Hannah Goodwin in Person

An exploration of the fundamental bond between cinema and the cosmos

The advent of cinema occurred alongside pivotal developments in astronomy and astrophysics, including Albert Einstein’s theories of relativity, all of which dramatically altered our conception of time and provided new means of envisioning the limits of our world. Tracing the many aesthetic, philosophical, and technological parallels between these fields, Stardust explores how cinema has routinely looked toward the cosmos to reflect our collective anxiety about a universe without us.

Employing a “cosmocinematic gaze,” Hannah Goodwin uses the metaphorical frameworks from astronomy to posit new understandings of cinematic time and underscore the role of light in generating archives for an uncertain future. Surveying a broad range of works, including silent-era educational films, avant-garde experimental works, and contemporary blockbusters, she carves out a distinctive area of film analysis that extends its reach far beyond mainstream science fiction to explore films that reckon with a future in which humans are absent.

This expansive study details the shared affinities between cinema and the stars in order to demonstrate how filmmakers have used cosmic imagery and themes to respond to the twentieth century’s moments of existential dread, from World War I to the atomic age to our current moment of environmental collapse. As our outlook on the future continues to change, Stardust illuminates the promise of cinema to bear witness to humanity’s fragile existence within the vast expanse of the universe.

Hannah Goodwin is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Her research bridges film and media studies with science and technology studies. Her recent book Stardust: Cinematic Archives at the End of the World, which traces the entangled histories, technologies, and temporalities of cinema and astronomy. This book focuses on the early- to mid-20th century, when Einstein's theories of relativity were gaining traction globally, and identifies the common ways film and new astrophysics seemed to promise temporal mobility in an age of apocalyptic anxieties. Goodwin has published in an array of journals and edited collections including Uncanny Histories and Contemporary Visual Cultures of the Sublime, and she has also done interdisciplinary research on social media and censorship in Mongolia, Turkey and Zambia as part of a team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Odyssey Bookshop, 9 College Street, South Hadley, United States