MICROSTORY OF ART ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM Where would be an appropriate place to begin our reflection upon the movie Sunshine (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunshine_%282007_film%29), if not in free nature, and down on Earth? This might be our secret homage to the Science Fiction classic Solaris which also was a major inspiration for Danny Boyle, director of Sunshine. And the opening of Solaris shows images of water, images of water plants. And where to turn to in following that inspiration, if not to the Ermitage at Arlesheim (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eremitage_%28Arlesheim%29)? Where we find ponds, intense sunshine and also a so-called Proserpina grotto (all pictures: DS).

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Dedicated to Sunshine

(Picture: thefictiondivision.com)

(Picture: DS)

I am told that life on Earth might be possible, even without our sun (small picture in our header, above: fotolog.com). As I became curious to check the solidity of this very claim I have indeed come across a recent article in a popular science magazine. According to this it might be possible that Jupiter kicks us (the Earth) out of our solar system. We would become a ›ghostplanet‹ (a such has been discovered two years ago or so), and our survival would probably – since I haven’t been able to finish reading the article (at the newsstand) I am not completely sure about this – depend on our adapting to live underneath of the surface of the Earth, and also on using geothermal energy.
We would strive to the inner beauty (and warmth) of our planet, as it were, and we would become diggers and live in grottos, and in days of the first symptoms of November blues this all is very heart-warming (another solar planet, by chance, might even catch us again and defrost us). But since mankind disposes of a vast archive of pictures, reminding the Earth (the population that remains) of solar days and ages, it might be not that worse. The movie Sunshine might be part of such an archive, although I am not completely sure what the remaining population would make of it.

But what they would get, would be a multiperspective view upon views upon our sun. And by multiperspective I mean literally ›multiperspective‹, since I am sure that future viewers would, after a first viewing of that movie, also study the audio commentary tracks. And like in ancient theatre, they and we would, sort of, not only viewing what is happening on stage/screen, but we would be also viewing other viewers in their viewing, and what we see, as viewers of the ancient plays or of Science Fiction movies, is also viewing as such.
Viewing/seeing here, of course, takes on partly the meaning of ›getting to know‹ here, because we are actually listening to other viewers, bespeaking an audio commentary track. And the Sunshine DVD has more than one commentary track, a track of the director speaking, to be precise, and a track with the scientific advisor speaking (who is, by the way, not only a physicist, but is or was also a fairly succesful Pop musician: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Cox_%28physicist%29). A multiperspective view, for sure, although I am a little under the impression that the scientific advisor’s vision has as much to do with what we actually do see on screen as the director’s view (but this might be due to a very lively interested in enthusiastic scientific advisor.

I have learned for example (i.e. I have been directed to investigate this as well) that a NASA solar mission involves (or had involved) plans for a periscope: an instrument to look, in one or the other way, indirectly into the sun, while the mission approaches the sun. And the scientific advisor mentioned this because, in Sunshine, the crew of Icarus II that is flying to re-ignite a dying sun (to rescue mankind from eternal November blues) has this kind of platform, a special room with computer guided filters, to look into or at the sun (see picture above).
And this might also serve as a brief characterization of the movie as such: it is addressing issues of greatest weight very directly, and I am not sure if deliberately so. Or completely deliberately. But in any rate: deliberately or not – it is a refreshing movie that arouses, while one is viewing it, not only intellectual interests but, as it addresses generally phenomena of light and shadow, of warmth and cold, of colors and lack of colors, arouses all kind of interests and also awakes bodily memories of such phenomena in the very viewer, who is following the movie with inner participation. And future viewers, maybe, would mainly becocme interested in spectacular pictures of the sun, and in scientific attempts to re-ignite our (still-working) atomic power-plant, but maybe future viewers would also become interested in viewing astronauts, trying to relax by viewing pictures that are meant for and chosen by them to relax them. Pictures of water, of breaking waves for example. Pictures that have bodily effects, even, or especially on career astronauts (the crew, however, is not exactly depicted as one that one would want to entrust that mission of rescuing the Earth by re-igniting the sun – but they manage this, in the end, under great sacrifice, heroically; future viewers might find in this a sort of new creation myth).

›Darkness is something we are floating in‹, says the psychologist aboard of the Icarus II, while with light it is different, since we are not only responding to light, but ›light becomes us‹ (picture: DS)

The sun as seen from the entrance to the Proserpina grotto at Ermitage Arlesheim (picture: DS)

(Picture: pf-roio.de)

(Picture: spectrum.de)

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