What’s the last movie you’ll see before you die?

It’s Wednesday night at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts and a pair of stab vest-clad, masked-up police officers have just burst into cinema number one.

They quickly spot their suspect; a ponytailed reprobate in an aisle seat. The taller copper grabs him by the shoulders, but he isn’t going quietly. A struggle breaks out, the film stops and the lights flood on. Within seconds, well-meaning citizen observers in the crowd are whipping out their phones, while the police drag their man kicking and spewing out the door.

As the crowd comes to terms with what they’ve just witnessed, an officer walks back into the room. But instead of bagging up evidence, he strides onto the stage, picks up a microphone and launches into a spirited rendition of Matt Monro’s From Russia With Love theme.

It’s only then that the audience twigs what is going on. We’re here as part of a series called Last Movies, which examines the final films that major 20th-century figures saw before dying, and this stunt is a reimagination of Lee Harvey Oswald’s final moments as a free man. The film we had been watching (a low-budget, chest-thumping Audie Murphy number called War is Hell) had cut out at the exact same moment Oswald was apprehended at the Dallas Theatre, 60 years ago to the day, while From Russia With Love is supposedly the last film that John F Kennedy saw before getting a ‘magic bullet’ to the brain.

Last Movies is the brainchild of Stanley Schtinter, whose job description is best left to his own press bio: “Schtinter has been called an ‘artist’ by the Daily Mail, and an ‘exorcist’ by the Daily Star.” The project exists in a series of screenings and talks at the ICA, and an accompanying book of the same name. Last Movies presents a sinister, accidental and occasionally poignant alternative history of cinema, which according to foreword writer Erika Balsom, “abandons all those calcified criteria most frequently used to organise cinema programmes; period, nation, genre, director, star, theme…and embraces chance.”

Alongside studies of JFK and Oswald’s final flicks, there is the depression-era bank robber John Dillinger (shot dead by the FBI after watching Manhattan Melodrama), Kurt Cobain (who takes his own life shortly after seeing The Piano) and the Heaven’s Gate cult, who also took their own lives en masse after watching Mike Leigh’s Secrets & Lies. Alongside these notorious 20th-century figures are cinematic icons such as Fassbinder, Pasolini, George Cukor and Bette Davis (who died soon after attending the San Sebastian Film Festival.)

A few days after the From Russia With Love screening, I met up with Schtinter to find out about this peculiar rewriting of cultural history. I ask him about the initial inspiration for the project: “It was finding out that Olof Palme, the Swedish Prime Minister, was assassinated leaving the cinema”, he explains. “There’s a huge amount of political intrigue and speculation about who killed him, but I found myself wondering, ‘What was he watching?’ “It turned out to be a film called Mozart Brothers by Suzanne Osten, which is an inversion of Don Giovanni. Interestingly, Osten had asked Palme if he wanted to play a role in the movie, as its megalomaniacal protagonist, which is quite possibly why he was there.”

The Palme mystery lit off a chain reaction in Schtinter’s head. “Obviously, Ian Curtis is a commonly known one, but I thought ‘Shit, maybe there are others?’, and there were”, he continues. “If a life has been afforded sufficient scrutiny in its last days and hours, then you can often find out what they were watching, if they were watching. Eventually, I found enough examples to present this alternative navigation of the first century of cinema. There were a lot of disappointments, like Marilyn Monroe, who I’d hoped to write about after the horrible biopic Blonde, but it is what is: there can be no bias in the selections of subjects, only “fate”.

The format of Last Movies can at times feel like an elevated listicle, or a highbrow Wikipedia hole full of fascinating coincidences and random tidbits. Schtinter is all too happy to hear this comparison and even goes a step further. “I wanted the book to be the consummate ‘toilet book’, the return of the toilet book”, he grins. “There’s a great book by Willie Donaldson called Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics, which is this insane compendium of con men and pirates. I love his approach to cross-referencing and footnoting, although his project is so vast that his subjects can’t be afforded the detail of the Last Movies watchers…if you want to call it detail.”

