Destroy All Musicians! Giant Monsters vs. Music Video

No movies today – instead I’ve decided to wallow in music videos featuring battles with giant monsters. Why is this particular combination on my mind? Three reasons.

1. The discovery that Miike Takeshi made a couple of music videos for Kikkawa Kōji (courtesy of Agitator: The Cinema of Takeshi Miike (FAB Press, 2003) by Tom Mes).
2. A recent binge on Japanese science fiction movies directed by Honda Ishirō – The H-Man [Bijo to Ekitai-ningen] (1958), Varan the Unbelievable [Daikaijū Baran] (1958), Battle in Outer Space [Uchū Daisensō] (1959), Mothra [Mosura] (1961), King Kong vs. Godzilla [Kingu Kongu tai Gojira] (1962), Matango (1963) and Atragon [Kaitei Gunkan] (1963).
3. The unexpected video content of Iceland’s entry for Eurovision 2021.

With that in mind, I’ve selected five music videos exploring this theme, sorted into chronological order. That’s enough preamble – it’s time to RELEASE THE KRAKEN!!!

OK perhaps not that kraken. (Although an argument could be made for this clip from Shaun Micallef’s Mad as Hell (2020) being a sequel to my first choice.)

Beastie Boys “Intergalactic” (1998) – directed by Nathanial Hörnblowér (aka Adam Yauch)

A giant robot soars through space to the strains of Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain”, while the three scientists (Beastie Boys) “piloting” it fight amongst themselves. Landing in the streets of Tokyo, much to the horror of the local citizenry (some of whom are sporting fake moustaches or quiffs), the robot lowers to the ground three men dressed as construction workers (Beastie Boys) who move off through the subway system like a manic cross between Power Rangers and Weeping Angels in a heroic pose-a-thon while rapping lyrics empty of any real content. Meanwhile the body-popping robot receives a blast of energy from the purple trident held aloft by a creature with a giant purple octopus for a head, lobster claws for hands and wetsuit flippers for feet. Things look grim, but the robot defeats the creature (the old “push it into the powerlines” trick) and returns to space (apparently without the construction workers – left behind perhaps as ambassadors?) There’s a similar DIY aesthetic on display to Spike Jonze’s distillation of 70s cops shows in the video for “Sabotage” (1994), although Beastie Boys member Yauch’s main reference point here is the fantasy/SF TV series Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot [Jaianto Robo] (1967-1968). Whether these events have any bearing on the man with the green octopus head dismantling a cardboard robot in the Mad as Hell clip above is uncertain, but I feel it would be more than appropriate to see this as an act of revenge from a monster’s angry offspring.

Go! Go! Fushimi Jet (2002) aka Kikkawa Kōji “Pandora” – directed by Miike Takashi

The only version of this video I could find online lacks any English translation, so I owe most of my understanding of the plot to Tom Mes (book cited above). The clip opens with a 90 second animated prologue depicting the discovery in Cuba on 26 June 2002 of footage from a “lost” silent samurai film titled Go! Go! Fushimi Jet. The newly discovered footage shows a bunch of unruly warriors in the aftermath of a battle as they clean up after the corpses. They unearth a mysterious crystal globe but are immediately confronted by wandering ronin Fushimi Jet (Kikkawa Kōji) who begins to cut his way through his foes. Meanwhile, the crystal globe reveals a fleet of flying saucers on their way to Earth, and the carnage of battle is interspersed with glimpses of a young girl waking somewhere in space and holding another globe which might be a control device for the fleet. With most of his enemies dead, Fushimi Jet is threatened anew by a giant praying mantis rearing above the landscape, prompting his eyes to flash and a jetpack to grow on his back, taking him into aerial combat with the mantid menace. Miike’s editing of the combat to fit the music is fairly effective but lacks the manic fervour of his opening to Dead or Alive [Deddo oa araibu: Hanzaisha] (1999). The ronin was named Fushimi Jet in homage to the character Kikkawa Kōji had previously played in Miike’s contemporary yakuza film The City of Lost Souls [Hyōryū-gai] (2000) – the character would turn up again in a 1970s setting for the music video “The Gundogs” (2002). Although Miike is better known for his modern gangster films, he had ventured into the samurai genre with Kumamoto Monogatari (1998-2002) and Sabu (2002) and would return to the jidai-geki with a revival of the popular blind masseur character Zatōichi (2007). He would go on to have further fun with monsters (giant or otherwise) in Ultraman Max [Urutoraman Makkusu] (2005) and The Great Yokai War [Yokai Daisenso] (2005).

