Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein picks 7 movies to pair with ‘The Edge of Space-Time’
In Pairings, artists and creators pick the movies that complement their latest work.
Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is an associate professor of physics and Core Faculty Member in Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of New Hampshire. Her latest book The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie is out on April 7!
We asked Chanda to pick a few movies that pair well with The Edge of Space-Time.
Sankofa
This is a hard and important film about how those of us who are descendants of kidnapped and enslaved Africans should relate to what our ancestors went through. Even though it portrays a lot of difficult moments, it also shows us the power of staying connected to our past and honoring the ways our ancestors stayed present with their humanity in terrible conditions. It’s also the film that introduced me to the Akan concept of “Sankofa,” that we should go back and get what needs remembering. This idea is my argument in the book for why doing cosmology matters – we are reaching back and getting our past.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
I am a Star Trek megafan, and “the one about the whales” was the first Trek I ever saw I was just a toddler but I have a clear memory of the way this film linked whales to the future and to space. Even though Nichelle Nichols gets sidelined in pretty much all of the original Star Trek films, in this one she does some cool tech stuff at the beginning that I felt was important to home in on. So this movie became an important frame for the second chapter, “The Voyage Home.”
Space is the Place
This film is hugely important in the history of Afrofuturism, which was experiencing a kind of cultural resurgence right as I started writing the book. In the film, musician Sun Ra’s character theorizes a bit about the Black American relationship to space, time, and science. So, as I wrote, I was reacting to that and hearing phrases like “Space-Time is the Place” in my head. That became the name of the third chapter of the book.
Alice in Wonderland (1933)
I only learned about this movie in the last few years and I feel like everyone should watch it. It has Cary Grant as the Mock Turtle, and you would really never have any idea that it’s him. But he’s so funny. I feel that this film really beautifully captures the spirit of the original Lewis Carroll texts – both Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. It was also an early experiment with surrealist filmmaking, preceding The Wizard of Oz. I don’t know why it got panned. It’s so good!
Neptune Frost
I love how this film, which is about rare earth metal miners in Burundi, offers a revolutionary counternarrative to capitalism. It’s about the stuff our phones and computers are made of, and it’s also about how gender and sexual identity liberation are linked to our economic conditions, which are linked to what different versions of our world we can imagine. As I was thinking about how star stuff ends up being mined stuff, this film became an important challenge to my assumptions about the problems associated with technology. It became an important part of my chapter “Cosmic Energy.”
Us
This film has one of the best scenes ever committed to screen: the home invasion fight set to NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police” was brilliant and felt like it was written for people exactly my age. It’s a great example of putting music into conversation with a concept that is important to you, which is something I do a lot in the book. One way that I used Us is to help readers envision what a fun house mirror is – I realize not everyone has actually seen one. I use this to help people understand the phenomenon of gravitational lensing, which is one of the coolest things to happen in the cosmos.
Lesbian Space Princess
A great example of what happens when we let our queer minds wander out in space, I really feel like Lesbian Space Princess captures the vibe of The Edge of Space-Time: whimsy, joy, and pleasure. A princess from Clitopolis? Count me in! An existential crisis? Yes. The film also got me thinking about my next book, where I really want to explain why it’s not possible to form a vagina-shaped planet, as much fun as that would be. The satirical Straight White Maliens were also hilarious.