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.
Once you have seen it
Watch concrete become impossible to see as just concrete. (structure)
Say Neptune over Yugoslav monuments for seventy minutes without ever cutting away, and the real material stops being able to hold its own plain identity.
Payoff: The science fiction here is made entirely by description, not by anything added to the picture. In the reading: crystalline description. The reading calls this crystalline description: an image that builds up its object in words until the object can no longer stay just itself.
Notice the film speaks of now as something already over. (structure)
Voiced from two billion years out, the narration places the present alongside the monuments' 1940s origins and their 1970s optimism, all as layers sitting under one distant vantage.
Payoff: Your own present gets filed as history in the film's very first sentence. In the reading: sheets of past (order of coexistence). The reading calls this sheets of past: not a dated flashback but layers of time that coexist and can be moved among.
Notice the film addresses two audiences that no longer exist. (sound)
The monuments were built for a Yugoslav federation that dissolved, and the narration speaks to a humanity that, from two billion years out, has not existed for eons either.
Payoff: Both the monument's original audience and the voice's addressed audience are gone, and the film sits in that gap. In the reading: the people are missing. The reading calls this a people are missing: a voice speaking to a constituency that has already vanished or has not yet come to be.
Carry this in: Resist looking the monuments up. Watch the sky instead. Cloud is the only clock here.