King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard “People-Vultures” (2016) – directed by Danny Cohen & Jason Galea

I love this video so much! This video follows on directly from “Gamma Knife” (2016), which saw the band perform a summoning ritual while colour-coded wizards plunged their knives into the earth, leaving behind an ominous egg surrounded by dead or unconscious bodies. “People Vultures” shows us what hatched from that egg – a gigantic composite vulture creature incorporating the seven bad members (drummers and keyboardist forming the feet; guitarists and bassist making up the torso; singer wailing from inside the creature’s beak). The creature trundles menacingly through the outback, encountering and defeating various enemies with its laser eyes before using its final opponent’s body as a guitar to signal the beginning of its doom-laden reign. Citing Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain [La montaña sagrada] (1973) as an influence, the filmmakers’ debt to TV shows like Ultraman (1965-1967) is more evident here. The vulture-thing is an astonishing creation, taking inspiration from Galea’s established aesthetic for the band to create the final wheeled monstrosity in collaboration with the Melbourne-based Boxwars team of cardboard architects. Despite its obviously constructed nature, it functions magnificently as a fearsome creature in conjunction with the band’s portentously frenzied guitar riffs.

The Feedbacks “Giant Monster” (2018) – directed by Jendo Shabo

A short and sweet pop punk depiction of a giant cat with purple laser eyes causing havok. The band wake up, panic, attempt to escape the city but end up zapped. The emergency personnel attempt to manage the rampage with the use of distracting toys and catnip grenades while evacuating the civilians. The cat is a natural and is well-integrated into the urban landscape. The news bulletins layer some light humour into the piece, and the random giggling instagrammer who stops to film an injured emergency worker ends up crushed under the cat’s paw. Fun all around! The director is currently completing a short Batman tie-in film titled A Gotham Nightmare (2021).

Daði og Gagnamagnið “10 Years” (2021) – directed by Guðný Rós Þórhallsdóttir

A lot has happened since 2020. Immediately upon completion of their would’ve-been-a-winner Eurovision entry “Think About Things”, Daði Freyr and his backing band Gagnamagnið were kidnapped by evil aliens who saw their music and dance stylings as an incipient intergalactic threat. After a series of adventures (depicted in the just-released-today 80s-retro free-download game Think About Aliens), Daði og Gagnamagnið have become Iceland’s first line of defence against giant monsters. “10 Years” depicts their latest battle against a cute, moth-like giant monster who is first seen batting playfully at a mobile of felt planes. Daði and friends’ first attempt to see the creature off with their sweet dance moves is a stalemate, but after combining to form a giant robot their repeated dance routine is triumphant, leaving the creature to bop along under the credits before climbing inside one of the mountain backdrops to hibernate. Gagnamagnið’s shiny new satin jumpsuits function well both as an upgrade of their previous costume, and as the official uniform of an anti-kaiju strikeforce such as the similarly-initialled G-Force introduced in Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II [Gojira tai Mekagojira] (1993). The overall tone is sweet and nonsensical – much like the band. I’m intrigued by the sound of the director’s previous work The Day the Beans Ran Out [Dagurinn sem baunirnar kláruðust] (2018), a short film about a man living peacefully through a zombie apocalypse until he notices his food is disappearing more quickly than it should – hopefully I’ll be able to track it down!

Experiments in Nature – Four Short Films

Time for a change of pace (in many ways) – four short films about nature (ranging from 16-39 minutes in length) which use various techniques to play with the viewer’s experience of time, expanding beyond their boundaries to occupy a greater subjective duration. In this selection, filmmakers from Thailand, Vietnam, Iceland and England bring their perspectives to the Mekong River, the shores of Antarctica and the jungles of Costa Rica.

Ashes [Năng-sân jàak] (2012) came about when Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Cemetery of Splendor, reviewed here) was commissioned to make a short film using a LomoKino, a hand-cranked film camera which turns reality into a juddery sequence of still images. Beginning in a rural locality with a girl on a bike, Weerasethakul’s film gradually shifts from a straighforward representation of reality into more abstract takes through the use of different varieties of film stock. He jumps back to concrete reality with some urban scenes before mixing the settings, running parallel tracks of footage out of synch with other and layering multiple images to create a stained glass window effect. Halfway through he cycles back to a repetition of the opening footage before introducing a narration by fellow filmmaker Chaisiri Jirawangsan, talking about a dream town he feels compelled to dedicating the rest of his life recreating in drawings and paintings. This section is accompanied by out-of-focus shots of various unidentified people, including a brief glimpse of Tilda Swinton. The film ends with a fireworks display, switching partway through back to smoother digital camera footage in a move intended to highlight the death of old ways of creating film. Oh, and apparently King Kong is in there somewhere… not that I spotted him. I can’t really say that the various components came together in a unified whole, but I did enjoy some of the experimental techniques on display.

