Last Things

What happens to us / Is irrelevant to the world’s geology / But what happens to the world’s geology / is not irrelevant to us. – Hugh MacDiarmid

From before the beginning until after the end; evolution and extinction as told through the prism of minerals. The geo-biosphere is introduced as a place of evolutionary possibility, where humans disappear but life endures.

Catalyzed by two novellas of J.-H. Rosny, joint pseudonym of Belgian brothers Boex who wrote sci-fi before it was a genre, the film takes up their pluralist vision of evolution, where imagining prehistory is inseparable from envisioning the future. Also key are Roger Caillois’ writing on stones, Clarice Lispector’s Hour of the Star, Robert Hazen’s mineral evolution theory, the symbiosis theory of Lynn Margulis, Donna Haraway’s multi-species scenarios, Hazel Barton’s research on cave microbes and Marcia Bjørnerud’s thoughts on time literacy.

In one way or another, these thinkers have all sought to displace humankind and human reason from the center of evolutionary processes. Passages from Rosny and interviews with Bjørnerud accompany us through the film. Stones are its ballast. We trust rock as archive, but we may as well write on water. In the end, it’s particles that remain.