To love after life: On the memorialisation of the immemorial in Last and First Men (1930 and 2021)

Abstract

The paper explores questions of love and architecture through the quasi-architectural context of monuments, in this case the take-up of a range of post-Yugoslavian spomenik in the experimental film Last and First Men (2021), directed by Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson in collaboration with cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen and fellow composer Yair Elazar Glotman. The film, itself incorporating elements of Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 novel of the same name, offers a complex meditation on loss and love, pairing the approaching dereliction of certain Balkan commemorative architectures with the truncation of humanity tout court as fictionalised by Stapledon in 1930.   

More broadly, the paper undertakes an exploration akin to what Elizabeth Grosz has termed an “ontoethics”—a necessarily politicised enquiry into the nature of what is and will come to be.^[1] The gambit trialled here is that an ontoethics of this sort has something to say about love, and following Grosz, something more to say about materiality, a domain routinely assigned to the ‘working up’ of architecture in concrete terms, but also its dereliction. Where Grosz argues that the material or the corporeal itself is not sufficient to articulate its own subsistence within and across time,^[2] I consider how modalities implicate with ‘love’ may both alloy with the concretely manifest, while exceeding all and any object-closure.

Reworking a range of philosophical orientations, a consideration of love is played against a trope offered by Gilles Deleuze in relation to modern political cinema: “the people no longer exist, or not yet…the people are missing”.^[3] Life in anticipation of, or after, determinant groups of people, as I seek to show, call on a deepening of love beyond the immediately corporeal and personal. Henri Bergson’s meditation on morality and religion, and the centrality he gives to “open love”, relative to determinant objects of affection like families and nations, rounds out the commentary enacted by the paper.

[1] Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2017), 1.

[2] Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism, 5.

[3] Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 216.