Vietnamese multimedia artist Thao Nguyen Phan took inspiration from Ashes in the creation of her own short film Becoming Alluvium (2019), which was “inspired by the beauty and suffering of the Mekong” (a river which is also featured, if less prominently, in Weerasethakul’s film). The opening captions reproduce a poem by Marguerite Duras lamenting the ways in which human attempts to control nature result in its destruction before revealing the film’s title, associating this gradual degradation with the river’s natural process of eating away at the land. Each section highlights different aspects of the river, including cultural aspects drawn from Lao and Khmer folktales. The story of a dam breaking and killing many villagers becomes a tale of reincarnation, in which two boys continue their friendship as an Irrawaddy dolphin and a water hyacinth. We switch from the more intimate waterways of the river to wide open spaces and accompany a ferry as it transports commuters in cars and on motorcycles from one side to the other. The next section showcases a stunning exhibition of dragon-based sculpture constructed from natural plants, fibres and textiles while captions appropriated from Calvino critique the wasteful nature of urban life. The scene moves from plastic-strewn rubbish heaps to children playing on the river inside an inflatable plastic ball, tarnishing the otherwise innocent scene by associating it with thoughtless pollution. The final sequence is a beautifully rendered animation of watercolour illustrations telling the story of a selfish princess who demands the impossible, a necklace made of dewdrops. The ecological theme of the film is once again served when the princess is finally made to realise the unreasonable nature of her request (although I’m not sure why none of the humans in the story possesses a head – it’s neck stumps all the way). The framing conceit of three reincarnations gives the final film a greater sense of cohesion compared to its inspiration, making it more of an anthology on a single theme than Weerasethakul’s piece.

Celebrated Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson sadly passed away in 2018 at the age of 49. Towards the end of his life he made two films, in which his skill at matching images to music was very much to the fore. I’ve previously reviewed his final film Last and First Men (2020), a feature-length adaptation of early 20^th century SF author Olaf Stapledon’s novel, which recontextualised Yugoslavian sculptures as relics of future human civilisation. End of Summer (2014) lacks any such narrative and is more of an abstract mood piece populated by penguins – and hopefully the viewer is a fan of penguins, because there are a lot of them on display here! After opening on an Antarctic seascape, we quickly transition to land and meet the penguins. Over the next 20 minutes the penguins begin to populate more and more of the screen, alternately still or busily moving about in footage which has been slowed down sufficiently to make their progress appear portentous, purposeful, and almost painfully prolonged. I’d love to say something more about the progression of these images or the development of the score as it slowly introduces a wordless vocal component, but I spaced out several times during this section, my visual field filled with penguins as strings layered over field recordings washed over me. The final 10 minutes of the film shift away from the penguins to depict wider expanses of the Antarctic seas and the land masses peppering them. A majestic shot from above gazing back towards the shore reveals the tiny heads of penguins dipping in and out of the water as they swim away from shore, our last glimpse of the penguins before the shadows of the dark outcroppings become more and more dominant with the gradual setting of the sun, a starkly beautiful but melancholy farewell to a landscape now absent of life. Although I found Last and First Men to be a more satisfying experience, the final third of End of Summer carries a charge of its own which (for me) elevated the effect of the preceding material.

Winding down to an even more glacial pace is English experimental filmmaker Ben Rivers’ Now, at Last! (2018), filmed over five days in the Costa Rican jungle. The star of this film is Cherry, a sloth, who we observe for a single protracted shot lasting over 10 minutes as she slowly climbs a tree before falling asleep. Suddenly the Everly Brothers break burst forth from the soundtrack singing “Unchained Melody” while a super-imposed RGB video effect of Cherry wriggles around over the still footage. Then it’s back to another sustained 5 minutes of Cherry climbing another tree, before switching to extended close-up shots such as her upside-down face, or her claws as seen from above the branch. Eventually it’s back to “Unchained Melody” and an outbreak of livelier colourised movement, leaving just over 10 minutes remaining to watch Cherry dangling from a branch, sleeping again. Watching a sloth for 40 minutes straight is a tough ask for most audiences, and I have to admit to cheating a bit – I split my attention between the film and playing a game on my phone for most of its length – but when I finally put the phone down and just watched Cherry in inaction, I did find it quite a restful experience. I haven’t got a clue what exactly Rivers was trying to achieve with his musical interludes, but it was a relaxing (if puzzling) way to while away the late afternoon.

