WE’LL ALL HAVE ONE: REFLECTIONS ON THE LAST,

& EVERY MAN AND EVERY WOMAN AS A STAR

by anti-curator, un-worker, alt-historian & artist’s artist, Stanley Schtinter

"We photograph things in order to drive them out of our minds. My stories are a way of shutting my eyes." — Franz Kafka

"Without imagination, there is only pornography." — Byung-Chul Han

Last Movies is a film programme, a book, and a durational moving image experience, offering an alternative or parallel perspective of the first century of cinema’s existence, navigated by the final films watched by some of its most notable public figures.

The organising principle of Last Movies removes by its fundamental nature my value judgement as curator/programmer before anything else. Whether I (or you) think these films any good (or bad) doesn’t matter. I don’t have control over who is in it, the ‘cast’, if you will, and clearly then I don’t have control over what. Inclusion relies on sufficient scrutiny being afforded public figures in their last days and hours, so that what they watched, if they watched something, becomes a part of their life story. This information tends to stem from a strange and predatory relationship the dominant culture encourages with celebrity. If there is a bias in the cast-list it is not mine, but rather coded into the telling of the 20th century, which I parasitise.

Chance, or fate, is the truer curator: the chaotic or divine intervening to humble the would-be selector. Fate intervenes as it always has and it always will, however secularised and flattened and programmed the world as it is presented to us becomes. 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.

The first to take up this challenge were the “Batalhans” who attended the 2023 preview of Last Movies in this durational presentation, my preferred programme format. This number of hours enables us to reach from (almost) the inception of the cinematic medium, with, by way of example, Franz Kafka watching Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid, right up to the present day, with Jean-Luc Godard watching his own, and a representative film for every era along the way (sequenced chronologically). A day and a night is also the primary and most tangible measure of human experience; the Aristotelian unity of time: something takes place.

One year ago those Batalhans rose to the challenge of the programme’s institutionally assigned 17-hour span. 101 stayed the course, beginning to end. They sat in the same seats that you do, as so many, dead and alive, have before. (Don’t be fooled by any seats that appear to be unoccupied.) If this sounds too ghoulish, consider that Last Movies isn’t really a project about death. It is an affirmation of life via the medium that imitates it. A site of play. Your experience of time, then, here in this space, today folding into tomorrow, tomorrow collapsing into today, should follow Nietzsche’s ambition for any birthday (rather than a funeral), ‘like every true celebration . . . an abolition of time.’

Time is the oldest of old ideological constructs, its story a projection and a narrative like any other. To scrutinise any story, fantasy or ‘true’, is to uncover holes, to reveal biases and agendas and motivations that might not be immediately apparent. In the course of researching the book that parallels this film programme, I encountered countless inaccuracies and fabrications in the stories of these films and those who watched them. When any one writer unquestioningly (lazily) picks up information from another, the gospel truth begins to be formed. But it is essential to remember that all historical write-ups carry a dose of speculation, even if the teller was present at the event recorded. And just because we might not be able to make immediate sense of a connection or coincidence, it doesn’t make it any less present, any less real. Take the ‘primitive’ or First Nations peoples encountering the camera for the first time, fearing that the photograph would steal some essential part of them. This is a story oft repeated with a patronising cackle, serving the ‘developed’ world’s insistence of progress at any cost, and never in vindicating the indigenous premonition. But they were right. They were the last, after all.

To shed a ‘satanic light’ is necessary; the whole of history as we know it could be and should be re-written from below. If there is any shared undertaking here—if Last Movies is generative beyond our allotted span of tonight and tomorrow—perhaps this is it.

This new presentation of Last Movies (“The Last Movies 2”) at Batalha Centro de Cinema (Battle Centre of Cinema!) premieres new additions to the cast list. Characters who have not featured in the Last Movies narrative until today include Yves Klein: the painter crushed by the representation of his artworks in the documentary titled Mondo Cane, suffering a fatal heart attack hours after the films premiere; we have Diana Spencer, “the People’s Princess”, allegedly sneaking out to watch Tom Cruise in Jerry Maguire, with her every minute left thereafter plainly accounted; Agatha Christie, taken by advancing dementia in the months following her final trip to the cinema, for the premiere screening of Sidney Lumet’s adaptation of her most famous murder-mystery, Murder on the Orient Express; and Betty Grable, who is said to have insisted on a final viewing of her favourite film, A Star is Born, passing ‘before her time’, as the old saying goes, aged 56, the most famous face (and legs) of World War II lost to the arrogance of the new.

A star is born, and so a star must die. In the time it takes for a star’s light to reach us, the source planet is very often dead already (here I recall an astronomer in Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia for the Light using the camera as an example to argue that there is no such thing as present time; that everything is past except the future… and soon that too). English writer and occultist, Aleister (“The Wickedest Man in the World”) Crowley, wrote: ‘Every man and every woman is a star. A star is an individual identity; it radiates energy, it goes, it is a point of view. Its object is to become the whole by establishing relations with other stars. Each such relation is an Event: it is an act of Love under Will.’

This is not an endorsement of the individualistic capitalist dystopia that demands your constant presentation of a black mirror screen-self. It is not Warhol’s fifteen-minutes. Crowley’s words mean to break through the consensual hallucination at the core of global capital’s triumph in murdering the social. They mean to inculcate a movement towards your

true will; your total perspective; the alignment of your life with your fate, and the ultimate liberation of time and ego in play with, and surrender to, another.

We’ll all have a last movie, and death is what we share in common, but life is what we’ve got. And so it is, and brightly, how brightly: as I look out from the projection booth above you, I am not drawn to the electric fire of light spooling ghosts onto the screen ahead, but to your magnificent constellation blazing in the auditorium sky below.