...These Blazeing Starrs!

Deborah Stratman

2011 | 00:14:14 | United States | English | B&W | Stereo | 4:3 | 16mm film

Collection: Single Titles

Tags: Found Footage, History, Poetry, Science

Since comets have been recorded, they've augured catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric ice-cored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th-18th Century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage.

...These Blazeing Starrs! juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when we translated the sky to predict human folly. These days, comets are understood as time capsules harboring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. We smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, the remain oracles — it's just the manner of divining which has changed.

...These Blazeing Starrs!

Threaten the World

with Famine, Plague, & Warrs:

To Princes, Death:

to Kingdoms, many Crosses:

To all Estates, inevitable Losses!

To Herds-men, Rot'

to Plowmen, haples Seasons:

To Saylors, Storms;

to Cittyes, Civil Treasons.

— Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas, 1578

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Premiere

International Film Festival Rotterdam
Rotterdam
2011

Exhibitions + Festivals

Video Fest (formerly Dallas Video Fest), Dallas, TX, 2012

FLEX Festival, Gainesville, FL, 2011

Ann Arbor Film Festival, MI, 2011

Images Festival, Toronto, 2011

Melbourne International Film Festival, 2011

Aurora Picture Show, Houston, TX, 2011

Off+Camera Film Festival, Krakow, Poland, 2011

Dawson City International Short Film Festival, Yukon Territory, 2011

Chicago Underground Film Festival, 2011

Onion City Festival, Chicago, 2011

VIVO 11th Signal and Noise Media Art Festival, Vancouver, BC, 2011

Maryland Film Festival, 2011

Rooftop Films, Brooklyn, NY 2011

BFI London International Film Festival, 2011

Mostra de Ciencia e Cinema Festival, Gailicia, Spain 2011