Contemporânea

On the set of the movie Earthquake, 1974
Daniel Blaufuks, Endless End, 2004/2026
Stanley Schtinter, The Last Movies, 2026; Taiyo Park, 2026
Archaeological Museum in Zagreb, after an earthquake, 2020
Viktoria Schmid, WOW (Kodak), 2018
Eduarda Neves, Spectacle, 2026
Henning Christiansen, All the Cage is a Stage, 1992
Nu No, Poema-sísmico, 2023–26

Last Movies is an alternative take on the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, navigated by the final films watched (during, just before or close to death) by some of the period’s most famous public figures. Using this approach, a parallel ‘map’ of recent history—‘Screen Time’—can be drawn, almost from the inception of the film medium, with Franz Kafka watching Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, up to the present day (almost), with Jean-Luc Godard watching his own Phony Wars.

The organising principle of Last Movies removes by its fundamental nature my choice as programmer/curator. Whether I (or you) think these films are good (or bad) doesn’t matter. Whether you (or I) think the individual is bad (or good) doesn’t matter. I don’t have control over who is in it, the ‘cast’, and so clearly I don’t have control over what I show (over what they saw). In all but one case, this is also true for the cast. They did not plan or conceptualise their last movie.

The criteria for a person’s involvement are that they freely gave themselves to the camera within their lifetime, even if they came to regret it. These are people who worked to be one with their projected image, in a way that was once the ambition of a tiny minority of society and the preserve of an even tinier few — a reality unrecognisable to the violation of humanity’s omnipresent recording and projection today.

Sufficient scrutiny was afforded these people in their last days and hours, so that if they watched something, we know what that was. The availability of this information tends to stem from a strange and predatory relationship that the dominant English-language speaking culture encourages with celebrity. If there is a bias in the cast list, it is not mine, but rather coded into the preexisting telling of the 20th and early 21st centuries, which I parasitise. In every instance of evidence existing to say ‘this person saw that film’, I have studied and written about them. Last Movies reflects what is already there.

Chance, or fate, is the truer curator: the chaotic or divine intervening to humble the would-be selector(s); be she curator, be she subject (dead). Fate intervenes as it always has and always will, however secularised, and flattened, and programmed the world as it is presented to us, becomes. This project is a tribute to the narratives we make to try to make sense of the steering consequences of chance. It is up to you, the audience, to consider the meetings of the sounds and images that make these movies, with the heads and hearts that saw them last.

Just as with any map of any territory, the one I draw for Last Movies is yours to follow or to ignore. But to indicate the possible causeways, light plays, crepuscular rays and shelterbelts: German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder watches Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 Years in Sing Sing on the night he dies. In the film, the narrative arc pivots on the receipt of a telegram. The telegram is dated exactly fifty years to the day of Fassbinder’s death. The protagonist, in the film, declares: ‘What? It can’t be? Somebody’s having me on.’ The character dispatching the note responds: ‘It’s true. We’ve investigated.’ Whether or not Fassbinder noticed the date during his viewing, we cannot say, but we can hazard a guess and state without doubt: Fassbinder had become cinema.

And then there’s former American President John F. Kennedy’s last night on earth, when an impromptu exhibition of art was made for him in his Fort Worth hotel room. Picasso’s ‘Angry Owl’ was installed atop a dresser, appearing to be watching over the door behind which Kennedy slept. The last telephone call Kennedy made was to the owner of the owl, thanking her for its company. An anagram of Lee Harvey Oswald—his alleged assassin—is A Shy Owl Revealed. 

And then there’s Peter Sellers. By the time of the comedian’s death, he was living at the Dorchester Hotel in Mayfair, London. The last film he sees is Brannigan, starring John Wayne, in its television premiere. He is holed up in his room. He knows he is sick. The film opens with the slow descent of the camera over Hyde Park, as a messenger angel, or grim reaper, arriving at the Dorchester. Collapse.

