John Menick

The Secret Life of Things

The theme of the end of the world, of the last man on earth, recurs in our literary and cinematographic culture and in our imaginary: “we had this dream before, the dream that we’re alone.”

In John Menick’s The Secret Life of Things, the narrator presents himself as an enthusiast and expert on films announcing the end of the world and those staging someone waking up to discover that they are the only survivor on earth. Like in some works by Mario Garcia Torres (like The Transparencies of the Non-Act, a slide projection about the artist Oscar Neuestern, Kadist Collection), the artist lends his discourse to a stranger. Mastering the montage, he intersperses a monologue and images. A suite of extracts that intersect with his discourse highlights the recurrence of the theme in cinema: from René Clair and “Paris qui dort” (1924), to “The Last Men on Earth” (1964) or “The Omega Man” (1971). These themes recur in European literary and cinematographic culture and in the imaginary: “we used to have this dream before, the dream that we were alone.” They were greatly developed in the 1960s and 1970s, allowing the expression of concerns of the time (the atomic bomb in Hiroshima, Cold War threats) through fiction. From the beginning of the video, one has a glimpse of Paris and then other cities, empty, with abandoned buildings, roads, and monuments. More than a filmography of the end of the world, the narrator explains that this obsession is linked to things: “I watched these movies for their things, the massive accumulation of things.” What will become of these objects, cars, houses when they have lost their users? He continues to say that these objects have another use, another identity, ‘a secret life’. Finally, he admits that “The story of the future is therefore in our present.” Above all, these announcing films are the witnesses of our history.