★
directed by Johann Lurf, Austria 2019, 104' (English friendly)
The visual essay from the Austrian film director Johann Lurf is a journey through time, space as well as the history of cinema. The artist juxtaposes images of starry skies from early, silent films to the present, creating a somewhat melancholic story about fantasies of escape and dreams of meeting the Other. This cosmic perspective is here connected with a very earthly one. These are human affairs – love, happiness, and tragedies all take place under a common sky. This is a kind of film planetarium—the intricately selected and edited fragments from over half a thousand films are also a statement about cinema itself —the night sky is after all a screen, on which stories appear, sent to us by stars from hundreds of years ago.