Last Movies is an invitation to see the sedentary single-screen for the revolving hall of black mirrors that it is. The narrative of the dominant reality is no different from a film narrative, whether or not you believe this Life to be scripted. All that is sure is Death, The End, unknowable and vast, but Life is what we’ve got (our Lives are what we are, which is what we spend our Time doing). 

Last Movies is an affirmation of Life via the medium that imitates it; a reminder that all that is real was once only imagined; that we live for dogma, but we live in myth. And it takes just one quake to reduce the founding monuments to rubble. Don’t believe the hype: the future will be candlelit.

As Last Movies reaffirms the inevitability of interruption, and interruption at its most extreme, it finds natural citation as the star system relative to the sky (red, falling) at which Alexandre Estrela points, seen from this interstitial timeship of Venice (shaking).

So goes the press release: ‘RedSkyFalls features a seismic-responsive system that invites a recalibration of perception through attunement to the Earth’s internal motions and attention to the quiet game of life.’ In other words, like it or not, the universe will play. It will play you, but you can play too. It will write you, but it can also be written.

Until I visited Lisbon in early 2025, I hadn’t experienced an earthquake firsthand. But there, in the Cinemateca Portuguesa, alone in pitch-blackness in the large auditorium (anticipating a 35mm film test), having just received coded invitation to contribute under Red Sky, the city was visited by one. I found it strange that the metro should run so close to the surface of this venue, and to sound so unbridled in its course, only to be told on exit that there was no train.

Deprived of an image to connect with the memory, my imaginational go-to is the famous scene described by the Lumière Brothers in the cinema medium’s first projection: their audience diving out of the way of the train hurtling towards the camera lens. I think here of Jean-Luc Godard, a ghost of four years vintage at Time’s writing, and the old declarer of cinema’s death: never be synchronous, and I savour the notion that the Lumière’s train—the consummate ghost train—of silent projection finds its sound 130 years late in the Lisbon cine-subterranea of earth’s recourse.

‘There are no coincidences,’ said Westway Nostradamus JG Ballard (in a longer line, possibly pinched from the TV show Charlie’s Angels). ‘Deep assignments run through all of our lives.’

Humans need stories to make meaning; to identify themselves in time and space. An epic scope is necessary to cope. That the language might not exist to describe the phenomenon does not remove the phenomenon or reduce it; the everyday is as remote and mysterious as the mythical. To be open to this means the better your ability to take the hand of chance, and the better the ride it takes you on. This is what Genesis P-Orridge called the ‘of course factor’.

Of course the publication of the Enlightenment’s encyclopaedia coincides with the devastating earthquake experienced by Lisbon in 1755.

Of course a global pandemic occurs in the year 2020, with the date’s obvious reference to visual acuity, meaning to see clearly at 20 feet what should be seen at 20 feet. That the questioner is burned at the stake, and that a potion is conjured to postpone the change demanded by the health of the organism that the existence of our organisms is entirely reliant on… of course.

Of course the people who feared the camera in their first contact with it were right. They were the last. THEY WERE SHOT. 

Of course the camera finds its apex in the livestream of genocide. Time’s Up for Screen Time. Everything has been shot. Retire the camera.

Of course for people enclosed, there are neither rules nor limits to what they may do to break free of the enclosure.

Invent originally meant ‘to find out’; law originally meant ‘to lie’. Of course.

Of course your ‘phone’ is already reading your thoughts. And of course it bears the icon of the symbol of original sin. Of course TikTok suggests the excruciating confirmation of wasted time, just as Palantir, meaning ‘far-sighted’, is lifted from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The palantír is the indestructible surveillance apparatus offering its user visibility at the expense of wisdom. 

And of course, of course, the project of Genesis, that recent beginning, has become cynically and opportunistically tethered to the binary transition of gender as it exists today. But their goal was located elsewhere: using superficial advancements in body-technology to help to remove the story of gender entirely. This, they believed, was feasible through absolute and equivalent love between two people, which would, of course, create a ‘third’ autonomous thing conquering all illusions, authority, all habits and dogmas — love’s potential, love’s promise.

