Fireball: Visitors from Darker Worlds is a 2020 documentary film directed by Werner Herzog and Clive Oppenheimer. The film explores the cultural, spiritual, and scientific impact of meteorites, and the craters they create around the globe. (wiki)
Tag Archives: Universe
1861 – Utopia in Babelsberg – Science Fiction from the DDR (2021 documentary by DEFA)
timespace coordinates: somewhere in the East Germany 1960s 1970s 1980s
Somehow I cannot embed the link so here it is (sadly only in German! and only available till 11.05.2022 ∙ 23:59). Many thanks to Julia Linda Schulze for catching on with this documentary and keeping us in the loop with it!
//This is, without question, one of the best documentaries I have seen about the context, ideals and cinematography surrounding East bloc, ex-Socialist SF. Maybe this is again a demonstration as why it is such a niche thing and why most of the older SF movies do not getting enough of an exposure and why it is easy to get stuck with images of mostly US, English-language movies from the same period (mainly space-age 1960s and 1970s). There is lots of interviewed researchers including film directors, special effects contributors, script writers, set designers, costume makers as well as SF historians, SF writers, art curators etc from current Germany that dwell on the retro-futuristic, the ideological engagements of the DDR period and the general openness towards a better and definitely more Internationalist and Pacifist, non-militarist future. The usual triumphalist scientist vision of unlimited growth and untrammeled progress that hounded so much of the Soviet planning is not really prominent, there is more questions and warnings as well as usual problems carried along in space. A few ideas first of what struck me when watching it. If you want to know more and see a few screen captures I made, here’s my take on it with the TW thread like rabbit hole into various related directions.//
Cosmonaut in the front is played by legendary Serbian actor Gojko Mitic that is known as the East German Winnetou in the Karl May Easterns (Ostern), as well as for his cosmonaut in 1970 DEFA studios Signale – Ein Weltraumabenteuer (Signals: A Space Adventure):
- Although there is a lot of aesthetic appetite for the retro futuristic Former East, its communist monumental art, brutalism and mosaics, there are very few detailed popular accounts about how pop cult was the future or space exploration during the Cold War. In retrospect, we are left with an openly nostalgic (Ostalgie – how it is called somehow disparagingly in Germany) feeling, as well as a lot of, I guess, normal misunderstandings about a period mostly labeled as a broken dystopia, a period of cultural creative and artistic censorship. In the eyes of the aggressively individualistic and ‘free speech’, a transgressive present, it all seems uber-controlled, stiffing, with education and history suffering from propaganda, party and state- induced inaccuracies and biases. It is really to fixate on Stasi terror Cold War or ’empty idealism’ since there really existed a repressive state surveillance, human rights abuses etc These of course existed and nobody needs to deny them. Cringe is ok, even ridiculing, but then nihilism and cynicism are at the order at the day every day. It is harder and harder to entertain any kind of ideals, other than ‘futurism’ or singularity as dictated corporate leaders (Elon Musk or Bezos entrepreneur ‘genius’ types) CEOs and their overbearing visions of how the future should be shaped and in who’s image. Promethean – ‘besting and bending nature’ to our will is clearly not the way, yet common will and reason must still have to weigh in if we are to somehow mitigate what mostly Western ‘growth’ has already done to the planet. Thus, under critical and trying times, it is becomes hard to acknowledge there was a playful side, a dreamy side and one that considered cooperation and pacifism as the precondition for space exploration, or avoiding the worst of the worst here on Earth. Visions of the East bloc Utopia are not a bloc, and are naive in any way, they are informed by a certain scientifically-informed outlook, of changing emotions and hopes in regard to the progressive fragility of modern human civilization as a whole, at a particular juncture, a difficult turning point characterized by that very modern separation of the ‘space of experience’ from the ‘horizon of expectation’ (highlighted in the work of German historian of Enlightenment and Modernity Reinhart Koselleck, especially his Futures Past). Our whole collective experience as an entire species, one might say of humanity as a whole, has not prepared us for what is around the corner, the existential risks around the next bend. This might mean unprecedented space exploration, material improvements, a more egalitarian space living, unusual and unsuspected medical & technological amenities, as well as the incredible and unprecedented material and ecological threats, that none of our ancestors experiences or current experiences can prep us for what’s coming. These split, the split between the lived and accumulated experience of previous generation and what lies ahead was particularly prominent in the XX East bloc, ex-Socialist, ex-Communist -call them what u want countries and political systems. This dissociation of the future from both present and the past – has, I think also characterized and formed these anxieties and hopes that animate and infuse these East German movies.
