L'Oeil de l'astronome (2012)
Directed by Stan Neumann

Film Review

Over the past two decades, the Czech-born filmmaker Stan Neumann has earned a reputation as one of France's leading documentarists, best known for his work on the television series Architectures (2001-2003).  L'Oeil de l'astronome is his first fictional work, a period drama based on recorded events in the life of the astronomer Johannes Kepler.   Neumann's fascination for both Kepler and his work, which revolutionised the science of astronomy in the early 1600s, is immediately evident from the detail he packs into the film.  Clearly, Neumann undertook many, many hours of research before he put pen to paper and his film is probably the best introduction to Kepler's work that any science enthusiast could hope for.  The musical signature of elliptical orbits provides one humorous detour and the physics of lenses is covered with particular care and lucidity, although the more squeamish spectators may find it hard to keep their gaze on the screen as an animal's eye is slit open (à la Buñuel) and the lens plucked out of the horrible squelchy mess.

L'Oeil de l'astronome is daring both in its choice of subject matter (17th century astronomy is by no means the obvious subject for a feature film) and the way in which Neumann tackles it.  'Ten nights in the life of Johannes Kepler' is how the film may be summarised, with the emphasis on the word night.  Neumann doggedly eschews artificial light and shoots the entire film at night, using only light sources that would have been around in Kepler's day, namely candles and the moon.  A few years ago, this would have been an impossible technical feat (the lighting level being too low to be picked up on film), and it is only with the aid of a state of the art digital camera (the Canon Mark IV) that Neumann was able to pull it off.  As a result, the film has a unique and strangely alluring ambiance which adds hugely to its poetry and mystique.  The oppressive physical darkness that envelops the troll-like Kepler as he perseveres with his painstaking researches is a potent metaphor for the ignorance and superstition of the age in which he lives.

Whilst high on educational content, L'Oeil de l'astronome does struggle to be an entirely satisfying piece of cinema, mainly on account of an irksome tendency towards am-dram theatricality in a few scenes.  If it were a conventional period drama, the film would be hard to take seriously, despite a committed lead performance from Denis Lavant, an improbable but inspired casting choice for the part of Kepler.   Fortunately, Stan Neumann opts for something very different, a personal evocation rather than a slavishly authentic and dramatically taut account of Kepler's work and life.  L'Oeil de l'astronome is a film that is most likely to be appreciated by those with an interest in the process of scientific discovery but its quirkiness and eerie lyricism gives it wider appeal.  How Neumann managed to resist the temptation to include a direct reference to Georges Méliès's Le Voyage dans la lune (1902) is a mystery, but by way of compensation his film ends with a more subtle allusion to the birth of cinema - justified because cinema is (as we all know) one of the happy by-products of the science of optics.

Film Synopsis

In the summer of 1610, one of Galileo's famous telescopes arrives in Prague, the capital city of the Germanic Empire.  For a period of ten days, Johannes Kepler, mathematician and astronomer to Rudlolf II, has the privilege of using the telescope to study the night sky.  In the process, he makes some remarkable discoveries, not just about the celestial orbits that have long fascinated him, but also about the frailty of human nature.  As Kepler is studiously engaged in his work, there is a plot to assassinate the emperor, and not everyone is sympathetic to the astronomer's attempts to unravel the secrets of the heavens.  Many believe he is a sorcerer, in league with the Devil himself...