The authors of the Oxford Junior Dictionary recently removed words including willow, pasture, otter and acorn. The acorn, which becomes the oak (!) . . . traded out with word-count limitations (so they say) for the digital dead-talk of Broadband and BYOD (Bring Your Own Device). As such, I use article four to give the acorn back its paper, this paper fit to burn, and to honour all of the wondering children who’ve held one, thrown one, and whose marbles I must believe will one day take back the highway. From the river to the sea: plant the acorn, climb the tree.

Alexandre Estrela and I first met through the Dreamachine. The Dreamachine was ‘the first work of art to view with the eyes closed,’ which inventor and artist Brion Gysin (along with Ian Sommerville) hoped would be ‘the great drugless turn-on of the 1960s.’ It is a stroboscopic light device that anyone can make at home with pencil, cardboard and scissors. Mounted atop the (then) widely accessible technology of the 78rpm record turntable, the rate at which the Dreamachine spins, light spraying through its slats, stimulates the brain’s alpha waves, generating ‘hallucinations’ from within the viewer’s own mind. This is the programme to undo the programmer, a collaboration with self beyond self.

Rather than television at the centre of every American home, Gysin foresaw the Dreamachine. Entire families would be gathered around this awesome bringer of light, freaking out. John Lewis (Free!) Christmas advert; high street shopfront acid temple. The artist acknowledged that the world exists in shades of grey and insisted on its technicolour potential. When asked what the spectator in space would see of us down here, on earth, ‘Blue!’ Gysin responded. ‘They’d see blue.’

There are artists who make, and artists who live. Rare is the artist who does both. Gysin’s masterpiece might have been his life: in its adventure, generosity, and farsightedness, it is one to which all of ours might aspire. His legacy is beyond grasp; outsmarting the camera and playing off the word against the record: a manual of vanishing arts instructing the user to see according to their own infinite means. (What he last saw, I do not know.) His calligraphic paintings are less the sculpting of oils and inks on canvas, and more the freeze frames of fires. Each character propels itself from the surface as desert death poems made river mantras. Nothing stays still. He tells us just enough to alert us to what is not—and nevertheless is—right there.

In his final authored work, The Last Museum, Gysin invents a removal company at the behest of a wealthy Californian collector, who would take and deposit the earth’s most recognisable monuments to the San Andreas Fault in anticipation of ‘The Great Earthquake’. All of our cultural references to go crashing into the void. The Athenian Parthenon, Notre Dame in Paris. Venice in its entirety.

In 2016, the centennial year of Gysin, I pulled the campaign from the page, hoping to spearhead The Last Museum’s realisation with Aleister ‘Every Man and Every Woman is a Star’ Crowley’s Abbey of Thelema, Sicily. Alas, no avail. Red tape.

But it stands to mention that the consensus of seismologists reliably measures the inevitability of California—promised land and reluctant home to Apple, Palantir, OpenAI and George Lucas, within the next fifteen years (long overdue)— facing a quake with a magnitude in excess of that which hit Lisbon in 1755, removing the city as it stood then and taking with it the lives of a quarter of its inhabitants—on the Day of the Dead, of course.

Gysin lifted the concept of the ‘bardo’, the state between death and rebirth, from the Tibetan Book of the Dead, and fused it with a kind of autobiography (or, unbiography) framed by the psychic ceiling of the Beat Hotel—famed hangout of William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, et al.—in Paris. In this final literary effort, Gysin sought a pact with the highest authority of the logos, intending to ‘write himself out of existence’. Death was not the thing to fear, but rebirth.

In my ambitions to realise the Last Museum, I searched for a ‘real’ Hotel Bardo on planet Earth—and there is one, of course, through mistranslation and the ‘wrong’ coordinates, located some fifty miles south of Wroclaw in Poland.

