Action at a Distance

The starting point of this film project is Arthur Eddington’s 1919 expedition to the island of Príncipe, a Portuguese colony in the Gulf of Guinea, to observe the effects of a total solar eclipse. There are no photographic records of the experience. Only a stone stele mounted upon a whitewashed plinth —at the approximate spot where the eclipse was observed— reminds us that Eddington’s achievement signified the verification of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.