As self-gratifying as this may sound coming from a film critic, it is nonetheless true and bears repeating: cinema is a medium – and, just as vitally, a place – like no other. It offers a protected escape that runs counter to the often debilitating need for progress, a singular space where people take time out of their lives to mourn the past, process the present, or yearn for future utopias. Cinema is a canvas daring us to fill it with human imagination for more than a century now.
For more than a century? Those are rookie numbers! Long before humans first felt the need to make sense of their shared existence through stories and fiction, the night sky had already been there to facilitate that desire. Offering the biggest blank space there is; a black void accentuated by bright and tiny balls of fire that somehow turn the darkness around them even more inscrutable, its all-consuming nature inviting all people across time and space to find their answers within its emptiness.
Be it sitting in the cinema immersed in a film or lying in a field gazing at the stars above: there is little else that manages to be so empowering and humbling at the same time. It’s this contradictory feeling of comforting soul-searching that gave way to ★, a film charting the history of stars on the silver screen. As the director of the film and collector of its many clips, Johann Lurf, writes in a book accompanying ★: “The night sky as a projection surface has always inspired contemplation, just like the cinema screen. […] both image excerpts are two-dimensional illusions of a three-dimensional space and mainly a moment in time – they point back to the past.”
With ★, Lurf attempts to combine these two mediums. He and his team have collected hundreds of film clips searching the night sky for questions, answers, comfort or thrills and combined them into a (ever-growing) feature-length work; hoping to bundle their differing gazes into one unifying experience.
However, different from other collage-films like Bruce Conner’s electric A Movie, Lurf doesn’t grant himself any artistic freedom in how he presents his material. ★ works off of a strict set of rules: the clips shown may only depict the night sky, without any horizons or spaceships or text blocking the view, and are not to be altered beyond that in any way. There are no decisions being made in the sequencing of the clips – they are shown in strict chronological order – nor in the soundtrack – each clip is accompanied by its original sound. Less a collage than a collection, ★ is a sometimes rewarding but often frustrating experience.
The premise remains the most charming aspect of the film. Lurf quite literally collecting stars from the cinematic sky and proudly presenting them to us is a beautiful thought; the “For You, My Dear” that launches the film frames the following clips with an intimate touch. There is also something to be said about the collective experience the film provides. I find it comforting to remind myself once in a while that the stars are equally unreachable and spellbinding for every person (able to be) looking at them. So to watch hundreds of different (audio)visual interpretations of the night sky with a room full of strangers, everyone having their own unique reactions to this shared screening, is an idea I really like.
Actually watching the film is a different matter entirely, as the charm of the idea quickly gives way for the sensory bombardment it unavoidably results in. By design, ★ consists entirely of jump cuts. Which – besides the few shots that bombard your maladjusted eyes with unexpected beams of white light – isn’t much of a visual problem. But it definitely is an auditive one. It’s difficult to sink into any of the film’s numerous gorgeous shots when I’m constantly bracing for the soothing soundscape to be abruptly superseded by a blast of music from the next clip. The hard cuts between the shots quickly turn the cinema’s sound system from immersive to abrasive and disorienting.
★ has moments where it delivers on the promises of its concept. There are sequences of rising and falling intensity that scratch a primitive itch in ways wholly its own, and the different languages being spoken create a feeling of international community that the film’s title elegantly reverberates. It’s even more frustrating then that the often expressive images never get the chance to speak. In retrospect I found myself appreciating many of the individual shots: some scouring the sky in a futile search for answers, others surrendering to its infinity. Falling stars became pleasant surprises and one particular shot even gave me a proper Lovecraftian sense of existential dread. But within ★, they succumb to the chaos surrounding them.
There is one clip that stayed with me more than any other. It’s a shot from Stories of Our Lives, an anthology film that premiered in 2014 and is about five queer people that are oppressed by Kenya’s antagonistic stance against its LGBTQ+ community. In it, a person tells us about himself, his fears and hopes in a voice-over that remains uninterrupted for a wonderfully long time. We are invited into his perspective and story, which imbues the accompanying visuals with newfound meaning. The night sky turns into a refuge of someone desperate to escape their situation, searching for a new home among the stars because he isn’t safe in his earthly one. For the first – and only – time, ★ lets the blank space that it celebrates for more than two hours be filled with a human longing.
The rest of the film doesn’t find any new layers in its two-dimensional images of infinite depth. At its worst, it turn into a wearisome guessing game about how many films you recognize by their stargazing (there’s a full list at the end in case you want to verify your guesses). At its best, it leaves you yearning for context.
Neither Georges Méliès’ nor Neil Armstrong’s trip to the moon got us any closer to illuminating the black void of the night sky. Then as now, the view to up there was only ever as meaningful as the stories we project onto it and the desires we locate in its empty spaces. The same goes for the silver screen, which is but a white backdrop until humans fill it with their artistry. ★ infuriatingly celebrates an empty canvas. It rips the clips away from their respective contexts so that the original films can’t fill them with meaning, groups them together with such abrupt editing that the viewers don’t have the freedom to fill them with meaning themselves, and doesn’t even allow itself to create new meaning because of its insistence to show the footage chronologically and use the original sounds. There are wonderful images to be compared and gauged at, and some cuts even made me instinctively laugh, but ★ remains a more rewarding concept than film.