Cineaste Magazine
Last Festival on Earth: The International Short Film Festival Oberhausen 2021 Reviewed by Jared Rapfogel
Among the films that explicitly reflected the pandemic, perhaps the most explicit was Last Man (Dana Levy, 2020), which combined sound and imagery from the 1964 postapocalyptic Vincent Price film, The Last Man on Earth, with security camera footage recorded during the height of lockdown, depicting streets, intersections, plazas, and business districts in cities around the world—locations normally teeming with human activity, now rendered all but deserted. The conceit of the film—comparing the reality of the spring of 2020 to a postapocalyptic zombie film—was not exactly revelatory in its originality or perceptiveness. But personally—as someone who did have the luxury of working from home, and therefore didn’t step foot outside my south Brooklyn neighborhood for several months at the height of the pandemic—I was taken aback by how powerfully the film brought home the profound and surreal transformation of the urban landscape wrought by COVID-19, a spectacle that remained largely theoretical for those who were able to shelter in place. The catastrophically depopulated cityscapes, the muddy quality of the footage, the blank gaze of the security cameras, not to mention Vincent Price’s theatrical but resonant voice, all combined to conjure an indelible depiction of a world whose gears have come grinding to a halt, in ways that until this past year seemed like the stuff of dystopian fantasy.
