Have you heard about the rock doc at Sundance this year? You’re thinking of a non-parody version of “This Is Spinal Tap,” aren’t you? Incorrect. Wrong rock. I’m talking about those things the characters become in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Yeah, those rocks. They know things.
Deborah Stratman’s (“The Illinois Parables”) “Last Things” is in Sundance’s Final Frontier category, which I think of as the “these films are stranger than the others” category. It’s the rock doc.
The film traces history from the beginning of time to the present day as seen by rocks. Narrators (Valérie Massadian, “Milla” and Marcia Bjørnerud, debut) speak in French while structures — sometimes molecule shaped, other times more fractalline, like snowflakes — form and spin on a black background. It is unclear if these forms are in a vacuum or backed by a galaxy. What is that blackness? The narrator tells us the forms have existed far longer than we have. Once we are gone, they will remain.
Much of the film consists of what appear to be microscopic images of rocks, revealing their internal organization at the non-human equivalent of a cellular level. The variation of these structures is fascinating. Some are sharp crystals. Others look like frozen sea anemones with white tendrils reaching across the screen.
Music accompanies these images, harsh notes with long pauses, more sound than score. A steely, cutting clang makes the crystals feel like knives, formidable and emotional. Rather than observing the rocks, we are invited to feel what it might have been like to exist with them as the earth threw life in and out of turmoil over millions of years.
Other parts of the film feel more like a typical documentary. People interact with rocks both in labs and in the natural world. In a lab, a man discusses an aggregate rock, one of the earliest rock types to form in the solar system. Later, the French narrator returns as a woman enters a rock cave. As she descends into the dark, a heartbeat becomes louder — the heartbeat of the cave itself. While Stratman focuses on what we can learn from studying rocks, she also characterizes them. In “Last Things,” rocks are just as alive, if not more so, than humans.
As I watched the film, I almost believed in the life of what I knew were inanimate objects. From far away, the rocks pictured were as motionless as ever, but in the microscopic close-ups they moved and changed. I realized something was happening, even if in everyday life I wasn’t aware of it. That stillness was an illusion. These objects were recording information.
How do we interact with things that dwarf us in age? If the film is their story, what part do humans play? The film shows a stone permanently dented from raindrops before it was solid enough to fend off their eroding effect — “raindrop autographs older than the pharaohs.” When a man leaves the rock face he studies, the camera focuses on the hand print he left behind; as much information as he took, he also left a mark in the stone. The film doesn’t just tell us we are insignificant, having been on earth so fleetingly, but shows how we communicate and learn from these objects.
There’s a post-credit scene. A break dancer performs on the pavement of a busy street. The camera closes in on his hands brushing the asphalt, lingering on the sidewalk’s chiseled and smoothed surface. We now know what that pavement contains.
“Last Things” is only 50 minutes long, and any longer would have been too much. But the film strikes a rare balance, centering on something non-human while maintaining its humanity. I smiled at the post-credit scene, thinking, “Next time I walk across the sidewalk, what will I think? What would I ask it if I could?”
Senior Arts Editor Erin Evans can be reached at erinev@umich.edu.