29/10/2020 Jóhann Jóhannsson: What Is Already Here on Notebook | MUBI

Notebook Feature

Jóhann Jóhannsson:
What Is Already Here
An exploration of the otherworldly sounds and images
in Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson's two
directorial efforts.

Sasha Frere-Jones • 12 OCT 2020

Jóhann Jóhannsson's End of Summer is

exclusively showing on MUBI from September 30
- October 30, 2020.

End of Summer

In the only two movies he directed and scored

himself, Jóhann Jóhannsson gave us a vision of
human otherness, a sense of people without
people. End of Summer (2014) and Last and First
Men (2019) both present landscapes riven with
energy but fresh out of humans. Last and First

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Men was filmed all around the former Yugoslavia,

using 16mm anamorphic camera lenses. The only
subjects before the lens are “spomenik,”
enormous statues built after World War II to
commemorate sites of violence. The figures are
based on ancient, unfamiliar shapes and seem
far from any common experience of Earth. Tilda
Swinton’s narration, taken from a 1930s sci-fi
novel, describes a dying race from the future
talking to the dying race of the present—us.
Jóhannsson’s music blends with field recordings
and flows under Swinton’s narration of “non-
luminous gas” and “the plains of Neptune.” All of
the sounds work with the very slow tracking
shots of the monuments, pulling the viewer and
listener away from a normative sense of time. Or
rather, the music seems to be iterating the
feeling of time itself while the camera renders
the feeling of presence and embodiment. These
two forces seem to be more than enough in
Jóhannsson’s cinematic universe. The conditions
depicted and the sensations produced are not
barren and empty but quite the opposite—fully
formed and spiritually complete. Jóhannsson
hasn’t removed the people from the landscape
to deny them but to show us what is already
always here.

In Last and First Men, as in most of his film

scores, Jóhannsson uses voices and electronics
to open up the timbre of the traditional string
section. It’s interesting that here, and in End of
Summer, when in full control of the cinematic
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experiences, he doesn't entirely abandon

narrative or coherence. There is a liminal space,
an edge much like the orbit of Neptune, where
Jóhannsson takes us, though he doesn’t strand
us there. The mood of Last and First Men is both
dark, in a true sense, and exalted. There is a
chance that humanity can survive, though slim,
while the hulking, illogical statues perform the
beautiful trick of making scale invisible. Are
these things two feet tall? A hundred? A
thousand? Nothing in the frame allows for
comparison. They seem like the sentinels of time
itself and, as the film elapses, the viewer loses
hold of anything but the narration.

End of Summer ends up closer to that state of

eternity and uses many of the same gambits as
Last and First Men, but is more concise, and
sweeter. Shot on Super 8 in the Antarctic, End of
Summer uses sound from the site of filming as
much as it uses Jóhannsson’s score. This time,
there is no narration at all, no voiceover or
dialogue. We have what feels like a silent film
from 1917 recharged and filled up with sound. The
first twenty of the film’s thirty minutes are given
over to the penguins of the Antarctic, who mill
about in enormous groups. The treatment and
editing of the film allows for a frame rate that
only records a portion of the activity, making
everything seem provisional, like it has been sent
from the past, rather than the future. 

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Last and First Men

The penguins are extremely good at conveying

calm and liveliness, connecting with the
landscape and aligning with its rhythms.
Jóhannsson’s strings combine here with Hildur
Guðnadóttir’s cello and Robert Aiki Aubrey
Lowe’s electronics. Both collaborators also use
their voices, and the progress of End of Summer
is a gently devastating move from the string
towards the singing voice. The penguins are
collected in small groups of twenty or so, at first.
The sound of birds connects here with long,
gentle swells of cello. The shots give us
incrementally larger groups of penguins by the
side of small inlets and rivers. Eventually there
seem to be hundreds of penguins, massed near
a creek below a huge, snowy mountain. The
sounds of water blend into the vocals of Lowe as
the camera pulls back slightly and the sound of
natural processes diminishes. The film moves
from the character of a string quartet to a
religious choral work, without becoming massive.
The general affect is still light, if cosmic. These
penguins, in this film, do nothing quickly and as

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he will later, in Last and First Men, Jóhannsson is

suggesting a passage of time. As the water flows,
it dawns on you. Is something melting? If we are
not hearing from a future civilization hoping to
save us, we may be hearing our own friends in
the animal kingdom. Maybe they are staring at
that creek because they know it. Maybe they are
staring at it because it wasn’t there last year.

After a flurry of avian squawks, we ride Lowe and

Guðnadóttir and Jóhannsson into the final third
of the film, a luscious expanse of grey stripped of
all birds and beasts. The liveliest force here is
wind, which we can now hear, and the currents of
the ocean. One rock formation looks like a very
small island, or the top of a sunken city. Glassy
and metallic tones give the proceedings a brief,
electronic tang. 

Stranded on the ocean, we travel with a band of

voices that slowly loop a slightly dissonant
wordless chorus, altering in pitch and duration,
set apart by long silences. The ocean gives away
to clumps of icebergs, and then narrow
passageways between mountains. The sounds of
the earth have settled down to a very quiet
rumble, and we are being gently paced by the
chorus as we trawl past forms of ice and snow.
They start looking less like formations and more
like ruins, slowly eroded by the waters. 

As the film was winding down, I was extremely

aware of the short distance between the

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elements Jóhannsson uses: strings, singers,

synthesizer, field recording. His sounds move in
close formation, like the grasses that take up the
final minute, before Jóhannsson closes on a
setting sun. The musicality of the sounds and
the sound of the music drives the viewer
towards one silvery, cohesive point. If we follow
the tenor of Jóhannsson’s music, we see what he
is showing us, for the brief time that it is still
here.

Tags
Jóhann Jóhannsson / Now Showing

Related Films

END OF SUMMER LAST AND FIRST MEN

Jóhann Jóhannsson Jóhann Jóhannsson

Feiwan Ho

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