Last and First Men is the only full length (or thereabouts) feature directed by well-loved around here as well as elsewhere composer Jóhann Jóhannsson. Completed after his death, this is a fascinating bit of poetical, experimental narrative cinema, certainly influenced by Chris Marker in the way it mixes its sources visual and audio-visual to create something new.
In practice, this consists of Tilda Swinton (always up to any interesting project offered) calmly and carefully reading parts of the final chapters of Olaf Stapledon’s titular wonderful far future history, underlaid by swelling and descending drones by Jóhannsson and Yair Elazar Glotman, while the camera pans over – sometimes strangely angled – black and white shots of spomeniks, those brutalist-abstract World War II monuments built throughout what was then Yugoslavia, here meant to evoke the ruins of a future past; additionally, there’s an oscilloscope.
It all combines into something highly evocative, suggesting dimensions of time, as well as a feeling of nostalgia and melancholia for all the things we can’t experience that will already have been lost in the far future from where our narrator speaks, which is the place where nostalgia gets weird as in Weird Fiction. There’s horror for the future terrors and the inevitability of the end of everything (us, the universe and everything in between) yet also awe, awe for the now, the times in between, and even the wonder and terror of our end.
In other words, this film’s basic concept, mood, and execution seem to be directly made for me, seeing as it involves Cosmic Horror and Cosmic Awe (see also Lovecraft for the pessimistic version and Arthur C. Clarke for the optimistic one), drones, weird art shot weirdly (that’s a compliment), and one of the best novels of one of the great underread SF writers. If you’re in the proper mindset to appreciate this sort of thing, you may very well be moved as much as I was watching it.
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