Sympathetic to the project, the hotel granted access to all of its twenty-three guest rooms over the course of as many hours. In each room, a different video conversation with a luminary impacted by Gysin—Genesis P. Orridge, John Akomfrah, Liliane Lijn, and many others—was installed. I’d press play, close the door behind me, and let them find their way. If Gysin was still trapped in the Bardo, this was the place that the messages might reach through and finally release him from it.

In one of these interviews, I heard of the assassination of the Swedish Prime Minister, Olof Palme, killed as he exited the movies (The Grand Cinema, Stockholm, 1986).

Artist CM von Hausswolff first described how he and a friend had travelled from Sweden to Iran in 1986, securing visas with a bogus student magazine. Their journey was taken in search of Hassan-i Sabbah, the Persian warlord who ruled without an army, and who William S. Burroughs believed Brion Gysin to be the reincarnation of. 

From Sabbah’s followers, the Hashashin, the word ‘assassin’ is derived. With the most potent hash, Sabbah would knock out the most promising local boys and wake them in his ‘garden of earthly delights’: wine, women. These young bucks believed Sabbah had the hand of God, and would journey then to far-flung lands to dispatch any opponent suggesting otherwise.

Alamut (‘Eagle’s Nest’) is little more than a three-hour drive from Tehran today, but there were no such roads in 1986. The journey was arduous and arcane, outside of radio coverage. Only upon returning to the city did Hausswolff learn of the murder of Palme. ‘Shit,’ he said, reflecting on the temporal alignment of their trip to the diastema garden and the assassin’s win: ‘Did we do something?’

Intense intrigue persists about Palme’s murder. His assassin has never been caught, and their motivations remain unclear. But in all of the extensive accounts of that night, none give due attention to the film he’d just watched. This seemed to me a detail as potentially revealing as any other, and it was central to my realisation that a living audience could share in what any number of the dead last saw.

Palme watched The Mozart Brothers by Suzanne Osten. A riff on Don Giovanni, the film follows a megalomaniacal theatre director and his unbearable posse. Only after the publication of the Last Movies book did Suzanne Osten agree to speak to me, dying shortly afterwards. She told me that her ‘superstition’ had, until then, prevented her from sharing with anyone the request she’d made to Palme: that he play the main character in the film. He declined, but the likelihood is that he was at that cinema that night—a spontaneous trip made without any security detail—for the curiosity of seeing the feature in which he might have played the central role.

As RedSkyFalls contemplated itself, in the days between its final installation and its public preview, I woke to an earthquake (of course), breaking my first night of sleep in Japan. It wasn’t until I arrived in the country for residency at Numanohashi, Bunkyo City, that I learned of a ‘real’ Last Museum to rival the ‘wrong’ Hotel Bardo, and only by looking at a map in search of somewhere else.

Real estate developer Kenzo Monguchi opened Taiyo Park, a garden of earthly delights near Himeji, in rural Japan, in 1992. Taiyo was conceived to be a place for those unlikely to leave Japan, through disability or incapacity, to see, experience and touch the world. Care facilities were built as part of the sprawling countryside complex in which society’s set aside could interact with man’s greatest monuments and a visiting public: the Arc de Triomphe at the park entrance, overseen by Rapa Nui’s Moai and the funerary guards of San Augustín; a diminutive Statue of Liberty, dwarfed by the immense trees and vegetation nourished by Belgium’s Manneken Pis in plural, gang formation. There is a full-scale reproduction of the Terra Cotta Warriors of Xi’an, each unique, made using the same materials and techniques as the original statues and shipped to Japan from China. 

A short walk away, on a hilltop accessible by monorail, is a two-thirds-scale replica of Germany’s Neuschwanstein Castle: the Disney-implanted archetype of enchanted kingdom lore.

