In 2012 Simon Starling traveled to Tahiti and Honolulu to film the transit of Venus across the sun, which is only to be seen again in 2117. The 35mm film explores the parallel developments between the history of science and that of cinema, associating the evolution of moving image technologies with that of astronomic research.

Adam Carr: Your work often reveals the phenomena tied to an object, image or event, as well as the path of research, unearthing connections, coincidences and contradictions. Black Drop is certainly indicative of this approach. Watching it, I cannot help but ask the obvious: What was your starting point for the piece? What were its roots? Although commissioned by Modern Art Oxford in collaboration with Oxford University, and debuted at the Radcliffe Observatory, Green Templeton College, was it a response to the commission, or did it have its beginnings much earlier? Many of works of yours I’ve seen make me think about their existence in response to a site, time and place, and the genealogy of their process.

Simon Starling: It feels very much like a project that found me. I'm not known for my stargazing or deep knowledge of the heavens, but I guess Mike Stanley and Paul Bonaventura, who commissioned the piece for Oxford, had a sense that it might interest me, and they were right. As soon as I started digging into the history of scientific observations of the transit of Venus, a connection was made to my ongoing interest in early photographic and moving-image technologies, and to the relationship between still and moving images. So in that sense it was both a completely new area and an age-old preoccupation coming together. The key was to foreground the making of my film as a parallel narrative, and that notion came very early on in the development of the work. Explicitly unpacking the making of the film created a useful meta-narrative that seemed to reverberate in relation to the specific story of Janssen and the invention of his photographic revolver.

AC: Could you tell me about your journey to record the transit in 2012?

SS: For me, travelling geographically when making work is very closely linked to notions of time travel – the travel seems to add weight and significance to the films’ journey back in time to the eighteenth and nineteenth century. The journey to Hawaii and Tahiti directly echoes previous scientific expeditions made to try to productively record the transit of Venus for science and to establish an accurate calculation of the astronomical unit (the distance from the earth to the sun). Additionally, there were practical considerations that led to the decision to travel to the Pacific Ocean for the film. In order to capture the entire six-hour-long transit during daylight hours and in conditions that were almost guaranteed to be conducive to filming the transit, it seemed that the 4000-meter-high summit of the Mauna Kea volcano on Hawaii’s Big Island would be a safe bet. Following the successful high-altitude recording of the transit, our tiny film crew, consisting of myself, cinematographer Christoph Manz, and the producer/sound recordist Annette Ueberlein, visited a number of historically related sites including the site of the 1874 British observation camp at Honolulu and the rocky shores of Kealakekua Bay where Captain Cook (an early observer of the transit of Venus) met his death. We then moved on to Tahiti and the black sand beach at Point Venus – named after Captain Cook’s observations of the transit there in 1769. In the final film, this footage, made in these geographically remote locations, is seen being edited together in the rather hermetic context of a Berlin 35mm editing suite – this space, with its flickering ground-glass screen, becomes a kind of time and space portal through which to reconstruct the historical narrative.

AC: It would be great if you could list some of the equipment involved in the making of the film…

SS: We travelled with the most compact kit we could, but when you’re trying to film a small black planet crossing the face of the sun over a six-hour period, things get pretty complex and heavy. We took a 35 mm movie camera and a specially adapted, very long telephoto lens which was covered with a Mylar filter to stop the sun frying the film, and then this was all mounted on an astronomical mount which moves the camera in time to the movement of the sun. Then there were the big batteries to run all that stuff for six hours, etc., etc. – quite some kit. It is amazing how, at 4000 m above sea level, everything seems to weigh twice as much as it would normally.

AC: While your previous work embraces and celebrates the medium of film and often discusses its production, film is slowly dwindling. For example, a number of 16mm film labs have been closed, as well as photographic labs, and the conversion from analogue to digital is almost complete. I wondered what your thoughts are about this, and what your opinion is in this light about an Internet platform such as Vdrome as a context in which to view film and video-based work?

SS: Making the film revealed just how fast that technology is dwindling – it was awkward and expensive as a result. In some sense, the real drama in the film comes with the realization that Black Drop’s footage of the transit, filmed as it was on 35mm film stock, is very likely the last footage of its kind. With the next transit not due until 2117, it is highly unlikely that it will be possible to use that fast-disappearing technology then. In some sense, the transits of 1874 and 2012 form parentheses around the rather short history of pre-digital film technology – of celluloid and its silver-based successors. Vdrome is a first for me. I have always shown my films in the hyper-controlled context of the museum or gallery, but actually, Black Drop has been interesting in that it’s opened up to a whole new audience – a film-going audience. It has been shown in cinemas at film festivals, which is something I’ve enjoyed very much and feels very appropriate for what is very much a film about film. In many ways, Vdrome is a natural extension of that. I decided very early on in the making of the film that the end product would exist in a digital, post-celluloid form. Prior to the digitally produced end credits we watch the last frames of film run through the editing table – so perhaps it is fitting that it should find an audience through something like Vdrome. That always/everywhere sense of time and space that such technology enables certainly resonates in some way with Black Drop.

Credits

A Film by Simon Starling

Voice: Peter Capaldi
Cinematography: Christoph Manz
Camera Assistant, Berlin: Josie Rücker
Sound recording: Annette Ueberlein
Film editing: Cristóvão A. dos Reis
Sound: Jochen Jezussek
Text editing: Emma Dean, Philip Starling
Casting: Nina Gold Casting Ltd, London
Produced by: Annette Ueberlein

Written with reference to texts by:
Michael Chauvin, Professor George Forbes, Tony Horwitz, Francoise Launay, Nick Lomb, Jessica Ratcliff, Birgit Schneider

Images courtesy of:
Science & Society Picture Library
Collège de France
Observatoire de Paris
Royal Astronomical Society
Science Photo Library
Cambridge University Library
Bibliothèque de L’Institute de France
Hulton Archive

Produced with the support of Modern Art Oxford and The University of Oxford

With thanks to: Jan Bleicher, Paul Bonaventura, Henriette Bretton-Meyer, Alice Conconi, Mike Davies, Pierpaolo Falone, Christian Foghmar, Caris Gaertner (Multilogistics), Nina Gold, Andrew Hamilton, Alexander Ho, Uffe Holm, Casey Kaplan, Roland Lederer (Space Instruments, Berlin), John Mason (Big Island Film Office, Hawaii), Kevin McDonald, Maja McLaughlin, Tim Neuger, Franco Noero, Dawn Pamarang, Leah Pualaha (Bishops Museum),Burkard Riemschneider, Michael Stanley, Vincent Starling, Alice Starling, Toby Webster, Edmund Yamagata (Roberts Hawaii), Ranger Dean Gallagher (Volcano National Park), John (Kona Boys), Christoph, Stefan & Jörg (Arri Rental) Andreas, Lissy & Franziska (Arri Film & TV)