- While the above cannot be ruled out, there is the exactly opposite feeling that experience, however slight and remote, back here on earth, can somehow introduce us to somehow that is beyond immediate reach, transforming us here on earth trough mutual communal play. That we, as communal playful primates can practice and the enjoy is essential in a period of tremendous technological & scientific changes. This happens whenever we have to face the future together. Yes technological and scientific overdrive – was popular in Soviet east, heavy ‘Taylorist’ industrialization started with Lenin, Chernobyl events immediately followed suit, catching up with the West and war against nature made sure the collapse came earlier than planned, but ecological and environmental (as well as what we would call X-Risk) thinking was also making strides. Especially during the long 1980s, the last gasp of those divergent regimes was reworked and visible in SF bookd amd movies. Some Socialist SF movies already started showing the dirty side of things, moving away from the totalizing ‘Star Trek’ futures, acknowledging there is pollution, there’s a visible tear & wear of progress and technological betterment, and the fact that the post-apocalyptic times or xenoplanetary worlds might be quite un-heroic, with ego-maniacal rulers, neo colobialism, and various forms of slavery, racism and sexism still very much alive. Even as a space faring civilisation you still had to recharge a spaceship’s hyperdrive from (sic!) – proto-technological remains such as a pair or phosphorus smeared matchsticks (like in Soviet Kin-Dza-Dza 1986). This planetary future was to be experienced, not just dreamed or read about in SF books, and one that cannot be faced as nations nor as corporate entities, not even as people or as a single species, nor race, gender, sex, origin and birth – should be made a priority. This universalist call it what u want – program, grand plan, vision, dream, etc has been a motor for a lot of very unlikely cosmic visions, from the Pioneer playgrounds, school visits, children’s books, TV programs etc. This was a practice foremost – of imaginary exercises in schools, during classes, in kindergartens, when one had to write and think in terms of the year 2000, write an essay about what one would do or one’s children would do in that incoming future! Everything was suffused (at certain periods more than others for sure) with the livable qualities of this kind of starry eye program, the idea that you can participate via present into a future. That you or your group of school friends are some small part of something much more grandiose that makes even the usually drab, scarcity prone and usually defective Socialist present livable. It was almost the runaway- dreaming of the weirdo Russian cosmists (Tsyolkovsky, Fyodorov etc) and shameless avantgarde lofty ideals but turned into something more humble, more terrestrial, (DIT) DoItTogether in a way that was not deffered (no waiting!), but constantly living it and experiencing it in the Now. There is a lot of nostalgia industry nowadays, although noirish 1940 nostalgia adds a different layering to – and makes retrowave cyberpunk post-Marxist itself divergent, diverging further more from a complacent belief in unlimited progress as such. Marvel is peddling tons of nostalgia, just thinking about WW84 or Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, yet calls about “retrofuturism” obscure the fact that what we are properly speaking about is not a nostalgia about something gone, something used up, but for the future – of valuing not just what was or is, but what could have been; those unrealized (maybe even more and more unachievable at the present moment) potentialities that coexist and suffuse what has happened or happening. What they lacked in action, plotline or even cerebrality, or the usual Kaboom competitive strife & big Star Wars fireworks, these Eastern SF flicks provided a vague, general background, a substrate on which a programmatically (much too rosy &) hopeful, universalist (in spite of everything – colonialism, imperialism, racism, instrumental reason, carbon ideology, patriarchy etc) belief that one can skip exotic bananas (as one of the SF writers in the movie reminisces), in order to entertain the possibility of contributing to exoplanetary adventures. At the same time, this strain of SF was not good at dealing with the past, especially the East German past during the WWII, or the way a recent past as much as an older past still lingers or may affect present outcomes and futural imaginings. Still, what Utopia in Babelsberg Studios manages to evaluate or value is that is is possible to approach such imaginings without fetishizing them. We are mostly thinking about Hollywood as the preeminent dream machine, even now in the rise of China Hollywoods seem to bend and become reinvested in the Chinese Dream. This makes me(and probably others) curious, since, like Frankfurter School cultural pessimism always maintained, Hollywood is too much real and not very much dreaming. It was never about dreaming, but about repeatedly selling the same waking nightmares or recycled capitalist tropes as realities in the form of dreams.
1813 – review of Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin (Goodreads)
Black Hole Survival Guide by Janna Levin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
Black Hole Survival Guide – is probably top ten of Survival Guides in the Universe (even better than The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attack; Downtown LA). Can one pull trough the math behind the existence of black holes and still come out sane on the other side? Well, if math is not your strength but you’re still willing to grapple with inherent complexities in a readable form and enticing style, this is your entry. Even without the tongue-in-a-cheek survivalist or prepper add-on, it is still a remarkable book about the most extreme objects in the universe.
