Last and First Men

Snapshot

A seventy-minute black-and-white 16mm film in which a voice from two billion years in the future addresses the present, spoken over images of abandoned modernist monuments in the former Yugoslavia. It is the only completed feature directed by the Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, who died in Berlin in February 2018 at forty-eight, before the film was finished; it premiered posthumously at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2020. The source is Olaf Stapledon's 1930 novel Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future, of which the film adapts only the closing movement — the Eighteenth Men, the last human species, dying on Neptune and transmitting a message backward through time. Tilda Swinton narrates. There are no actors, no characters, no synchronous sound, and no human figure anywhere in the frame. What remains is a triangulation of three orphaned futures: Stapledon's cosmic one, Yugoslavia's socialist one, and the composer's own unfinished one.

Industry & production

The film is best understood as an art-music project that migrated into cinema rather than a film production in the conventional sense. Jóhannsson had spent the 2010s becoming one of the most in-demand composers in English-language cinema — The Theory of Everything, Prisoners, Sicario, Arrival — while continuing a parallel career of album-length concert works and gallery-adjacent commissions. Last and First Men began on that second track. Its material existed first as a live audiovisual performance: 16mm imagery projected while an orchestra, chorus and narrator performed the score in the room, a format Jóhannsson presented in Europe in the years before his death and which had a direct precedent in his own earlier work.

Financing and structure were correspondingly modest and Icelandic-led, with the imagery gathered over several years of location trips through Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia and North Macedonia rather than in a compressed shooting schedule. This is a film assembled the way a record is assembled — accumulated, revisited, re-sequenced — and its economics belong to the concert-hall and festival circuit, not to theatrical distribution. There is no meaningful box-office record, and I will not invent one; the film's commercial life has been festival screenings, arthouse and cinematheque bookings, streaming, and the soundtrack album, issued in 2020 on Deutsche Grammophon, the label that had released Jóhannsson's Orphée in 2016.

The decisive industrial fact is the death. Jóhannsson's final years were marked by two high-profile score rejections — the replaced Blade Runner 2049 commission and the abandoned score for mother! — and by Mandy, released after his death. Last and First Men was completed by collaborators, most visibly the Berlin-based composer Yair Elazar Glotman, who had worked with Jóhannsson and who finished the score. Beyond that, the division of finishing labor is thinly documented in the widely available record; it would be easy to over-attribute, and I would rather note the gap than fill it.

Technology

Almost every technical choice is a refusal. The film is shot on 16mm black-and-white negative at a moment when nothing in its budget class required film at all, and the grain is not incidental but constitutive: it is the visible evidence that the image is a physical deposit, a thing that decays. This matters for a film whose subject is durable objects failing to outlast their meaning. The photochemical image is placed in the same category as the concrete monument — both are attempts to fix something, both are already eroding.

The second technological choice is the exclusion of the digital sublime. A film about deep time and interplanetary futurity made in 2020 could have reached for visual effects; this one has none. Neptune is produced entirely by voice and score over photographs of Yugoslav concrete. The third is the sound chain: the score was recorded with orchestra and voices and then processed, layered with electronics and tape-degraded textures, so that acoustic sources arrive already weathered. Analog capture, analog decay, and a deliberate absence of the tools that would have made the future look like a rendering.

Technique

Cinematography

Sturla Brandth Grøvlen — the Norwegian-born cinematographer of Victoria, Rams and Another Round — shoots the monuments as if they were geological formations or spacecraft, which is precisely the ambiguity the film wants. The grammar is severe and repetitive: slow vertical tilts up a concrete wing or fin; lateral tracking that reveals a form is not what the first angle suggested; static compositions held past comfort while cloud moves behind a silhouette. Scale is systematically withheld. Because no human body ever enters the frame, the viewer cannot calibrate whether a structure is three meters tall or thirty, and the objects float free of measurement into something closer to astronomy.

Light is overcast, diffuse, often flat — the monochrome is not high-contrast graphic modernism but a soft, silvered grayness that lets texture dominate. Focus is used sparingly but pointedly, racking between a foreground edge and a distant mass so that solid concrete briefly becomes an unreadable blur. The sky is a recurring co-subject: much of the film is a study of pale mass against moving cloud.

Editing

Cutting is by juxtaposition of forms rather than by narrative or geographic logic. Monuments are not identified, located, or dated on screen, and shots are grouped by shape, rhythm and the cadence of the narration rather than by site. The result is deliberately anti-documentary: the film declines to tell you what you are looking at. Duration is the primary editorial instrument — shots run long enough that the eye stops reading them as photographs of things and starts reading them as abstract events. The cut is almost always to a related form, producing an effect closer to musical variation than to montage argument.

