In the summer of 2012, Simon Starling made Black Drop, a film that traces a relationship between astronomy and the use of motion picture technology typical of early cinema. The artist started from the assumption that the 2012 transit of Venus would be the last one that could be documented on celluloid (the next transit will take place in 2117), given its gradual exit from production. This was the starting point for considering the two observations of the transit (that of 1874 and that of 2012) as the brackets that temporally enclose the entire history of cinema in film. Black Drop traces the development of the "photographic revolver", an instrument invented to capture the imminent passage of Venus in front of the Sun in 1874 with confidence and precision. Together with a film crew, Simon Starling traveled to Hawaii and Tahiti to observe and film the transit of Venus at the sites of previous observations and historical photo-documentation. The book is a photo novel that reconstructs the film frame-by-frame, where the words of the voiceover are reported as a "comment on the images". "Black Drop Ciné-roman" tells the relationship between astronomy, photography, and technology of the moving image, setting the events in a story made of epic journeys and long distances.

Author: Simon Starling

Title: Black Drop Cinè-Roman

Publisher: Humboldt Books

Year: 2013

Language: English 

Specifications: softcover, 208 pages, 228 x 175 mm