I truly appreciate an author taking time to take us along, to cognitively estrange us from everything we thought we knew about the tangible universe, and funnel us towards things that lie beyond any type of immediate perception or empirical experience. No wonder, since time itself begins to comport weirdly around them. Benjamin Bratton wrote in his intro to The Terraforming about the impact of the “The Black Hole”(of M87*) picture, and where this representation stands in a lineage of astronomic imaging. Blue Marble or Earthrise images are still images of the Earth, still operative, still clinging to the geocentric iconicity that props up “transitional humanisms” of an unfinished Copernican Turn. The Black Hole image is frightening because it resists mirroring back, and in a way this non-operative image makes our planet turn into a camera that is not looking “up” or “in” but “out”. The hyperdense void enclosed by the Event Horizon is frightening, and not just because it “uproots the human” as in Heidegger’s angsty 1966 interview in Der Spiegel. Once the certitude of extinction seeps in and uprootedness is taken as a given, there is room to move on. This “something” that is a crushing time-space nothingness- makes us care here on Earth for an impossibly remote invisible object (its light arriving from the Eocene to us) at odds with every other single phenomenon we encounter in our earthly life.
Black holes have become huge imaginary and cultural attractants in SF, movies, books, artwork, philosophy, etc At the same time, even when dealing with black holes – cosmic or bodily, I agree that we should beware of male authors or artists making claims about emptiness since as Audrey Wollen’s beloved meme keeps remind us that ‘Girls own the void’.
How is it that we start to care about something so remote from everything that we know or care about?! Janna Levin guides us patiently, step by step towards this all-engulfing event horizon & even towards what might lie beyond it. This travelogue puts any other travel (cheap flight or X spaceship included) to shame. It is a rendezvous with an astronomical feature that we never think as – tangible, as touchable, and that will always keep being doggedly theoretical. It was a theoretical object not so long ago. Janna Levin makes the impossible happen – an embodied experience of what it would be like to go down the drain of a black hole, in fact, several such black holes. Another important inescapable fact is that black holes have the same status as elementary particles, and this is definitely hard to grasp. No matter how big, they are all equal in a way that all atoms of the same kind are equal.
Yes, we think we know about trees falling in the pre-human forest without our minds realizing or sensing it, but what about a non-sensuous perception of objects whose ‘nothingness’ shapes the largest galactic structures, giving a twist to everything, even our spiral galactic core.
This delightful book makes Janna Levin stands tall on my list of fav STEM outreach examples. The book works for all age groups and even has some great illustrations to make her point. Exposing us to remote larger-than-life forces, she managed to pull me beyond a reality of terrestrial lockdown and uncertain futures. Scientists or authors with a background in life sciences writing sci-fi (i am thinking here of Peter Watts, Adrian Tschaikowsky, Chris Beckett or the great Joan SLONCZEWSKI!) have a special spot in my heart. I live for (and love) speculative fiction – yet I still recognize that without Kip Thorne’s contribution to Christopher Nolan’s filmic oeuvre the CGI-digitally designed black hole Accretion Disk in Interstellar might have felt quite anodyne, maybe less appetizing and less aesthetically entrancing and tangible.
So I think that black holes via Black Hole Survival Guide – will definitely become more accessible to non-specialists in a way that is not dumbing down nor patronizing, attractive in the most literal sense of the term. Ominous and good to speculate (get comfy?) with, the STEM scientist/physicist/astronomer by training makes a good friend to have along on a deep dark cosmic journey. I could not pinpoint what are the new “rules of the game” that Janna Levine brings or if there is any magic secret to this scientific imaginary (i want to believe that imagination pools and informs both rigorously scientific and non-scientific speculative endeavors). From that special skillset, if I can single out one- is the ability to sum up the current state of knowledge on a given topic. What are the implication of black holes, unthinkable (for us) implications((for now) not just on stars but carbon-based bodies and minds such as ours, seemingly prisoners of our isolated sensorium and our speck of the universe?
I appreciate her own subjective-objective intervention – the informed ability to lean on other available explanations, or limit or circumscribe explanations while reaching out for other theoretically sound possibilities.
This I find vital. There is of course and the silliness and the sound advice one gets (how to choose which black holes to fall into! answer: the larger the better) along the way. As remote as it sounds – you can play around in your head with monstrous black hole peculiarities that seem to multiply. As we get closer to these cosmic sublime objects we seem to get a taste of infinities. As we taste some of the limits of science when approaching or entering a black hole we look beyond. To be able to hold on to this you need to envision the precise moment when you start seeing the back of your head (truly) and Janna Levin brings us as close to that as currently possible.
