The great hymns of Novalis ever mourned the death of his beloved and cast his grief into a cosmically oriented grace of language. I excerpted some of that lanugage in my previous film From: First Hym to the Night - Novalis. In this much more extended vision, this "Last Hymn...", I have attempted to create some paradigm appropriate to Novalis' final sense of the universe, some "hymn" of the inner eye, something hopefully occuring to him, comforting him, when he was dying and beyond language. This elaborately hand-painted step-printed film (composed of many layers of paint and electrical erasures, scrapes and gouges of emulsion, violations of previously step-printed film - which Phil Solomon and I photographed separately and together), is a composite of multiple tempos, thus rhythms, in interaction, and many "spaces" approximated by interruptive overlays of paint, all dedicated to that spiritual condition which resolves the physiology of cells and the distant stars. - SB