Apocalypse-cinema : 2012 and other ends of the world / Peter Szendy ; translated by Will Bishop.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Szendy, Peter, author.

Contributor:

Bishop, Will, 1867-1943, translator.

Standardized Title:

Apocalypse-cinéma. English

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science fiction films--History and criticism.

Science fiction films.

Apocalypse in motion pictures.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (181 p.)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2015.

Language Note:

English

System Details:

PDF

EPUB

Summary:

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 a cinema 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.

Contents:

Front matter

CONTENTS

Foreword: One Sun Too Many

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

Notes:

Includes index.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

0-8232-6684-2

0-8232-6483-1

0-8232-6484-X

OCLC:

913610679