Black Drop

Through the story of observations of Venus’ rare crossings of the Sun, and of the photographic instruments developed in the last two centuries to record them, this film reconstructs the links between astronomic research and the origins of cinema, through a series of images presented in the form of an atlas. Starling became interested in the relationships between science, art and photography in 2011, when he included the amazing lunar images captured by amateur astronomers James Nasmyth & James Carpenter (authors of the book “Illustration for The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite”, 1874) in his “constellation of works” for an exhibition project at the Fondazione Merz in Turin. In “Black Drop”, the artist pays particular attention to the invention of the ‘photographic revolver’ by Pierre Jules César Janssen (1874), and its influence on both the ‘photographic rifle’ of Etienne Jules Marey, and on the Lumière brothers’ machine. In June, 2012, using the same exposure mode as Janssen (1 frame per second), from the observatory on the Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, Starling shot the last transit of Venus across the Sun predicted for this century, on 35 mm film. This phenomenon won’t occur again for another 105 years. Most of “Black Drop”, which, according to the artist, is in fact a piece about the history of cinema and film-making, was shot in black-and-white inside an editing laboratory, capturing a highly skilled editor, Cristovâo A. dos Reis, at work on various materials and on Starling’s footage. The film also generated a book, “Black Drop Ciné-roman” published in 2013 by Humboldt Books. Phantom Ride, a piece produced in 2013 for the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain in London, is also linked to the origins of cinema; in parallel, Starling continued his astronomical reconaissance work with the project In “Speculum” (2013), starring the Great Telescope of Melbourne, in Australia.