Movies to see just before you die

• New book explores the final watching preferences of famous figures

We’ve all seen and may even own Christmas stocking books like 1001 Movies You Have to Watch Before You Die, but British artist-curator and author Stanley Schtinter’s new book, Last Movies, offers an intriguing twist on the “before you die”, aspect by compiling a list of the actual films that a host of famous characters watched before their deaths.

From Franz Kafka — whose last cinematic experience was the decidedly un-Kafkaesque Charlie Chaplin comedy The Kid — to grunge legend Kurt Cobain, who watched Jane Campion’s quietly devastating masterpiece

The Piano before he took his own life in April 1994, Schtinter has turned a macabre fascination into a fascinating exploration of cinema and what his historical characters’ final watching preferences might add to our understanding of them.

The book has just been released and is accompanied in the UK by a screening programme of several of the last movies at the ICA in London.

It’s the latest in a series of singular examinations of pop culture that have marked Schtinter’s artistic career. His previous projects have included

The Lock-In, a 2018 video work that stitched together scenes from the long-running British soapie East Enders to create a 100-hour movie set entirely in the pub. Another is a live restaging of the funeral of

Princess Diana on the streets of Manchester, which replaced the original musical elements of the service with the sounds of a mariachi band. And his 2021 project called Important Books (Or Manifestos Read by Children) collected famous political tracts and recorded children reading them aloud.

Schtinter told The Guardian that his latest idea was inspired by reading about the death of former Swedish prime minister Olaf Palme, who was assassinated in 1986 after leaving a Stockholm cinema.

GOOD METAPHOR

Schtinter was intrigued by the question of what Palme might have watched in the hours before he was killed. He found that it was the Swedish art house comedy The Mozart Brothers, directed by Suzanne Osten. It focuses on the trials and tribulations of a Swedish opera director trying to stage an unconventional production of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and coming up against a cast who think his ideas are terrible.

That’s probably a good metaphor for the job of any political leader. But one wonders how Palme received it and whether, were it not for the fact that he had been offered a role in the film by Osten, he might never have gone to see it in the first place.

Notorious bank robber John Dillinger was also coming out of a cinema when he was shot by FBI agents in Chicago in 1933. His last movie? The crime drama Manhattan Melodrama starring Clark Cable and

William Powell as two men who were raised as orphans and remained friends even as their different paths led them to live lives on very different sides of the law and to fall in love with the same woman, played by Myrna Loy.

Marshall Applewhite, the leader of the Heaven’s Gate religious cult whose members committed mass suicide in 1997, watched Mike Leigh’s emotional social realist drama Secrets and Lies with several members of his flock before their death. One can only wonder what they made of a drama that opens emotional wounds related to family deceptions and workingclass struggles in the last days of their devotion.

EROTIC DRAMA

A MACABRE FASCINATION TURNED INTO A FASCINATING EXPLORATION OF CINEMA

Chaplin, living in self-imposed exile in Switzerland at the time of his death in 1977, watched a print of Stanley Kubrick’s visually lush period film Barry Lyndon before he died. It was a film he found so moving that after watching it he wrote a telegram to Kubrick telling him that he “hated to send it back”.

Kubrick himself would die in 1999, shortly after watching the trailer for his Nicole KidmanTom Cruise erotic drama, Eyes Wide Shut, which was released shortly after his death.

It’s not always easy to establish with certainty what Schtinter’s cast of colourful icons watched before their deaths but in some cases he has been able to make an educated guess. Former US president John F Kennedy probably ended his film-watching life with the 1963 James Bond caper From Russia With Love, starring Sean Connery. Kennedy was assassinated in November of that year. Elvis Presley hired a cinema in Memphis for a screening of the Roger Moore Bond classic The Spy Who Loved Me, just weeks before his body was found in his Graceland bathroom in August 1977.

Sometimes Schtinter found links between characters and their final viewing choices that are just plain creepy. Maverick German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder who completed 40 feature films before his death from an overdose of cocaine and barbiturates at the age of 37

was watching Michael Curtiz’s classic 1932 prison drama 20,000 Days in Sing Sing in the last moments before his death. In the film there is a shot of a telegram dated June 10 1932, exactly 50 years before Fassbinder’s death.

That’s a spooky piece of coincidence that Schtinter says serves to remind us that his project and the cast of characters whose final watching habits populate it are real ghosts and that though we “might not grapple with it or consider it, what we’re seeing up there on the screen [are] ghosts”.

It’s also in some cases, like that of Palme’s assassination and the death of Dillinger, proof of French director Louis Malle’s maxim that “the cinema can kill, just like anything else”. So maybe see every film you watch as if it were your last.