Last Testaments

No filmmaker gets out of this life alive, and very often directors will find themselves forcibly retired well before their expiration date. In this melancholy knowledge, the most an auteur can hope for is to go out with a bang rather than a whimper. The films playing in Last Testaments do exactly that: from the bold docufiction experimentation of the too-soon-dead F.W. Murnau’s Tabu to the contemplation of the hereafter in Derek Jarman’s Blue to the extravagant artifice of Josef von Sternberg’s The Saga of Anatahan to the howling abjection of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo, the films here are the work of artists laying it on the line and leaving everything on the field. We all gotta go, but we don’t have to do it quietly.