Cosmic Miniatures: Trails Towards the Great Bear

My film concerns the speed of light, animals of the Milky Way, possibilities of escape, and emergency exits—should the Earth die—into the, at present, still distant cosmos.

It is also about cats, dogs, and Pirx the spaceship pilot, not to mention the experience of time in the universe, so comfortingly different from that of our own lives and contemporary world.

There was a young Lady in Bright,
Who’s speed was much faster than light,
She started one day,
In a relative way…
And returned
By the previous night…

Light’s highways and racetracks: The light flashes and star-cluster storms move at unimaginable speeds. But the fact that nothing can be quicker than light comforts me. There is nothing more comforting in this disruptive world than knowing that, somewhere, balance indeed exists.

This film has to do with our true home, the stars. In the billions of cells that we human beings—like all good animals—carry around with us on a day-to-day basis, there is a trace of star dust. Three suns had to explode before those hydrogen and helium clouds could become the matter of which our Earth and life itself are made, already a concern of my sci-fi films in the 1970s. And the more I age, the more interested I become in science. More than in science-fiction. Reality is an unparalleled narrator. And its headquarters? Space.

Cosmic Miniatures is my most recent full-length film. It is not just any old film I scraped together for an international festival, but one I made specifically for January 2024 and the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The film is dedicated to my teacher and fellow traveller Edgar Reitz and to Leslie Adelson, Professor of German Studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who came up with the title Cosmic Miniatures for her eponymous book.

—Alexander Kluge