Last Things

“This story takes place during a state of emergency and public calamity. It’s unfinished because it’s still waiting for an answer,” says one of the two women’s voices heard throughout LAST THINGS. Deborah Stratman’s experimental essay film delves into the deep tumult of planetary change, working across scientific discourse and speculative fiction to decentre the human as the measure of time, space and transformation. Through a weave of archival and newly shot images, Stratman sets the earth’s materiality in motion, unfolding what the second voice, that of geologist Marcia Bjornerud, calls a “polytemporal worldview”. Drawing on citations from Roger Caillois, Clarice Lispector, and nineteenth-century science fiction author J.-H. Rosny, Stratman explores a topographical imaginary in which extinction and genesis go hand in hand and the future might in some ways be indiscernible from the past. A poetic dispatch from our age of climate catastrophe, LAST THINGS could be seen an act of mourning for the habitat we have destroyed. At the same time, Stratman holds fast to utopian glimmers of renewal and reinvention—all those new beginnings that might take root after the age of “man” has definitively fallen into ruin. (Erika Balsom)

With LABERINT SEQUENCES.

In the presence of Deborah Stratman.

Deborah Stratman: MY ALCHEMY (1990, K), UPON A TIME (1991, K), THE TRAIN FROM LA TO LA (1992, K), ON THE VARIOUS NATURE OF THINGS (1995, K), FROM HETTY TO NANCY (1997), THE BLVD (1999), IN ORDER NOT TO BE HERE (2002, K), KINGS OF THE SKY (2004), IT WILL DIE OUT IN THE MIND (2006, K), THE MAGICIAN’S HOUSE (2007, K), O’ER THE LAND (2009), KUYENDA N’KUBVINA (2010), FF (2010, K), ...THESE BLAZEING STARRS! (2011, K), THE NAME IS NOT THE THING NAMED (2012, K), HACKED CIRCUIT (2014, K), THE ILLINOIS PARABLES (2016), XENOI (2016, K), OPTIMISM (2018, K), VEVER (FOR BARBARA) (2019, K)