Description
Stanley Schtinter’s debut collection, Last Movies, is an alternative account of the first century of cinema according to the films watched by a constellation of its most notable stars shortly before (or at the time of) their deaths. An extensive and exhaustive research project-a holy book of celluloid spiritualism and old canards-Schtinter questions and reconfigures common knowledge to recast the historic column inches of cinema’s mythological hearsay into a thousand-yard stare. Via a series of interlinked vignettes, here we’ve a book in which Manhattan Melodrama, directed by W.S. Van Dyke and George Cukor, is seen by American gangster John Dillinger, only for him to be gunned down by federal agents upon leaving the cinema. In which George Cukor watches The Graduate, and dies thereafter. In which Bette Davis-given her break by Cukor-watches herself in Waterloo Bridge (the 1940 remake Cukor had been meant to direct), before travelling to France and failing to make it back to Hollywood. In which Rainer Werner Fassbinder watches Bette Davis in Michael Curtiz’s 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, and suffers the stroke that kills him. In which John F. Kennedy watches From Russia with Love at a private ‘casa-blanca’ screening prior to the presidential motorcade reaching Dealey Plaza; in which Burt Topper’s War is Hell exists only in a fifteen-minute cut, considering this is as much as Lee Harvey Oswald would have seen at the Texas Theatre in the wake of JFK’s killing. Including a foreword from Erika Balsom-an ‘intermission’ by Bill Drummond-and an afterword by Nicole Brenez, Last Movies is a love letter to those that’ve lived (and died) amidst the patina and glow of cinema’s counterpoint to life. Like Hermione Lee ‘at the movies, ‘ and redolent of the works of Kenneth Anger, Last Movies antagonises the possibility of survival in an age of extremity and extinction only to underline the degree of accident involved in a culture’s relationship with posterity.
