Last and First Men

Jóhann Jóhannsson 2020

The Icelander Jóhann Jóhannsson contributed distinctive and haunting scores to Denis Villeneuve's Prisoners, Sicario and another less worthy of their abilities; and Last and First Men, which Jóhannsson directed, co-wrote and co-scored, indicates that his untimely death robbed us of a pictorial and poetic talent as well as a musical one.

Olaf Stapledon's epic history of the future is not so much adapted as abstracted, dispensing entirely with the lengthy catalogue of human varieties which separate the present makeshift species from its much-improved descendants on Neptune. Also lacking are the near-future events whereby the far-future narrator, via the "colourless but useful creature" Stapledon (so rated in Last Men in London, which chronicles the same future entity's influence on a single present-day individual) lectures Homo sapiens ipsedixit on the defects that will doom it. This pruning of the middle-men pares down the story to Stapledon's basic premise: a member of the Eighteenth (and, owing to a minor cosmic incident, final) human species communicates with the first across two million millennia.

Published in 1930, Stapledon's book uses men to mean the sum total of humanity, and Jóhannsson neatly sidesteps accusations of archaic sexism by bestowing upon the far-future narrator the voice of Tilda Swinton, who in her time has also played an androgyne or two. The words are spoken over monochrome visuals featuring the remarkable abstract memorials commissioned by Tito to commemorate the Second World War in Yugoslavia. Shot from a wide variety of angles and distances, these forgotten reminders of the catastrophe awaiting Stapledon's future variously suggest massive spacecraft, titanic buildings, re-shaped human forms, and the round-eyed gaze of awe-struck primitives.