When I first read a blurb in the paper advertising a screening of Deborah Stratman’s Last Things, the description called to mind Enys Men: a “documentary exploring the geo-biosphere throughout evolution and extinction” featuring “stunning visuals ranging from the microscopic to unending landscapes” that “defies the boundaries of what a documentary can be.” There was the promise that the film blended science fiction with science fact but which continued to express itself as truth. In the end, it wasn’t like Enys Men at all. In fact, I’m not entirely sure what a good point of comparison would be, other than to say, with an awe and respect that this description wouldn’t normally imply, that it’s one of the most student film-y pictures I’ve ever seen. I loved it. 

Insofar as Last Things has a narrative at all, it tells the story of the geology of our planet as an epic poem about the emergence of life in a form we wouldn’t recognize as life. Through the anthropomorphization of molecules and minerals, an origin myth emerges – one that’s not untrue in the way that a lot of origin myths are not untrue. For instance, did you ever consider that rocks could go extinct? I certainly hadn’t, but as it turns out, there was a time when iron floated freely in the planet’s oceans, suspended in it much like salt is at present. With the emergence of the first organisms that performed photosynthesis (cyanobacteria), oxygen became a component of the atmosphere for the first time, causing the iron in the ocean to oxidize and fall to the ocean floor, where they formed into banded rock of magnetite, silica, and other minerals. Formations like this one are extinct rocks, in the sense that they can never form again (at least not on this planet). 

It’s fascinating stuff, but it’s also not for the easily bored. At only fifty minutes, it falls shy of the length we would normally classify as a feature film, but there will be moments when you wonder how that amount of time has not already elapsed. It’s comprised almost entirely of open-source footage: NASA’s conceptual animation lab footage of the planetary nebula cloud, electron microscope imagery of chloroplasts, images of ice forming in water blown up to the highest magnification. Whether its ambition exceeds its grasp is in the eye of the beholder, but I thoroughly enjoyed the way that a story emerges from the cutting and pasting of bits of philosophy, poetry, vintage science fiction, and more against the visuals of rocks, minerals, and protozoa. As we are told by a scientist talking about chondrites—meteors that fall to earth without interacting with another body outside of the asteroid belt, meaning that they have been unchanged since the moment the furnace of the sun spat them out, before our planet was formed—“All matter does have a history, but it doesn’t remember it.” 

On the more fantastical end of the spectrum that Last Things slides up and down, our own bodies are stated to have a “genetic memory” connected to the rock, as the emergence of eukaryotic cells (and therefore life as we know it) required that the prokaryotic cells which banded together to symbiotically evolve into eukaryotic life required that taking in of minerals in order to form mitochondria. The film does this, ping-ponging back and forth between scientific fact and what we might call speculative geology, and it does it all with pulsing, hypnotic electronic music. It called to mind a movie that I saw at the New Orleans IMAX on a fifth grade field trip entitled The Hidden Dimension, which included a lot of microphotography, but to a much more psychedelic effect. 

There came a moment in Last Things in which the camera lingers for a long time on a rock formation in a park. It made me think of the Kuleshov effect, the theory and effect that Lev Kuleshov was able to demonstrate through the editing together of disparate images intercut with the face of Russian silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine. Although the image of Mosjoukine was unchanging, the audience interpreted different meanings from his (identical) facial expressions based upon what footage appeared in between. Between the music and the fantasy, it does almost start to feel as if the rock is experiencing something, even thought that clearly can’t be the case. Can it? 

What’s the relationship between eukaryotic life, Petra, and glistening space concrete? Is there one? Director Stratman has stated that the film was born out of her existential panic about living through the planet’s sixth mass extinction event, and although I can’t speak for her, it seems to partially be about finding peace with the finity of human existence by viewing our transience, brevity, and diminutiveness by holding us up against mineral formations that meaningfully predate our solar system. If our concept of prehistory does not extend beyond the formation of the earth, it’s barely scratching the surface. And hey, the life that became us changed the planet; our ancestors caused rocks to go extinct, and those rocks became part of us, and although there’s no meaning in that, there is beauty, and we should appreciate it. 

I’d recommend reading this interview with Stratman; it’s insightful, and it says more about Last Things than I can. And if you get the chance to see this one, don’t miss it. 

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond