Last Things

Filipka + Dear Madam + Passing as a Great Grey Owl + Last Things

What happens to us / Is irrelevant to the world’s geology / But what happens to the world’s geology / is not irrelevant to us. - Hugh MacDiarmid.

From before the beginning until after the end; 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.

Catalyzed by two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, joint pseudonym of the Belgian brothers Boex who wrote 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 key were Roger Caillois’ writing on stones, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, Robert Hazen’s mineral evolution theory, the symbiosis theory of Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway’s multi-species scenarios, 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 center of evolutionary processes. Passages from Rosny and interviews with Bjørnerud form the film’s spine.  Stones are its anchor.  We trust stone as an archive, but we may as well write on water.  In the end, it’s particles that remain.