Last Movies
Stanley Schtinter 

Tenement Press #10
978-1-7393851-1-8
324 pp

£17.50

 _{ORDER DIRECT FROM TENEMENT HERE} 


Published 5th November 2023

With a Foreword / Programme Notes by Erika Balsom 
an ‘Intermission’ from Bill Drummond
& an Afterword by Nicole Brenez


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


Last Movies is a puzzle book in which one must decide what to believe.

Lilian Crawford,
The Times Literary Supplement





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