Our Heavenly Bodies

Join us for a memorable night of live music and film when Nashville-based group Coupler performs their soundtrack for a new digital restoration of Our Heavenly Bodies, one of the least-known technical marvels of the silent era.

In the early 1920s, German filmmaker Hanns Walter Kornblum set out to make a film unlike any before—one that was both a summation of all known astronomical knowledge and a dreamy investigation of what wonders might await with the advent of space travel. The result revels in the mysteries of the universe in a way that anticipates Carl Sagan’s Cosmos more than 50 years before the fact.

Founded in 2012 by Ryan Norris, a veteran of the beloved band Lambchop, Coupler explores the intersections between man and machine, live and recorded, composed and improvised, stasis and flux. Their techno-organic sound will provide an amazing complement to this silent treasure’s beautifully retrofuturistic visuals. (91 mins., DCP)

Digital restoration of Our Heavenly Bodies courtesy of Filmmuseum München.