Female Director Showcase – Miu Miu Women’s Tales

For the past ten years (2011-present), the Italian high fashion brand Miu Miu have provided an outlet for female directors to showcase their work in their Women’s Tales series. Each year they commission two short features, one to accompany their summer collection (premiering during New York Fashion Week) and one for the winter collection (premiering at the Venice International Film Festival). Apart from a requirement that the films should feature clothing from the Miu Miu range, the directors are given free reign to follow their creative muse where they will, which is apparent in the diverse range of approaches taken over the years. Of the twenty films released so far, I selected the nine which sounded most interesting to me, writing a paragraph on each and providing links to the full works for easy reference.

Miu Miu Women’s Tales #2: Muta (2011)

Dawn on an empty ship. A crawlspace opens and a woman extrudes herself in awkward bursts of stuttering insectile movement, head and feet folded together like an emergent pupa. More women in designer dresses and shoes gradually populate the other areas of the ship. Fluttering eyelash extensions sound like butterfly wings. A slightly hunched woman snatches a piece of paper from the wall and we hear sounds like a caterpillar munching. This 6 minute short from Argentine director Lucrecia Martel is filmed like a narration-free nature documentary with a heavy emphasis on Guido Berenblum’s sound design, portraying the models as exotic creatures with decorative carapaces. As evening approaches they retreat into their cocoons or discard their outer garments to flutter away like moths.

Miu Miu Women’s Tales #3: The Woman Dress (2012)

Reframes the art of clothing design as ceremonial magic. A trio of witches (indie pop trio Au Revoir Simone) prepare a bubbling cauldron-substitute with various concoctions in anticipation of the arrival of The Woman (Maya Sansa), pacing steadily in a hypnotic reverie. The witches help her into a bath and begin the ceremony, circling the bath while chanting in reversed speech. At the ritual’s conclusion, the woman and bathwater have disappeared – in their place is a red lace dress, which they mount reverently on the wall with their other designs. The sound of the piece is once again my favourite element – Sandro Rotti’s sound design maintains a constant presence of liquid bubbling, emerging from the mix periodically to become more prominent before submerging once again, while the members of Au Revoir Simone (memorably featured in Twin Peaks: The Return) provide a suitably eerie score.

Miu Miu Women’s Tales #7: Spark and Light (2014)

Elizabeth (Riley Keough) is en route to visit her mother (Maria Ellingsen) in hospital, but her car breaks down near a frozen lake far from civilisation and she can’t get any cell reception. Despairing as night approaches and the cold increases, she spots an oasis of light and heads there in hope of assistance. The occupant (Laufey Elíasdóttir) invites her in to call for a tow truck. Awaking from sleep on the couch, she has a dreamlike encounter with her mother (wearing a dress which matches the wallpaper design) before the sound of the truck’s arrival wakes her again for real in her car, nestled in the blanket given to her by her (imagined?) host. Although the story itself did very little for me, Korean director Kim So-yong’s film excels when she allows Eric Lin’s camerawork to linger on the Icelandic vistas or the gorgeous wallpaper designs.

Miu Miu Women’s Tales #8: Somebody (2014)

Writer/director Miranda July delivers a quirky comedy built around a new social networking app – rather than delivering a text message directly, it allows you to select a nearby stranger to deliver your message verbally, complete with stage directions indicating which emotions to convey or physical actions to perform. The recipient of the message can even rate the delivery person on the Somebody app. A series of four conversational vignettes culminates with a bizarrely sexual encounter in which a pot plant demands to be watered and to have its soil probed (“Deeper!”). I’d heard interesting things about her work – definitely curious to see more!

