No./7 A composer’s sci-fi eulogy
The story behind Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Last And First Men, a swansong set two billion years in the future
JÓHANN JÓHANNSSON — THE Oscarnominated Icelandic composer known for scoring dark, mysterious films such as Arrival, Sicario and Mandy — died tragically in 2018, at the age of just 48; at the time of his death, he had been working on his directorial debut, a film as dark and mysterious as anything he’d ever worked on.
First conceived in 2012, Last And First Men was cryptic from the start. “People struggled to understand the idea,” says Jóhannsson’s friend and producer, Thor S. Sigurjónsson. “It was a long road.” The composer was inspired after seeing photography of abstract war memorials in the former Yugoslavia, and made a link with Last And First Men, a 1930 sci-fi novel by Olaf Stapledon, which imagines the ‘future history’ of humanity.
The film, Jóhannsson has said, “straddles the border of fiction and documentary”. Strange images of alien-like architecture play against Tilda Swinton’s narration of Stapledon’s text, a cosmic note from the future race of humans — all set to Jóhannsson’s eerily beautiful music.
“He didn’t want to create a totally literal connection between what Tilda is saying and the monuments,” explains producer and cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen, “but those elements together would speak to each other, and create a new meaning. There was a constant balance between not being illustrative but also not going too abstract and following some sort of narrative.”
Filming took place over three weeks in 2013, shot on grainy black-and-white 16mm film, to give the film a timeless feel. “I wanted it to feel like these film rolls had been dug up in the desert
— like found material from this alien future species,” Grøvlen says. Swinton came aboard shortly afterwards — “For Jóhann, she was the only one,” says Sigurjónsson — and then began the years-long process of editing. The cut was “95 per cent” finished at the time of his passing.
The result is an oddly beautiful send-off to Jóhannsson. “It creates this extra emotional layer,” says Grøvlen. “I was crying through the premiere. It is kind of a eulogy.” A film about monuments has become a monument to its creator.
LAST AND FIRST MEN IS ON BFI PLAYER NOW