Blazeing Starrs Deborah Stratman, 2011

Since comets have been recorded, theyve augured disaster: catastrophe, messiahs, upheaval and end times. A short film about these meteoric icecored fireballs and their historic ties to divination that combines imagery of 15th18th century European broadsides with NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory footage. These Blazeing Starrs juxtaposes a modern empirical desire to probe and measure against older methods, when star gazers were translators, explicating the sky more intuitively for predictions of human folly. Comets are now understood as time capsules harboring elemental information about the formation of our solar system. Today we smash rockets into them to read spectral signatures. In a sense, they remain oracles its just the manner of divining which has changed.