During my time there, on a punishingly hot day in May, I encountered only the people that Monguchi had built the park to enhance the lives of. Wandering along the Great Wall of China, there, in Japan, affording vantage over Tiananmen Square, I was soundtracked by the din of a musical workshop in the valley below: gongs, chanting, wailing, piano: music playing as the park plays place. And I was aware of my choice in deciding the location of the ‘real’. Are Monguchi’s off-Moai, basking and humming down there, any less real than the lonely, kidnapped Mo that stares at a blank wall in the British Museum?

Had Monguchi known of Gysin’s work, it is reasonable to think that the castle might have been equipped with Dreamachines in all of those rooms where imagination or budget expired. But Taiyo Park’s location, just eighteen miles south of Japan’s major inland fault of Yamasaki, does find dialogue with the artist’s Last Museum. The art colonialism that Gysin playfully rails against is an Elginism of possession and destruction for their own sake, consistent with the American story. In Monguchi’s cover-version-oasis is an antidote: an artist statement made shelter, the spirit of which every conceptualist could situate as the foundation of their construction.

As the San Andreas Fault anticipates, so does the Yamasaki, long overdue. And there, and here, is the cinema of my own quiet contribution: where the singers and the statues come together with the stars, selecting and seeing every film as though it might be their last. However subject to the ecstatic tyranny of chance, this is a practice available to us all.

The art world becomes an expensive spectacle. The gallerist asks for one million, and the collector buys it for half that amount. The museum exhibits the work, thereby promoting the spectacle. The critic and the curator stand in solidarity with everyone. Tolerance is an increasingly sought-after character trait. So is silence. Nothing is offered for free. The artist, brooding in soliloquy, will tell themselves that one million is not an exorbitant sum, and it might just as well have gone entirely to them. Their work’s value matches that of great football stars, even though class struggle remains imperative for this virtuous (un)happy consciousness, which orbits around the civilised spectacle of success and money. Gods and heroes. The blame lies with the speculative market, which has reached a realism bearing the same modifier. The alchemy of wealth becomes the transmutation of values. The spectaculum takes many forms, and its apostles continue to multiply. Once again, Guy Debord: In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.* Always untimely. Debord once again speaks to the nation: many are paid to pretend … they suppose they can continue to speak without anyone noticing “from where” they speak … pen-pushers hired by the system of spectacular lies … Their system is now in fact under attack, and it is defending itself by force. Portugal, April 1974: soldiers with red carnations in the barrels of their rifles advance aboard army tanks; sailors fraternize with the people.

Spectacle can also be a form of ecstasy. Recalling Anselm Jappe: we must be free in order to achieve liberation.

Those who call for climate action do not always wish for gun control. Ecological pacts and green, blue and digital economies give shape to programmes named to symbolically point towards the Horizon of 2050—economic, social and territorial cohesion subjected to an endless proliferation of reports projected into edifying NextGenerationEU futurological discourse. In Karl Kraus’ words: natural medicine wreaks havoc in art as well. Inclusion will be total, wherever it may come from—women, young people, low-skilled workers, people with disabilities, ethnic minorities, migrants, disadvantaged people worldwide—unite! Financialised convergence will be the spectacle of our time. The total work of art. These profitable initiatives foster moral imperatives identified with psychologising, emancipatory, and didactic modes of art. No one shall be excluded from the longed-for democratisation of culture. Art will not die. Hegel's pronouncement did not prove prophetic. Public programmes demystify and explain everything to everyone. The public will save art, even while finding strange the role entrusted to it. The cunning of reason has not disappeared. It has been capitalised. Between the dominant political ecology, the Moon and Mars, capitalism reorganises itself. The Promised Land, the neoliberal gospel and the alienating function of financial power—the expansion of poorly paid wage labour and the expansion of capital. Art will operate with the necessary magnanimity that its history demands—noblesse oblige. Like the social system of which it forms part, it will continue to reproduce—covertly and as invisibly as possible—naturalised exploitation, inequality and injustice. The aura will remain undisturbed. A Hunger Artist, by Franz Kafka. The fasting has no end.

_{* "We go round and round in the night and are consumed by fire."}