Episode 142: The Music of the Spheres: On Jóhann Jóhannsson's "Last and First Men"

Jóhann Jóhannsson was one of contemporary cinema's greatest score composers when he passed away in 2018 at the young age of 48. Last and First Men, his enigmatic directorial debut, was released shortly after in 2020. Based on a novel by the same name by the British science fiction writer Olaf Stapleton, the film offers a sustained meditation on the prospect of extinction, the eventuality of humanity's disappearance from the comos. In this episode, JF and Phil discuss the images and sounds of the film as they flicker and swell against the backdrop of nonbeing that envelops us all. The conversation touches on the idea of beauty, Brutalist architecture, modernism, and futurity.

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REFERENCES

Jóhann Jóhannsson, Last and First Men

Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer, SNL character

Spomeniks, Yugoslavian monuments

Olaf Stapleton, The Last and First Men

Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters

The Last of Us, television show

Ray Brassier, Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction

Weird Studies, Episode 2 on Garmonbozia

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Prize Speech

Weird Studies Episode 139 on Art Power

Numenius, Platonist philosopher

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?

Jia Tolentino, “The Overwhelming Emotion of Hearing Toto’s “Africa”

Weird Studies, Episode 110 on “The Glass Bead Game”

D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover