“Last Movies raises the status of the film programme to that of monumental funerary artwork.”
— Gareth Evans (Adjunct Curator of Moving Image, Whitechapel Gallery)
A durational moving-image experience, film program and parallel publication (Tenement Press, 2023) by Stanley Schtinter, Last Movies remaps the century of cinema according to the final films watched by a selection of its icons, giving an audience the opportunity to see what those who no longer see last saw.
Last Movies is a single-day, multi-venue screening presented in conjunction with Nitehawk Cinema and Light Industry. On November 4, Spectacle will host an afternoon screening of the last film watched by writer Franz Kafka (d. 1924), alongside a compilation of last scenes viewed by 20th-century luminaries as they drew their final breaths.
THE KID
Dir. Charlie Chaplin, 1921
60 mins. USA.
Silent with English intertitles.
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 3PM (Tickets for this event will be $10)
SCREENING ON 16mm with LIVE SCORE by DAN ARNÉS and ERIK GUNDEL
“That’s a very energetic, work-obsessed man. There burns in his eyes the flame of despair at the unchangeable condition of the oppressed, yet he does not capitulate to it. Despite the white face and the black eyebrows, he’s not a sentimental Pierrot, nor is he some snarling critic. Chaplin is a technician. He’s the man of a machine world, in which most of his fellow men no longer command the requisite emotional and mental equipment to make the life allotted to them really their own. They do not have the imagination. As a dental technician makes false teeth, so he manufactures aids to the imagination. That’s what his films are. That’s what films in general are.” – Franz Kafka on Charlie Chaplin, from Gustav Janouch’s 1971 memoir “Conversations with Kafka.”
Chaplin’s heartwarming story of a street urchin and his down-and-out protector was the last movie Franz Kafka watched before his death in 1924 from tuberculosis. Where and how he came to watch this 1921 tear-jerker is unclear, but Kafka’s well-documented fondness for Chaplin and his tragic screen persona leaves much to consider.
Screening with:
EXCERPTS FROM LAST MOVIES
Dir. Various
37 mins. USA.
Working from curator Stanley Schtinter’s meticulous list of LAST MOVIES, this cinematic prayer for the dead brings together a rapid-fire succession of final films seen by some of the 20th century’s most luminary figures.
Boris Vian (d. 1959)
I Spit on Your Grave (Michel Gast, 1959 [heart attack during the first minutes of the film’s premiere]) *5m screened*
Sergio Leone (d. 1989)
I Want to Live! (Robert Wise, 1958 [heart attack while watching on television]) 120m *30m screened*
Stanley Kubrick (d. 1999)
Eyes Wide Shut Trailer (Stanley Kubrick, 1999) 1m