I ask Schtinter about his case studies. Which of the deaths seems to have the most poetic connection with the film in question? “John Dillinger is a good example”, says Schtinter. “He was watching Manhattan Melodrama by W.S. Van Dyke and George Cukor, which is about childhood best friends sent on different paths after a tragic event. One of them gives everything to the maintenance of law and order, while the other embraces the underworld.”

“Clark Gable plays the bad boy, and he was Dillinger’s favourite actor – (Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s too). When Gable’s character is sent to the electric chair at the end, the film references Dillinger and the crimewave that gripped 1930s America, in part attempting to justify the lawman’s ultimate betrayal of his best friend. So Dillinger is watching this film, reflecting on the world that he has helped create, and then he’s shot dead by the FBI outside the cinema.”

Are there any entries that seem particularly death-inducing, through either tragedy or rage? Schtinter suggests the French writer Boris Vian, who died of a heart attack, shouting at the screen while watching an adaptation of his own novel, and the folk singer Phil Ochs, who took his own life after watching One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (a film with a particularly bleak ending, even for 1970s American cinema).

Last Movies is a spiky, iconoclastic book, part investigation, part playful stream of consciousness. At one point, Schtinter turns detective, challenging the common narrative around the death of Ian Curtis, who legend says was watching Werner Herzog’s Stroszek before he hung himself. Schtinter dug up the TV records of the time and revealed that Curtis could have also watched the 1962 version of Cape Fear before he died (and then International Golf Highlights). Does he anticipate any pushback from Joy Division superfans for suggesting this? “Cape Fear is the better film.”

Although the project is based on long-dead stories and characters, for Schtinter, it reflects his wider pessimism around the film scene, and culture as a whole: “It’s no coincidence that this project is called ‘last movies’”, he explains.

“Places of accident and discovery have always been undermined and restricted by those in power. The cinema in the UK with some notable exceptions is all but gone. It does feel like we’re at the end of something. What I don’t understand is why the technology we have isn’t used in more innovative and liberating ways, on an individual and collective level – making radical, sleazy movies to share on new platforms, in new ways? Most filmmakers with any visibility today are at best propagandists, and at worst advertisers.”

For Schtinter, Last Movies is a way of reconnecting cinema to its past, where cinemas could be illicit, dirty and exciting, rather than just the schism between arthouse and multiplex we have today. “I love the cinema space. There’s a certain danger there, you don’t know what’s going to happen or who’s going to be there. This sense of possibility, and in the journey to and fro, is as important as the film. Kenneth Anger described cinema as ‘inherently evil’ in his 1969 manifesto, and said that he used it to more literally ‘capture’ people. This is a useful consideration particularly when contemporary political and social issues are taken up as merchandising opportunities by individuals and institutions. I don’t like the film, but it doesn’t matter: there is something really satisfying about putting on From Russia With Love at the ICA.”

As the interview comes to an end, I can’t resist asking him the most inevitable, hackneyed question of all: what would his own last movie be? “Maybe the project has shifted – very slightly – my relationship with watching films. In his review of the book for Prospect magazine, Sukhdev Sandhu asks, ‘What if we were to watch each movie as though it were our last?’ And when I was on a plane recently, I was flicking through the movies and remembered I’d never seen 2001: A Space Odyssey.”

“I was a huge Kubrick fan as a teenager, but 2001 felt sacred to me. I always said I’d only see it on a 70mm presentation, by chance. But I was on the plane, on my way to present the Last Movies programme for the first time. I’ve never experienced turbulence like it. I thought of what Sukhdev said. I couldn’t watch 65. I couldn’t watch the new Indiana Jones. And so I broke my oath and did 2001.”

Last Movies is a project that drags cinema away from all the chin-stroking, from ‘the discourse’ and the increasingly politicised festival circuit. It examines a time when watching a film was a random decision, a happenstance, or just an excuse to smoke indoors and make out with someone. It shows you how cinema anchors our lives, but also, how the last film you ever see might not necessarily be a good one.