Synopses & Reviews
Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012,
The Day After Tomorrow, and
The Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like
Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and
Twelve Monkeys,
this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit.
Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the film. It is the consummation and the (self-)consumption of cinema, in the form of an acinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling radiations, freeze-overs, and seismic cracks and crevices are but other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white, its freeze-frames and digital touch-ups.
The apocalyptic genre is not just one genre among others: It plays with the very conditions of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that, every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing.
In a Postface specially written for the English edition, Szendy extends his argument into a debate with speculative materialism. Apocalypse-cinema, he argues, announces itself as cinders that question the "ultratestimonial" structure of the filmic gaze. The cine-eye, he argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.
Review
In this prodigiously intelligent book, Peter Szendy reflects on the specific nature of apocalyptic cinema. Organized as a series of brief essays on individual films and recurrent cinematic strategies, Apocalypse-Cinema offers brilliant insights on a genre that has yet to receive all the critical attention it deserves. --Marie-Helene Huet, Princeton University
"Apocalypse-Cinema is a brilliantly-executed, timely book, a tour-de-force encounter with a major film genre that has been too much neglected by serious film scholars. Szendy s survey of the highs and lows of the apo canon is nuanced and impeccably grounded in contemporary philosophy and film theory." --Terry Harpold, University of Florida
About the Author
Peter Szendy is Professor of Philosophy at Paris Ouest Nanterre and musicological adviser for the concert programs at the Cité de la musique. His books to have been translated into English (all from Fordham) are
Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials,
Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox,
Prophecies of Leviathan: Reading Past Melville, and
Listen: A History of Our Ears.
Will Bishop received his doctorate in French Literature from the University of California Berkeley. He lives in Paris, where he teaches and translates.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
1. Melancholia, or the After-All
2. The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown
3. Cloverfield, or the Holocaust of the Date
4. Terminator, or the Arche-Travelling Shot
5. 2012, or Pyrotechnics
6. A.I., or the Freeze
7. Pause, For Inventory (The "Apo")
8. Watchmen, or the layering of the cineworld
9. Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography
10. Blade Runner, or the Interworlds
11. Twelve Monkeys, or the Pipes of the Apocalypse
12. The Road, or the Language of a Drowned Era
13. The Blob, or the Bubble
14. Postface: Il n'y a pas de hors-film, or cinema and its cinders