Miu Miu Women’s Tales #9: De Djess (2015)

Another first time encounter with a director whose work I’ve been meaning to explore, in this case Italian writer/director Alice Rohrwacher. An opening placard warns that the film “has been shot with imaginary words” before switching to a nun (Chiara Paoluzzi) directing two fishermen who are bringing in a shoal of dresses, using boat hooks to latch onto their protective garment bags. The nun stretches them out to dry on a quay before bringing them inside for an imminent fashion show. A pack of fashion photographers bursts into the foyer, swivelling cameras like big game hunters. Models appear seemingly at random in front of red backdrops. The pack rushes towards each new target, takes aim, and fires in unison like an execution squad – one model (carried in like a modelling dummy) collapses as if shot. Servant girl Gianetta (Yanet Mojica) – the sole black face in a sea of white – takes the final dress (eager to escape its wrapper) to the room of diva model Divina (Alba Rohrwacher), who throws a hissy fit when she nicks her finger. A single drop of blood lands on the previously pristine dress, which hides in shame underneath the bed. Gianetta reappears and coaxes the dress from its hiding place. As the dress slides gratefully on to her body, it rewards her intentions by converting the blood into an embroidered flower. Gianetta is spotted by the photographers as she attempts to sneak from the building, but all of their phone batteries have died simultaneously and they are unable to capture her image, leaving her to escape with a smile. Rohrwacher’s film sparkles with creativity and provides a satirical critique of the very fashion industry which hired her to create the film in the first place.

Miu Miu Women’s Tales #10: Les 3 Boutons (2015)

Influential Belgian filmmaker Agnès Varda has taken her own unique approach to the brief which discards glamour, flirts with fairytale logic and pays homage to a poem by Jacques Prévert. A young teenage girl (Jasmine Thiré) is telling the camera how much milk she can get from her goats when a postman (Jacky Patin) arrives with a package from which a fabulous ball gown billows forth. Descending into a stunning cave system in search of the phantasmagorical gown, she espies several sets of miner’s clothes roosting on the ceiling like a colony of bats before locating the dress, which turns into rags at her touch. Pausing to inform the viewers of her choice to embrace education over fashion, she heads into town, losing three buttons along the way, each of which is found by a male at a different stage of life. The teenage cyclist (Corentin Vignet) looks longingly after her; the middle-aged man (Michel Jeannès) files it carefully away in his collection, catalogued by date and description; the young boy (Léon Mézard) plants and waters his button, watching it grow into a flower. The postman returns to inform her that her loss of the three buttons entitles her to three wishes (and three raccoons) – and the film ends! I liked it, but I’m not quite sure what to make of it… I get the sense that Varda has layered in all sorts of references outside of my experience. But it tickles me that Varda is so blatantly biting the hand that feeds her.

Miu Miu Women’s Tales #13: Carmen (2017)

Award-winning actress Chloë Sevigny has been stretching her creative muscles, writing and directing three short films in the past few years. Last year’s We Are One Global Film Festival introduced me to her most recent film White Echo (2019). Carmen is her second film, a look at life on the road through the eyes of stand-up comedian Carmen Lynch, the star and co-writer. The first half emphasises her isolation, showing extracts from her routine about the difficulties of modern dating but cutting away to eliminate any hint of audience laughter or applause. Interspersed with her routine we see her adjusting her appearance in the mirror, ignoring clumsy and insulting catcalling while shopping, and sitting by herself in a bar while clusters of younger people enjoy each other’s company. The tone switches halfway through, signalled by a change in the colour of her dress from bluish-purple to vivid red. Her body language is more relaxed, the camera has pulled back to show the audience, the laughter and applause are genuine appreciations of a shared female experience. Men are now no longer a noticeable presence as experiences the joys of solitary explanation in an unfamiliar city against a backdrop of blurred crowds, apart but self-contained and content. Sevigny’s approach to the material is subtle and accomplished, showing a firm grasp of filmic techniques and their application to create a mood or emotion.

Miu Miu Women’s Tales #14: (The [End) of History Illusion] (2017)

Writer, director and (crucially) choreographer Celia Rowlson-Hall has created a ’60s fantasia which gradually crumbles in the face of the looming Cold War nightmare it attempts to deny. The film opens with a commercial introducing the viewer to its 1960s-dream-home-cum-underground-bunker setting. The front door swings to open to reveal two synchronised tap dancers (Sean & John Scott). A ballerina (Katlyn Addison) prepares meals in the kitchen. A mermaid (Christina Jones) performs solo synchronised swimming routines in the flower-filled pool. The costumes and design are firmly rooted in the 1960s with an appropriately saturated colour palette. The advertisement concludes with a rapidly-spoken voice-over warning of the potential health problems of underground living, an almost subliminal intrusion of reality. Commercial completed, the frame expands and the inhabitants continues as before – freezing briefly as klaxons blare and the lighting turns red, warning of nuclear danger, before reverting to previous behaviour. As the interruptions increase, the performers continue to behave as if nothing were wrong but slip out of synch with their surroundings, until their mutual denial of reality results in the destruction of themselves and their environment, with only the blind gardener (Mina Nishimura) escaping above ground to a the bright light of an uncertain future. A visual feast with exceptional choreography – my favourite being Leal Zielinska’s elaborate performance as a vacuum-cleaning maid who eventually becomes entangled in the cord, obliviously persisting in her attempts to continue her routine.

