“Last and First Men” is the only feature film directed by Icelandic film composer Johann Johannsson (“Sicario”), who died suddenly in 2018. According to producer Thor Sigurjonsson in notes to journalists, his death occurred late in the filming process, just before “we were about to start on the final music.”
But even describing “Last and First Men” as a movie, while accurate, is misleading; it often feels closer to a literary exercise or art photography. (A live multimedia version was shown in 2017) It combines a complex, “Dune”-esque mythology with the sonorous, hypnotic line readings of Patrick Keiller’s British essay films (“Robinson in Ruins”).
Based on the 1930 sci-fi novel by Olaf Stapledon, the film consists mainly of 16 millimeter black-and-white images of abandoned monuments, identified in the credits as being in the Balkans. No people appear. As the camera surveys the asymmetries of the monolithic sculptures, often contemplating the sky through the negative space in the masonry, Tilda Swinton delivers a voiceover that begins with an epic poem in the style of an incantation (“listen patiently”) and is framed as a message two billion years from now, when our descendants, braced for extinction, share a telepathic hive and have appearances that would seem grotesque to us.
The landscape, with the occasional bird or a cloud streak from an airplane, breaks the illusion that we are observing the colonized Neptune that Swinton speaks of. Color – in the green of an oscilloscope or in the fiery hues of the sun – intermittently punctures the black and white. And Johannsson’s stark, uncompromising passion project always catches the eye, even at moments when the story falls asleep.
Last and first men
Not judged. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters and in Metrograph’s virtual cinema.