This event is sold out. However, we always reserve spots for our Friends of Reethaus annual pass holders, giving them year-round access to our monthly Open Haus events.
Before his premature death in 2018, the acclaimed Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson embarked on a seven-year project to adapt Olaf Stapledon’s classic sci-fi novel into a film. The making of the Last and First Men, Jóhansson’s only directorial work, was a feat he described as “one of the happiest experiences in my life, and one of the most gruelling.”
This November for our Open Haus, Soundwalk Collective presents a singular aural experience: the complete soundscape of Last and First Men, with an oracular narration by Tilda Swinton, spatialized for Reethaus. Here, with the images subtracted, listeners are plunged ears-first into an aeon-spanning drama that inquires into tragedy and humanism from a cosmic vantage point.
The narrative of the eponymous 1930 novel by Olaf Stapledon consists of a dispatch from two billion years hence, when our unrecognizable descendants, in the antechamber of final extinction, share a telepathic group mind and an overabundance of history. For Jóhannson, the project was a meditation on memory, architecture and failed utopia. The film’s score, composed with and finished by Yair Elazar Glotman, is elegiac, droning and somber — befitting a requiem for the Last Men and for the ideals of an unattainable utopia.
An epic amalgam of philosophical fiction, cultural anthropology and speculative ethnography, Last and First Men is a history of the future, charting the rises and falls of humanity. Reethaus welcomes you this November to listen patiently.