During a Q&A from October at the Viennale International Film Festival, the Illinois-based experimental filmmaker Deborah Stratman made a telling remark: “A film, for me, is successful if I can’t translate it into a sentence.” Her new work, Last Things—an existential reflection on the significance of rocks and minerals to Earth—certainly adheres to this mentality.
At just 50 minutes, Last Things offers a mystifying audiovisual tapestry. A wide array of images of rocks, crystals and nature landscapes float hauntingly across the screen like photos being flipped through in a scrapbook. Ambient electronic hums and glitches chime in and out, setting a slow tempo and creating a contemplative—if somewhat foreboding—atmosphere. Two narrators, filmmaker and photographer Valérie Massadian and geologist Marcia Bjørnerud, provide contrasting commentary, with Massadian reciting poetically tinged lines from a handful of texts while Bjørnerud describes a variety of geological processes. If Bjørnerud’s words seek to explain scientific concepts to viewers, Massadian forces the audience into abstraction. Bjørnerud starts her narration discussing chondrites, the earliest form of rocks, thus sharing with us the origin story of the hard slabs of matter whose ubiquitous presence on Earth most humans take for granted. Massadian’s musings, some in French and some in English, are haunting and hypnotic, and evoke worlds before or without humans.
Human beings occupy an interesting space in Last Things: rocks are the film’s centerpiece; humans, when they are presented on screen, serve as mere complements to them. If the formation of complex human societies, especially since the industrial revolution, resulted in our mastery of nature, then here Stratman has constructed a world where human activity is sublimated to the geologic structures all around us. When she features video footage of prehistoric rock art, Stratman chooses images that emphasize the vastness of the rocks that host the drawings over the drawings themselves. At one point, she presents clips of tourists in Petra, the ancient rock-cut city in Jordan (and one of the New Seven Wonders of the World). A man there is dusting off a rock carve-out like he is shining the shoes of a king; visitors gaze up in awe at the mesmerizing structures towering over them, filming the rocks with their iPads and proudly displaying photos of them; a camel even licks one of the rock walls in an oddly sensual manner. All these acts combine to feel like a form of rock anthropomorphism. In the hands of a more didactic director, Last Things’ subject matter could easily render the project a nihilistic antihumanism treatise, but Stratman skillfully avoids this by balancing high-minded concepts with playful introspection.
The most intriguing images in Last Things were not of rocks in isolation, but of rocks situated in nature. The footage Stratman uses of caves and boulders is calming and beautiful; the close-ups of minerals under microscopes, by comparison, sometimes feel like staring at the generic pictures in a high school science textbook. But what makes Last Things impactful is not just what it depicts—the questions it will undoubtedly raise in the minds of viewers are integral to the experience of seeing this film. The film lingers with you and asks you to consider what Bjørnerud calls a “polytemporal worldview”—a worldview that is mindful of the history of Earth’s non-human elements. By opting to speak for the rocks, Stratman attempts to re-elevate nature to a more equal footing with humans.
Photo courtesy of The Cinema Guild
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