1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910460368803321

Autore

Szendy Peter

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

New York : , : Fordham University Press, , 2015

©2015

ISBN

0-8232-6684-2

0-8232-6483-1

0-8232-6484-X

Edizione

[First edition.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (181 p.)

Disciplina

791.43615

Soggetti

Science fiction films - History and criticism

Apocalypse in motion pictures

Electronic books.

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

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

Sommario/riassunto

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.