Friendship's Death

Alien Friendship was sent from the Procyon star system to contact earth’s intellectual and political elites, but ends up in the Amman warzone in Jordan during ‘Black September’ in 1970, the bloody Jordanian struggle against the Palestinians. The Scottish journalist Sullivan escorts Friendship to safety at a hotel. There the two converse at length on topics including mortality, technology and the nature of warfare. Friendship’s mission is to understand why earth’s human inhabitants seem so hell bent on destroying themselves and every other species on the planet.

Like a postmodern Dietrich or Garbo character, Friendship undergoes countless spectacular costume changes. Because the extraterrestrial, a kind of proto-AI, has no identity, it can identify with everyone. Friendship compares herself to a musician without a score, weighed down by the freedom of improvisation. In an interview, Tilda Swinton stated that the film “set the tone for her”: every subsequent role was tackled as if she were Friendship’s multifarious spirit.

Celebrated cinema theoretician Peter Wollen was also a filmmaker, generally collaborating with Laura Mulvey. Friendship’s Death, his final film from 1987, was the first and only time he wrote and directed a film alone. Wollen’s background as a film theoretician reveals itself at the end when he completely abandons the conventions of realistic, narrative cinema.

4K restauratie door British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive

Preceded by

Preceding Friendship's Death, a screening of a 16mm print of Powers of Ten by the American design duo Ray and Charles Eames (1977, 9’) that was personally selected by Tilda Swinton, who chose a short film to precede every feature film – either from her own filmography or from Eye’s collection.

Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe is a film created by Charles and Ray Eames of the Eames Office in 1977. © 2025 Eames Office, LLC. All rights reserved.