Apocalypse-Cinema , livre ebook

APOCALYPSE - CINEMA
PETER SZENDY
2012 AND OTHER ENDS OF THE WORLD
APOCALYPSE - CINEMA
Translated by Will Bishop
Copyright 2015 Fordham University Press
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This book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy, L apocalypse-cin ma: 2012 et autres fin du monde Capricci, 2012.
This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 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-cin ma. English]
Apocalypse-cinema : 2012 and other ends of the world / Peter Szendy ; translated by Will Bishop. - First edition.
pages cm
This book was originally published in French as Peter Szendy,
L apocalypse-cin ma: 2012 et autres fin 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 fiction films-History and criticism. 2. Apocalypse in motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1995.9.S26S9413 2015
791.43 615-dc23
2014030503
FOR GIL ANIDJAR
CONTENTS
Foreword: One Sun Too Many
by Samuel Weber
Chapter 1
Melancholia , or The After-All
Chapter 2
The Last Man on Earth , or Film as Countdown
Chapter 3
Cloverfield , or The Holocaust of the Date
Chapter 4
Terminator , or The Arche-Traveling Shot
Chapter 5
2012 , or Pyrotechnics
Chapter 6
A.I. , or The Freeze
Chapter 7
Pause, for Inventory (the Apo )
Chapter 8
Watchmen , or The Layering of the Cineworld
Chapter 9
Sunshine , or The Black-and-White Radiography
Chapter 10
Blade Runner , or The Interworlds
Chapter 11
Twelve Monkeys , or The Pipes of the Apocalypse
Chapter 12
The Road , or The Language of a Drowned Era
Chapter 13
The Blob , or The Bubble
Postface
Il n y a pas de hors-film , or Cinema and Its Cinders
Notes
Index of Films
FOREWORD: One Sun Too Many
Samuel Weber
And truly, I saw something, the likes of which I never saw.
-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus 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
The apocalypse is in fashion. Ever since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when it first 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 -progressively fascinated what was once called the popular imagination. 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 takes up this tendency and examines it critically, and which also informs much of Peter Szendy s remarkable construction of an Apocalypse-Cinema- namely No Apocalypse-Not Now! -Jacques Derrida argues that there exists a secret, more or less implicit, affinity between literature and the nuclear referent of apocalyptic self-destruction, since, precisely by virtue of its totality, the latter can be represented only via a certain fictionality and thus retains a literary quality. In Apocalypse-Cinema Peter Szendy argues that a similar affinity exists between the apocalypse and cinema-between anticipations, intimations, or representations of the end of the world and what could be called the finitude of the film as a structure delimited in time-in short: between the end of the world and the end of the film. His emblem and experience of this apocalyptic end is the dark screen that separates the final image of Lars von Trier s Melancholia from its credits -a blackness that lasts somewhat more than ten seconds, in which von Trier s film is no longer really cinema any more but rather a cinema of the after-all.
Szendy thus reminds us of an aspect of the apocalypse that is often forgotten in its common usage. This usage generally reflects two moments. First, as Szendy writes, In Greek apocalypsis means revelation, unveiling, uncovering. Revealing, unveiling, uncovering-these words indicate why a medium such as the cinema could stand in a privileged relation to the apocalypse. But the etymology of the Greek word also suggests something else: In order for something to be unveiled , uncovered , or revealed , it must in some sense or other have already been there all the time. It cannot simply be thought as the advent or announcement of something entirely new-even or especially if this newness involves the destruction of the existing world. Second, and no less important, is that the apocalyptic revelation-at least as it comes down to us from what is probably its most important textual articulation in the Book of Revelation of St. John, the book that concludes the New Testament-is not simply an uncovering of what has been but a manifestation of what will be: of what is to come, after all, if we understand all here as applying to all previous life on earth. In short, the apocalypse involves a revelation both of the end of one world and the beginning of another.
In the account of St. John, the one is essentially related to the other. What is to come involves the retribution and reward of what has been: the damnation of the sinful and the saving of the faithful. The apocalypse, at least in its Christian origins-and this still holds in different ways today, even in an apparently secular culture (which may or may not be specific to those parts of the world informed by biblical traditions)-involves a violent, destructive but potentially-selectively-redemptive transition from one world to another, from one life-that limited by guilt, sin, and its consequence: mortality-to another and possibly better one.
But in many of the films examined in this book, it is the end as such, the end itself, that tends to overshadow its aftereffects: This is the ambiguity of what Szendy, playing on a French idiom, calls the after-all ( apr s-tout ). If, after all, there is only the end, then how is this end to be imagined, represented, depicted? Does the apocalypse entail the end of everything, everyone, or is it just the end of some one, anyone: the one required to experience something like an end ?
This is a question that Derrida, in the essay already mentioned, and which informs many of the arguments and interpretations elaborated in Apocalypse-Cinema, dares to address in what is perhaps one of the most provocative passages not just in this essay but in all of his writings:
My own death, so to speak, as an individual can always be anticipated phantasmatically, symbolically too as a negativity at work. Images, grief, all the resources of memory and tradition, can cushion the reality of that death, whose anticipation remains therefore interwoven with fictionality, or if you prefer, with literature; and this is so even if I live this anticipation in anguish, terror, despair, as a catastrophe that I have no reason not to equate with the annihilation of humanity as a whole; this catastrophe takes place with each individual death. There is no common measure able to persuade me that a personal mourning is less grave than a nuclear war. 1
If Derrida can state that he-and with him, presumably any singular living being-has no reason not to equate the anticipated catastrophe [that] takes place with each individual death with annihilation of humanity as a whole, it is because the death of that singular being takes with it a world-which for that being was also the world. It is the point of view of such a singular living being that then becomes a condition for thinking, experiencing, and depicting involved in Apocalypse-Cinema.
Each Time Unique, the End of the World is the English title of a collection of texts written by Derrida to commemorate the passing of friends and colleagues, and from which Peter Szendy quotes the following memorable passage:
Death, writes Derrida-and not only the death of a human but that of every living being (animal, human, or divine) - death declares each time the end of the world in totality, the end of every possible world, and each time the end of the world as unique totality, therefore irreplaceable and therefore infinite. 2
If Szendy also argues that film (as) a Western invention is no doubt profoundly Christian, the contrast of Derrida s linkage of the end of a singular life with the end of a unique world, with the Revelation of St. John the Divine, points to the force field in which Apocalypse-Cinema plays itself out. The vision retold by John is both cosmic and judgmental : The apocalypse is also the scene of the Last Judgment, in which the guilty and the sinful will be punished and the virtuous and faithful rewarded-rewarded with that Eternal Life in a passage th