Goodwin, Hannah McKim Lloy (Author)
Wolfe, Charles T. (Advisor)
University of California, Santa Barbara
Wolfe, Charles T.
Physical Details: 312 pp.
Language: English
This dissertation considers the intersections between filmic and cosmological discourses and representations from the turn of the twentieth century through the early 1960s, a crucial period in the intersecting histories of astronomy, cinema, and the globe. As changing cosmologies altered how human beings understood their position in space and time, filmmakers frequently turned to cosmic subject matter, and theorists contemplated film’s relationship to the new spatiotemporal concepts astrophysics offered. I consider a wide range of films, from science education films of the 1920s that take on Einstein’s theories of relativity, to wartime films that take an aerial perspective, to avant-garde films from the 1950s and 60s that address the profound scalar upheavals of the atomic bomb. Collectively, these films explore questions of illumination and invisibility, universalism and fragmentation, science and spirituality, and enchantment and entropy in the entangled domains of cosmology and cinema. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that bridges the histories of film and astronomy, I explore how films exposed and instantiated the imaginaries of temporal mobility that permeated discourses around astronomy and cinema during this tumultuous period of world history. In discourses of film theory and in numerous films with cosmological themes, the cosmos becomes a metaphorical matrix for contemplating the medium’s capacity to preserve and restage the past. Just as outer space archives light from the past and becomes a platform for dreams of travel through time, the celluloid filmstrip stores an image of the past and makes it accessible to the present and future. Films thus not only explained, represented, and narrativized modernity’s cosmological shifts; at the level of the medium, they provided a model for comprehending and making meaning of cosmological concepts. Accordingly, film theorists were frequently compelled to consider the medium’s relationship to space and time by referencing astronomical models. Through close analysis of films and theoretical writings on cinematic time, I argue that conceptions of time in film and cosmology of this period evince a widespread desire to preserve the past for the future, to bear witness to disaster, and to imagine a mobile temporality that might disrupt linear history.
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