View all my reviews
1803 – Children of the Sea (2019)
Children of the Sea (Japanese: 海獣の子供, Hepburn: Kaijū no Kodomo) is a 2019 Japanese animated film directed by Ayumu Watanabe and produced by Eiko Tanaka, with animation production by Studio 4°C. It is based on the manga of the same title by Daisuke Igarashi, who also wrote the film’s screenplay.
It is Watanabe’s first theatrically released film since Space Brothers #0 (2014), and the first animated film adaptation of an Igarashi manga. The film stars the voices of Mana Ashida, Hiiro Ishibashi and Seishū Uragami. Set by and in the ocean and themed on the mysteries of life, it depicts the connections between humanity and nature. (wiki)
The “kaiju” in the Japanese title is the Japanese term for a marine mammal (“sea beast”), but is written with Japanese characters that mean literally “strange beast” (referring to monsters like Gojira (1954) and/or Mosura (1961)).
1768 – Cosmic Station (director: Bettina Timm, documentary 2008)
Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory official
Viktor Ambartsumian Armenian-Soviet scientist founder of the Byurakan Observatory
Synopsis Mount Aragaz is the highest mountain in Armenia. At an altitude of 3500 m one can find the remnants of a prestige project of the Soviet Union: the weather beaten buildings of Aragats Cosmic Ray Division. Here, more than a hundred men used to search for messengers from distant galaxies – particles, created by cosmic radiation on its way to earth in billions of tiny explosions. Most of the researchers left, when the financial support of the institution collapsed with the Soviet Union. However, despite the lack of funding a small group of Armenian scientists endures on the top of Mount Aragaz. Like astronauts in a spaceship they continue their research, hoping for a sensation: The discovery of unknown galaxies.
Statement
The Universe, the Nothingness, the Solitude – three scientists are holding out at what was once the Soviet Union’s greatest cosmic research station. Are they closer to the secret of Creation – here, on top of Armenia’s highest mountain? In their work they rather look like Sisyphus’ brothers, and it is not by accident that they start searching for the meaning of their existence, of God’s existence. Man asks, and the World does not reply. Or does it?
DURATION: 30 min
FORMAT: 35 mm / Farbe / 1:1,85 / DolbySR
LANGUAGE: armenian / german and english subtitles (optional)
PRODUCTION: Pelle Film in Ko-Produktion mit der HFF München und dem Bayerischen Rundfunk
Armenia’s Cosmic-Ray Catchers 2020 article
‘We’re Above Civilization’: life in a cosmic-ray station photo essay
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1757 – Psycho Goreman (2020)
PG: Psycho Goreman, or simply Psycho Goreman, is a 2020 Canadian science-fiction horror comedy film written and directed by Steven Kostanski (Astron-6). It stars Nita-Josee Hanna and Owen Myre as a young sister and brother who unwittingly resurrect an ancient extraterrestrial overlord (played by Matthew Ninaber). (wiki)
Having been acquired by RLJE Films and Shudder, Psycho Goreman is scheduled to be released in theaters and on video on demand on January 22, 2021.
1672 – Islam, Science Fiction and Extraterrestrial Life: The Culture of Astrobiology in the Muslim World by Jörg Matthias Determann (2020 book)
The Muslim world is not commonly associated with science fiction. Religion and repression have often been blamed for a perceived lack of creativity, imagination and future-oriented thought. However, even the most authoritarian Muslim-majority countries have produced highly imaginative accounts on one of the frontiers of knowledge: astrobiology, or the study of life in the universe.
This book argues that the Islamic tradition has been generally supportive of conceptions of extra-terrestrial life, and in this engaging account, Jörg Matthias Determann provides a survey of Arabic, Bengali, Malay, Persian, Turkish, and Urdu texts and films, to show how scientists and artists in and from Muslim-majority countries have been at the forefront of the exciting search. Determann takes us to little-known dimensions of Muslim culture and religion, such as wildly popular adaptations of Star Wars and mysterious movements centred on UFOs. Repression is shown to have helped science fiction more than hurt it, with censorship encouraging authors to disguise criticism of contemporary politics by setting plots in future times and on distant planets. The book will be insightful for anyone looking to explore the science, culture and politics of the Muslim world and asks what the discovery of extra-terrestrial life would mean for one of the greatest faiths.
Jörg Matthias Determann TW / academia.edu
TimeSpace Warps 