LAST THINGS

Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.

The film is spoken mainly in French. At the request of the director, the screening on Saturday March 25 will not be subtitled into English.

At a time where humans are glimpsing the increasingly clear contours of their extinction, the new film by American artist Deborah Stratman places its trust in the revivifying idea that rocks contain another story of evolution we can connect to. Mingling two voice-overs, one scientific, one fictional, Last Things invents a chimera that is half cosmogeny, half cosmology. On the one hand, geologist Marcia Bjørnerud conceives of each stone as a small world carrying a story beyond us and which we must learn to read in order to become aware of the multiple temporalities parallel to our own existences. On the other, in a voice that seems to spring from the depths of time, French filmmaker Valérie Massadian narrates a story inspired by two novellas by J.-H. Rosny – the joint pseudonym of the two Boex brothers who in the late 19th century imagined mineral or geometric extra-terrestrials. The voices are placed over images that constantly switch between different orders of magnitude – from the representation of stones to an overview of lunar landscapes, from the depths of the oceans to infinite space, in a collage enamoured of forms that espouses the life principle uttered in the opening sentence, borrowed from Clarice Lispector: “All the world began with a yes”. The voices seem to be suspended in an intermediary state, in search of a body, past or present, opposing the ongoing catastrophe with a space in which new relationships can be forged between the signs, and free reign can be given to thought that is as profuse and agile as a dancer on the pavement. 

Antoine Thirion

See also the interview with Déborah Stratman.