Last Things (2023)
Deborah Stratman
Last Things, Deborah Stratman, USA, 16mm > digital, 50 min, 2023
Evolution and extinction from the point of view of rocks and various future others. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.
The project originated from two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, the joint pseudonym of the Belgian brothers Boex who wrote on natural, prehistoric, and speculative subjects—sci-fi before it was a genre. The film takes up their pluralist vision of evolution, where imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning the future. Also central are Roger Caillois’s writing on stones, Robert Hazen’s theory of mineral evolution, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, the symbiosis theory of Lynn Margulis, multi-species scenarios of Donna Haraway, Hazel Barton’s research on cave microbes, and Marcia Bjørnerud’s thoughts on time literacy. In one way or another, these thinkers have all sought to displace humankind and human reason from the centre of evolutionary processes. Passages from Rosny and interviews with Bjørnerud form the film’s science-fictional/science-factual spine. Stones are its anchor. To touch stone is to meet alien duration. We trust stone as archive, but we may as well write on water. In the end, it’s particles that remain.
* SPECIAL NOTE: Due to a contractual streaming obligation not previously communicated to MCFF, this film must now be geoblocked from the United States.
We hope our US audiences can find another way to see this amazing film. Happy Viewing.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally, excluding the United States.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Artcite Inc. and the Film Studies Center at the University of Chicago.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits, and stills courtesy the artist © Deborah Stratman.
About the artist
Deborah Stratman (USA) is an artist and filmmaker born in Washington, DC, in 1967. Her work investigates issues of power, control, and belief, exploring how places, ideas, and society are intertwined. Her projects have addressed freedom, surveillance, public speech, sinkholes, levitation, orthoptera, raptors, comets, evolution, extinction, exodus, sisterhood, and faith. She earned her MFA from California Institute of the Arts (1995). Her films, sculptures, photographs, and audio works have been exhibited internationally at festivals, museums, and other venues, including The Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou, Hammer Museum, Witte de With, Austrian Film Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Whitney Biennial, Hallwalls, Mercer Union, Ballroom Marfa, Sundance Film Festival, Viennale, Locarno Film Festival, Media City Film Festival, and International Film Festival Rotterdam, winning awards from CPH:DOX, Cinema du Réel, Ann Arbor Film Festival, and Images Festival, among many others. She is the recipient of Fulbright, Guggenheim, and USA Collins Fellowships, a Herb Alpert Award, a Sundance Art of Nonfiction Award, and grants from Creative Capital, Harpo Foundation, and Wexner Center for the Arts. Her acoustic sculpture Ball and Horns (aka Desert Resonator and Range Trumpet), made in collaboration with Steven Badgett, is permanently installed at the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s Desert Research Station in the Mojave Desert. She lives in Chicago, where she is an associate professor in the School of Art and Art History at the University of Illinois at Chicago.