The Stars Down To Earth (2016) trailer
24:09 min. loop, color, sound.
For Adorno, “the stars mean sex without threat.”
Excerpts
Adorno—in his purposeful, justified and pragmatic critique (myopia as tactic to scorn)—did not conduct evident field research. The film The Stars Down to Earth is named for this 1952/53 text, and acts as its somatic secretary. Shot in early 2015, the 24 minute film acts as part sci-fi thriller, part documentary, part idealist anti-secrecy forecast. Astrologers from the Carroll Righter Astrological Foundation divine events for 2015 and 2016—including, reading the star charts for America (Cancer), Paris (Cancer), Russia (Libra), Snowden (Gemini) and Chelsea Manning (Sagittarius). Coupled with their predictions is the reincarnation of mythological prophetess Kassandra (Henry Hopper, Virgo) and the god Apollo (Afia Fields, Pisces) in 2015 Los Angeles (Virgo) and 2015 Athens (???).
In the Oresteia plays, Kassandra, foreseeing her death but unable to change it, considers Apollo's violence more bearable than this denial. This sparks for Kassandra a kind of hysteric anarchy, where she attempts to fool fate and create a dimensional transparency and chaos in defiance of Apollo and those around her (the world).
In the film, Kassandra’s divinations and access to past/present/future information see her momentarily and perhaps mistakenly identify with the whistle-blowers the astrologers chart in their predictions; both live in multi-temporality (extreme knowing), and both are threatened with not only imprisonment, physical harm or rape, but worse: erasure. What seemed shame of old is shame no more!