MIRRORS OF THE PLANET
aka Planetens Spejle
Dir. Jytte Rex, 1990
Denmark, 100 min.
In Danish with English subtitles

TUESDAY, MAY 5 – 7:30 PM
FRIDAY, MAY 15 – 10:00 PM
MONDAY, MAY 18 – 7:30 PM
WEDNESDAY, MAY 27 – 10 PM

“Here is a passage through a wall of darkness; nothing appears anymore, neither beauty nor ugliness. It sounds easy, but in actual fact it rushes up from the heart of the planet. Like multicolored fire. An infinity of waste.”

Long before Love was the final frontier in INTERSTELLAR or Terence Malick balanced the universe between the poles of Nature and Grace in TREE OF LIFE, there was Jytte Rex’s MIRRORS OF THE PLANET – a dialectical discourse on death, lust and the cosmos that’s sorely due for reappraisal. The film is a probing battery of philosophical inquiries, with black holes and rock formations re-etched in the idiom of a dissolving (or not?) relationship between astronomer Adam Morgenstern (Ole Lemmeke) and his unnamed colleague (Cher Guetze). There is no scientific certainty to Morgenstern’s work; the infinite cosmos become mere projections of his individual fears and refracted half-memories. Aside from an earnestness that runs surprisingly deep, what makes MIRRORS OF THE PLANET one of a kind is Rex’s collaboration with cinematographer Manuel Sellner, writing a slow-morphing spectrum of spectacular locations and Borgesian fata morganas in long, mezmerizing Steadicam takes. Words don’t just fail MIRRORS OF THE PLANET–the movie renders them useless.