ABSTRACT
Depicting cosmic scales and the sensation of the sublime that can accompany encounters with them presented a great challenge to cinematic representation. Films about outer space, both historically and present, are an interesting testing ground for thinking about technology, science, and the sublime. They have always been at the forefront of technical aspects of cinematic experimentation even as they also try to access spiritual and emotional registers that evoke the sublime. Kornblum's film about the theory of relativity relies on an intense process of manipulations to bring cosmic images to the screen. To draw the connections between silent film representations of the cosmos and those of digitalized films is to emphasize that the sublime in the digital era is part of a continuum, rather than a break from earlier cinematic representations of the sublime. In Melancholia, a simulated sequence with no pretense of indexing reality depicts a gargantuan planet colliding with and then engulfing the Earth.