Mise-en-scène / staging

There is no staging, in the sense that nothing was built or placed. But there is intense selection: the film's entire art direction consists of which monuments were chosen and from what angle. The spomenici — the memorial complexes commissioned across Tito's Yugoslavia from the 1960s onward to mark WWII battlefields and sites of fascist atrocity, designed by figures including Bogdan Bogdanović, Dušan Džamonja, Miodrag Živković and Vojin Bakić — were built in a deliberately abstract, non-figurative idiom, a memorial language that avoided any single national or ethnic iconography for a multi-ethnic federation. Jóhannsson films them stripped of context, vegetation encroaching, surfaces spalled and tagged. The staging decision that governs everything is the erasure of the visitor: no tourists, no caretakers, no roads, no signage.

Sound

The soundtrack is score and voice, effectively without synchronous location audio. Long-held low brass and string clusters, wordless choral writing that hovers between liturgy and drone, and electronic and tape textures that blur the boundary between orchestra and hum. The music does not illustrate the images; it supplies the film's gravity, and much of the sense of enormous duration is carried by harmonic rhythm rather than by anything visible. Silence and near-silence are used structurally, and the absence of wind, birds or footfall is what allows the terrestrial locations to read as another planet. Glotman's completion work is seamless enough that the score functions as a single authored arc, which is itself notable given the circumstances.

Performance

The only performance is Swinton's narration, and it is a study in withheld affect. Speaking as a collective "we" — the Eighteenth Men addressing the First — Swinton adopts a measured, unhurried, faintly formal delivery, with the emphasis distributed evenly rather than dramatically. There is no grief in the voice; the grief is entirely in what is said. Swinton's long association with the British avant-garde, and with voice-led and gallery work, makes the casting legible: the reading is closer to a recital than to a documentary voice-over, and the slight archaism of Stapledon's prose is allowed to stand rather than being naturalized.

Narrative & dramatic mode

The film has no drama in the conventional sense — no protagonist, no conflict, no scene. Its mode is the address: a single sustained second-person transmission across two billion years. This is the oldest device in the essay-film toolkit, and its power here is structural. Because the narration is spoken by beings who are already dying and already speaking from the far side of every human future, every image acquires the past tense. We are watching, in effect, ruins narrated by ruins.

Stapledon's novel is a "future history" — a chronicle of eighteen human species across two billion years, written as historiography rather than story. It is famously unfilmable because it has no characters to speak of. Jóhannsson's solution is to abandon the chronicle almost entirely and take only its ending, converting a vast taxonomy into a single elegiac voice. The narration alternates between exposition of the Eighteenth Men's condition, an ethical plea, and something closer to a hymn about the value of a species having existed at all. Dramatic progression is replaced by intensification: the film's last movement grows more direct, more addressed, more nearly a farewell.

Genre & cycle

It sits at the intersection of three cycles. First, the essay film in its landscape-and-narration register: Chris Marker and Alain Resnais's Les statues meurent aussi (1953), Marker's La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983), Patrick Keiller's Robinson films. Second, slow cinema and the structural landscape tradition — the long-take, human-free observational work of Peter Hutton and James Benning, where duration itself is the subject. Third, the science-fiction film that builds the future out of found present-day architecture rather than design: Godard's Alphaville using contemporary Paris, Tarkovsky using existing modernist infrastructure in Solaris, and beyond that the enormous influence of 2001: A Space Odyssey on the idea that cosmic scale is a matter of tempo and music rather than incident.

There is also a specific 2010s cycle it belongs to: the depopulated Anthropocene documentary. Nikolaus Geyrhalter's Homo Sapiens (2016) — abandoned structures, no people, no narration — is the closest contemporary sibling, and Leviathan (2012) and Anthropocene: The Human Epoch (2018) share the impulse to film the human world as though already posthumous.

Authorship & method

Jóhannsson's authorship here is compositional before it is cinematic, and the film should be read alongside his discography — IBM 1401, A User's Manual, Fordlândia, Orphée — all of which are concept-driven works about obsolescence, failed engineering utopias, and the transformation of technical residue into elegy. Fordlândia is effectively the same project in audio: a ruined modernist settlement as a subject for orchestral mourning. The direct cinematic precedent is End of Summer (2015), Jóhannsson's own black-and-white Antarctic short, shot on small-gauge film and performed live with music — the same method, at a third the length, with ice instead of concrete.

The collaborators are legible in the result. Grøvlen supplies a rigorous, unshowy camera that never editorialises. José Enrique Macián is credited with the adaptation of Stapledon's text, a job that is largely one of subtraction: reducing a sprawling chronicle to a recitable address. Swinton supplies the film's only human presence. Glotman completed the score. A relevant outside precedent for the whole enterprise is Bill Morrison's The Miners' Hymns (2010), which Jóhannsson scored — an archival, wordless, elegiac film about a vanished industrial world, driven almost entirely by brass and image duration. Last and First Men is what happens when the composer of that film takes the camera as well.

