★

★ (2025) Directed by Johann Lurf. Austria. 130min.

FREE with Museum admission

Opening PAM CUT @ The Whitsell, our first screening is the 2025 U.S. premiere of the evolving audiovisual experience: ★—a cosmic journey through the history of film. Johann Lurf’s epic and ever-expanding piece will be free and looped throughout the day, inviting audience members to gaze at the night sky and connect with cinema past and present. The piece will be looping throughout Saturday January 10th and Sunday January 11th, ★ will be free to all museum guests. 

A film with no answers but as many questions as there are stars in the universe. Austrian structuralist Johann Lurf has chosen an audacious and ever-expanding subject for his feature film debut: the stars of cinema. Not the movie stars, but the stars in the night’s sky, pinpricks of light against the darkness excerpted from films beginning at cinema’s dawn and continuing to this present day in a project that is planned to be expanded yearly. These stellar instances, riven from context with sound intact—ambient hums, grand orchestral scores, pedantic explanations, dreamy speculation—are magical fields of darkness sprinkled with possibilities. Lurf’s jazzy editing, balancing tranquil concentration and jumpy jitters based on his methodology of retaining each clip’s length, image and sound, sends the audience on a journey across the tones of promise and threat that emanate from the cosmos. A subject difficult if not impossible to accurately photograph on film, we are therefore greeted again and again by the varied interpretations of the starry night by matte artists and special effects wizards, gazing now in stillness, now in careening motion across or into space at incandescent nebulae, distant twinkling dots, and the black void in-between. Surveying a history of cinema’s fixation with, and escape to, outer space, we find both what audiences in their own times saw up there, as well as mirrors of our own wonderment: Awe, terror, hope, arrogant confidence, melancholic yearning and blank, awesome silence. These are the rare moments when the movie audience, backs to the projector, in fact faces light projected at them: Our eyes are the screens for the cinema of the stars. (Daniel Kasman)