Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Last and First Men
2020 · Jóhann Jóhannsson · Last and First Men on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch for any human body ever entering a shot. (camera)
There is none across the entire film. No person, no path, no railing, so nothing in frame tells you the true size of what you are looking at.
Payoff: Losing scale is the whole trick: the same concrete can read as a building or a spacecraft.
Watch the camera tilt slowly up a concrete edge. (camera)
Grøvlen's shots move in slow vertical tilts and lateral tracks that reveal a structure is not what its first angle suggested.
Payoff: The movement itself asks you to keep revising what kind of object you are even looking at.
Listen for the absence of wind, birds, or footsteps. (sound)
The soundtrack carries score and narration only, with no location audio at all, so nothing ties the images back to an ordinary place on Earth.
Payoff: Removing the sounds a location would normally have is what lets it read as another planet.
Notice no monument is ever named or located. (structure)
The film never identifies, dates, or places any structure on screen, grouping shots by shape and rhythm instead of by site.
Payoff: You are denied the caption that would turn these into documentary subjects instead of images.
Listen to Swinton's voice stay level, without rising for grief. (sound)
Her narration is measured and evenly stressed throughout, closer to a recital than a performance of sorrow.
Payoff: The feeling is entirely in the words, since the voice delivering them refuses to supply it.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Resist looking the monuments up. Watch the sky instead. Cloud is the only clock here.