Schtinter, Stanley: Last Movies: (A book of endings.)

Tenement Press, paperback

Publication Date: October 19th, 2023

Publisher Marketing: For a review of the collection published in The Guardian, see here. For an excerpt from the collection published on LitHub, see here. A publication, durational artwork, and moving-image experience, 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, Schtinter's 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, the collection 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. Stanley Schtinter has been described by writer Iain Sinclair as 'the last accredited activist, the last avant-garde.' He recently presented the premiere of his "endless" video-work, The Lock-In, at the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and exhibited the work as a solo presentation at the Barbican Centre in London during July 2022 (reviewed for The Guardian by Jonathan Jones as 'an epic film […] spellbinding, Warholian'). From May 2021 until May 2022 he presented Important Books (or, Manifestos read by Children) at Whitechapel Gallery in London. In 2021, he published the edited collection, The Liberated Film Club (Tenement Press). Schtinter is the artistic director of purge.xxx; an "anti-" record label ("anti-" everything) wherein he curates and publishes a catalogue of sound-works, soundtracks, and collaborations. Praise for Last Movies All films are haunted, both by the immortal light of the sooner-or-later dead that they curate, and by the filaments of meaning they extrude into unscripted human lives. Last Movies is an unexpectedly revealing catalogue of final interchanges between imminent ghosts and counterpart electric spectres on the screen's far side. Profound and riveting, Schtinter's graveyard perspective offers up a rich and startlingly novel view of cinema, angled through cemetery gates before the closing credits. A remarkable accomplishment. Alan Moore Wade more than a dozen pages into Last Movies and these connections start to reveal themselves like constellations on a cloudless night. Ryan Gilbey, The Guardian Very strange, and deeply thought-provoking. Laura Mulvey Here is the endgame of endgames. A commendably perverse demonstration of how it is possible for something to be assimilated, by way of rumour and manipulated history, without being experienced. Iain Sinclair, Sight and Sound In Last Movies, artist-curator Stanley Schtinter turns the idea, that film captures the dead and turns them into ghosts, on its head. Rather than focus on deceased people onscreen, he finds out (or, occasionally, makes an informed guess at) what was the last film that various important twentieth-century political and cultural figures had watched, bringing together a potted history of the medium itself. Juliet Jacques, ArtReview A scintillating labyrinth of synchronicities, where Schtinter's meticulous research and encyclopaedic knowledge are as impressive as his intriguing speculations. Essential reading for film buffs, conspiracy theorists and high-end pub quizzers everywhere. John Smith The more details Schtinter's Last Movies uncovers the more mysterious his project becomes. What are we meant to understand from learning that Franz Kafka's last movie was The Kid (1921) by Charlie Chaplin? Or that Chaplin started casting it just one week after the death of his son Norman? Or that Norman's tombstone read only 'The Little Mouse'? Or that, after Chaplin himself died in 1977 (his last movie was Kubrick's Barry Lyndon), his coffin was dug up from a Lausanne cemetery by two refugees and held to ransom? Perhaps it's the freedom to speculate, the unanswerability of those questions, that is its own reward. Boldface names, lurid details, strange connection. Schtinter, always eager to deflate pomposity, likens his project to an "occult version of OK! magazine." I myself can't help wondering: what if we were to watch every movie as if it were our last? Sukhdev Sandhu, Prospect Last Movies raises the status of the film programme to that of monumental artwork. Mortality and the movies are now unarguably one: death and life 24 times a second. Gareth Evans A highbrow Wikipedia hole full of fascinating coincidences. Clive Martin, Plaster Magazine Last Movies brings together its selections by the force of an external event, one which bears not on the films themselves but on little-known details of their exhibition histories, and then orders them not according to any curatorial vision but by date of disappearance. It abandons all those calcified criteria most frequently used to organise cinema programmes: period, nation, genre, director, star, theme. Nothing internal to these films motivates their inclusion, their "quality" least of all. Although Schtinter can choose a death to research, the title to be shown is dictated by history. This is all to say that Last Movies embraces chance, an avant-garde strategy its orchestrator has been known to marshal in previous undertakings. And so it should be for a programme about death. The tenacity of the "life review" flashback as a trope in fiction films could be attributed to the fact that people who have had near-death experiences claim to have encountered the phenomenon. It is more likely that this convention endures because it satisfies a reassuring fantasy: that life will ultimately attain coherence. The fantasy of that "last movie" is undone by the reality of Schtinter's Last Movies. They are often random and in large part unchosen; they throw significance into crisis and demand acquiescence to externality. They are, in other words, like death itself. Erika Balsom