, became a widely recognized emblem of nuclear power and destruction. Trauma-focused scholarship has suggested that representations of such singularly catastrophic events, laden with the invisible perils of radiation, can only approximate their full terror; much of the ensuing horror defies conventional frameworks for and possibilities of depiction. Yet scientific films produced for the United States military’s nuclear testing in the two decades succeeding Hiroshima and Nagasaki appear less concerned with such philosophical ruminations, prioritizing instead the acquisition of quantifiable data. These atomic test documents, created with high-speed cameras designed to record at frame rates almost a hundred times faster than most cameras of the time, were subsequently appropriated by countercultural filmmakers. Goodwin therefore counterposes the utilitarian production of these cinematic artifacts with the contemporaneous work of American avant-garde filmmakers, starting with Maya Deren, who engaged with and deconstructed archival footage. These directors fragmented imagery in various ways to project a more humane vision, different from the weaponization of fission and the scientific presumption of omniscience that accompanies the imagery in military contexts. Goodwin elucidates how, in contrast to aspirations for total coherence, experimental cinema of the era embraced the relativity, fluidity, and manipulability of time.
Goodwin concludes the book with a discussion of the potential cessation of human life on Earth and the survival of memory in our absence. The continuous, unchecked exploitation of the planet—a space and place where humans still forge their existence—has placed everything at risk. To confront the ecological crisis is to recognize that the gap between a human lifespan and cosmic time narrows as their trajectories tragically converge in the Anthropocene. What role, then, can the cosmocinematic gaze, now digitally produced, play in such a setting? Can it truly bear witness to this history of decline—a history whose origins and causes are scattered across places and periods, with responsibility unevenly shared between them? This monograph, somewhat after the fashion of Patricio Guzmán’s documentary Nostalgia for the Light (2010), which is analyzed in its final pages, bifurcates as it telescopes and projects out into the cosmic past and future, all while zeroing in on the precarity of humans and their traces. In response, strategies of conservation, preservation, and extensive archiving intensify, aiming, as Goodwin suggests, “to convince us of continuity, both of time and meaning.” (128) Yet even these digitized archives offer no greater security than the endangered planet they attempt to memorialize. If a witness is left standing, it may be the universe itself. Such are the profound challenges and imminent concerns that Stardust successfully conveys.
University of California Press