★

Our first encounter with the work of Johann Lurf on the big screen literally swept us off our feet. Taking the vertigo effect, popularised by Alfred Hitchcock in Vertigo (1958), as his starting point, Lurf’s Vertigo Rush (2007) pushed the film medium to the limits, transposing the spectators into a new dimension of reality – with an obligatory nod to the history of cinema.

Eleven years later, Lurf is making us lose our ground again. His debut feature ★ is fully composed of scenes of the sky, the way directors, cinematographers, sound engineers, special and visual effect artists have envisaged it since 1905 until this day. In a chronological order and painstakingly edited to exclude the portrayals of terrestrial and extra-terrestrial creatures, spaceships, satellites, film titles and credits, these simulations of the firmament, flickering stars and milky nebulas under the disguise of fantasy and escapism in fact speak of us – our hopes, desires, loneliness, curiosity, fear and awe we feel when we turn our gaze to the uncharted vastness around and inside us.

The materials were taken from live action, experimental and animated films, and and in the years to come, Lurf's film will keep expanding with new footage, just like the universe it depicts. English and German create a dialogue with Russian and Japanese, melodrama mix with sci-fi, black and white with colour, academy format with cinemascope, primitive scale-models with contemporary computer animation, the silence of silent film with immersion of surround sound, and analogue film with digital video. The current 99 minutes of Lurf’s ★ therefore present a star-spangled history of cinema. From the alluring colour scheme of Ophüls’s Lola Montès (1955), to the bittersweet musicality of Chazelle’s La La Land (2016), to the pioneering special effects of Gaston Velle, to Christopher Nolan’s contemporary computer wonders, ★ is an ode to the magic of film and the fools whose dreams add new stars to the expanding stretch of the cinematic sky.