Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World

182 Pages·2015·4.18 MB·English

by  Peter Szendy

APOCALYPSE-CINEMA
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PETER SZENDY
2012 AND OTHER ENDS
OF THE WORLD
A P O C A L Y P S E -
C I N E M A
Translated by Will Bishop
FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS )) NEW YORK )) 2015
Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic,
mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations
in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Th is book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy, L’apocalypse-
cinéma: 2012 et autres fi n du monde © Capricci, 2012.
Th is work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance,
received fi nancial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Aff airs, the
Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, and FACE
(French American Cultural Exchange). French Voices logo designed by
Serge Bloch.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Szendy, Peter.
[Apocalypse-cinéma. English]
Apocalypse-cinema : 2012 and other ends of the world / Peter Szendy ;
translated by Will Bishop. — First edition.
pages cm
“Th is book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy,
L’apocalypse-cinéma: 2012 et autres fi n du” — Title page verso
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8232-6480-3 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6481-0
(pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Science fi ction fi lms—History and criticism. 2. Apocalypse in motion
pictures. I. Title.
PN1995.9.S26S9413 2015
791.43'615—dc23
2014030503
Printed in the United States of America
17 16 15 5 4 3 2 1
FOR GIL ANIDJAR
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CONTENTS
Foreword: One Sun Too Many
by Samuel Weber ix
Chapter 
Melancholia, or The After-All 
Chapter 
The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown 
Chapter 
Cloverfi eld, or The Holocaust of the Date 
Chapter 
Terminator, or The Arche-Traveling Shot 
Chapter 
, or Pyrotechnics 
Chapter 
A.I., or The Freeze 
Chapter 
Pause, for Inventory (the “Apo”) 
Chapter 
Watchmen, or The Layering of the Cineworld 
Chapter 
Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography 
Chapter 
Blade Runner, or The Interworlds 
Chapter 
Twelve Monkeys, or The Pipes of the Apocalypse 
Chapter 
The Road, or The Language of a Drowned Era 
Chapter 
The Blob, or The Bubble 
Postface
Il n’y a pas de hors-fi lm, or Cinema and Its Cinders 
Notes 
Index of Films 
viii )) CONTENTS
FOREWORD: One Sun Too Many
Samuel Weber
And truly, I saw something, the likes of which I never saw.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Th us Spoke Zarathustra
What in daguerreotype must have felt inhuman, not to say deadly, was
the (moreover prolonged) looking into the camera, since the apparatus
[Apparat] records the human image without returning its gaze.
—Walter Benjamin, On Some Motifs in Baudelaire
Th e apocalypse is in fashion. Ever since Hiroshima and Naga-
saki, when it fi rst became evident that human beings had
acquired the power to destroy life on earth, and to destroy it
in a spectacular and rapid manner, apocalyptic thoughts and
images have increasingly proliferated and, at least in certain
parts of the world—a world soon to be “globalized”—pro-
gressively fascinated what was once called the popular imag-
ination. No wonder, then, that the most popular medium of
the post–Second World War period—cinema—and today its
audiovisual successor should have become the vehicle for
deploying visions of the end of all visibility and for providing
material for imagining the unimaginable. In an essay that