Movement / national cinema

Formally the film is Icelandic and belongs to a small experimental lineage rooted in the Reykjavík scene of the late 1990s and 2000s — Kitchen Motors, the interdisciplinary label and collective Jóhannsson co-founded, which deliberately blurred contemporary classical music, rock, installation and film. It also inherits a broader Icelandic disposition toward landscape as protagonist and toward the fusion of image with music-led national export.

But the film is really transnational to the point of being placeless: an Icelandic director, a British source text, a Scottish-born narrator, a Norwegian cinematographer, an Israeli-born composer completing the score, Yugoslav monuments, and a Berlin premiere. Berlin is the operative node — the city where Jóhannsson lived and worked, and the hub of the European post-classical and experimental-music economy from which the project emerged.

The Yugoslav dimension deserves an honest note. There is a real critical argument, sharpened after Jan Kempenaers's 2010 photobook Spomenik, that Western artists have treated these monuments as beautiful alien objects while discarding their specific history as antifascist memorials — an aestheticization that empties them. MoMA's 2018 exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 was in part a corrective. Last and First Men is squarely exposed to that critique: it names nothing, dates nothing, and mourns no particular dead. A defense is available — the film's subject is precisely the failure of monuments to carry meaning forward, and it enacts that failure rather than merely depicting it — but the tension is real and is the most substantive objection to the film.

Era / period

The film is a document of the late 2010s convergence between the post-classical music economy and art cinema, a period in which composers with concert-hall practices — Jóhannsson, Mica Levi, Jonny Greenwood — became central to serious filmmaking, and in which some of them began directing. It is also a product of the decade's ruin-photography and Anthropocene sensibility, and of a specific moment in European memory politics, roughly a quarter-century after the Yugoslav wars, when Tito-era modernism was being simultaneously rediscovered by design culture and neglected on the ground.

Its release timing added an accident of resonance: the Berlinale premiere in February 2020 placed it among the last major festival unveilings before the pandemic, so that a film consisting of a warning transmitted from a dying future to an unprepared present entered circulation just as the present became unrecognisable.

Themes

The governing theme is the message in a bottle and its near-certain failure. Every layer of the film is a transmission whose recipient may not exist or may not understand: Stapledon writing to a future he could not see, the Yugoslav state building memorials for a federation that dissolved, the Eighteenth Men broadcasting to us, and — after February 2018 — a composer's unfinished work arriving in a world without him.

From that follow the others. Deep time, handled not as spectacle but as an ethical instrument: the narration's calm insistence that the human species is one episode among many is what gives the images their weight. Extinction without catastrophe imagery — no ruins of cities, no disaster, only the flat fact of ending. The instability of monuments, which the film treats as the central irony: objects built specifically to resist forgetting are shown having outlived their meaning while remaining physically intact, a worse fate than collapse. Utopia's residue, where Yugoslavia's non-aligned socialist modernism functions as a small-scale rehearsal of the cosmic failure Stapledon describes. And, running under all of it, a strange secular consolation inherited from Stapledon — an insistence that the fact of having existed, of having thought and felt, retains value even when nothing survives to record it. The film's last passages are unusual in the extinction genre for offering something closer to gratitude than to warning.

Reception, canon & influence

Critical reception at Berlinale and after was respectful, frequently admiring, and divided along a predictable fault line. The film's advocates described it as hypnotic, monumental, and formally uncompromising, and praised the score and Swinton's reading as the elements that convert a slideshow of concrete into something genuinely cosmic. Skeptics found it inert — the objection being that seventy minutes of slow tilts across similar objects, however beautifully shot, provides insufficient variation to sustain the running time, and that the film substitutes atmosphere for argument. Nearly every notice acknowledged the impossibility of assessing it independently of Jóhannsson's death, which converted an elegy about extinction into an elegy for its own maker and, in some accounts, made the film harder to judge on its merits.

The influences running backward are clear and largely acknowledged by the work itself: Stapledon above all; Marker and Resnais for the narrated-object essay and for the specific idea, articulated in Les statues meurent aussi, that a sculpture removed from its living context has died; La Jetée for the transmission from a ruined future; Tarkovsky and Kubrick for the conviction that cosmic scale is achieved through tempo; Hutton and Benning for the disciplined landscape shot; Godfrey Reggio for the music-image compact; and Jóhannsson's own End of Summer and the Morrison collaboration for the method.

Running forward, the honest assessment is that the film's influence remains small and is likely to stay that way. It is a singular, unrepeatable object made by someone who cannot make another. Its measurable afterlife has been threefold: as the terminal entry in Jóhannsson's discography, where it functions as a coda that retrospectively organizes the whole; as a repertory and museum item, screened with live orchestra in a format that has helped legitimize the composer-led live-cinema performance as a serious concert form; and as a contested reference point in the ongoing argument about how the Yugoslav monuments should be looked at. Its most probable long-term canonical position is as a limit case — the furthest a musician-turned-director has pushed the film-as-score, and the clearest recent demonstration that science fiction requires no effects, no actors, and no future imagery, only a voice, a duration, and something old enough to stand in for the end.