Miu Miu Women’s Tales #16: The Wedding Singer’s Daughter (2018)

Writer/director Haifaa Al-Mansour, Saudi Arabia’s first female filmmaker, is known for using her work to examine cultural taboos and critique Saudi societal norms. Here she uses a wedding party in 1980s Riyadh to examine the constraints within which Saudi women lived. The women arrive at the party garbed in traditional abaya and boshiya, although a street level view reveals sparkly high-heeled shoes. Once inside they are free to relax, removing their outer layers to reveal a riot of colours, an array of fancy dresses matching their clothing – although even in this more liberated environment, three young girls whisper among themselves that, as a performer, the wedding singer (Rotana Tarabzouni) is doomed to go to Hell and her daughter (Haylie Niemann) will inevitably follow her. Once the bride and groom are ready to enter, a cry goes out that the men are on their way and the women fall silent, rushing to cover themselves again. The contrast is immediate and speaks for itself. The wedding singer’s daughter illuminates the approaching bride before turning the spotlight directly at the viewer – a direct call for self-examination.

MIFF 68½ – Last and First Men (2017) / MIFF Talks | Art of the Score: The Film Music of Jóhann Jóhannsson (2020)

Tilda Swinton narrates an elegiac future history pseudo-documentary adaptation of Olaf Stapledon’s influential golden age science fiction work, accompanied by a live performance of the score by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra.

Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future (1930) is not an obvious choice for adaptation to film. Charting an imagined future history of humanity spanning 2 billion years, it charts the rise and fall of civilisations from First Man (us) to Eighteenth Man on a broad historical scale without any easily dramatised narrative hook following the path of individuals.

Film composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, in his first and only directorial work before his untimely death in 2018, has addressed this difficulty by translating the novel into a documentary of sorts. Where Werner Herzog recontextualised footage of fire-fighting on the oil fields of Kuwait to construct a documentary framed as an exploration of an alien culture in Lessons of Darkness (1992), Jóhannsson has transformed the brutalist architecture of the Balkans into the remnants of a future civilisation. Cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen films these structures in black and white using glacially paced tracking shots moving across the landscapes or into the images, selecting unusual angles to accentuate the impression of an alien culture tenuously connected to our own. The strategic addition of film grain, scratches in the film and hairs in the gate at scattered moments later in the film adds to the illusion of imperfectly stored material documenting a time gone by.

Jóhannsson’s score, composed and performed in collaboration with Yair Elazar Glotman, matches the pace of the cinematography in its slow glide of orchestrated electronics, choral voices submerged in the mix but occasionally bubbling toward the surface before finally breaking forth towards the end. The music conveys an almost spiritual sense of yearning for the beyond, whether the physical horizons beyond our world or the future, mixed with an elegiac mourning for the eventual fate of the human race, distant but inevitable.

Tilda Swinton’s narration provides an extremely compressed expression of Stapledon’s future history. Jóhannsson and co-screenwriter José Enrique Macián have distilled the source material down to scattered sentences providing fragmentary descriptions of different epochs of future history, which are separated by narrative bridges visually accompanied by the green dot of an oscilloscope depicting a distorted impression of Swinton’s vocal imprint. The narration is scattered sparsely throughout the film, and I found it easy to lose track of what had been said at various times as I disappeared into the combination of sound and image, only to be startled back into verbal awareness when the swelling music cut out and the image jolted back to the green dot.

Acceptance of the ultimate extinction of the human race might not seem like the most uplifting place to end, but the film retains a sense of striving beyond the limitations of imagination coupled with a contemplative appreciation of unfamiliar beauty found within the familiar.

The MIFF Talks strand of the festival included a panel from the team behind the Art of the Score podcast, discussing Jóhann Jóhannsson’s composition in general with a specific focus on his scores for Arrival (2016) and Last and First Men (2017). Guest panelist Seja Vogel provided a fascinating insight into the theory and practice of electronic composition through her attempt to recreate a section of Jóhannsson’s score for Arrival. After explaining how she created the final sounds, her piece was contrasted with the original untreated music from which she started, a much simpler sound which was barely recognisable in the finished piece.