Ishi no Uta / Last Things
Sat 29.06.
20:00
Cinema
Arsenal 1
Director
Toshio Matsumoto
Japan / 1963
25 min.
/ Digital file
/ Original version with English subtitles
Original language
Japanese
The granite of the Aji-Shi mountains is said to be the loveliest in the whole of Japan, shaping the life of the local stonemasons from cradle to grave, who see the stone as being alive as they are. Toshio Matsumoto’s experimental portrait of a granite quarry, its production processes and unique shapes and textures consists almost entirely of still photography, with their motionlessness thus forging a formal link to its subject: as Matsumoto put it, filmmakers work images in the same way that stonecutters work stones. (jl)
Director
Deborah Stratman
France, USA, Portugal / 2023
50 min.
/ Digital file
/ Original version with English subtitles
Original language
English, French
LAST THINGS proceeds from two novellas by French-Belgian author J.-H. Rosny to probe the perspective of rocks, visualizing and expanding ever outwards from these early works of speculative fiction by way of oddly sensual scientific explanations and diagrams, a veritable syllabus of additional texts and image after image of the mineral world at its most radiant. Dense and devious, LAST THINGS is at once apocalyptic and optimistic: stones will survive everything, even us, and there’s strange comfort in that. (jl)
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