After the après-tout

Timothy Holland (bio)
Emory University

A review of Szendy, Peter. Apocalypse Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World. Translated by Will Bishop, Fordham UP, 2015.

As Samuel Weber observes in the foreword to Peter Szendy’s Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World, few things are more timely and fascinating than the spectacular destruction of life on earth: “[t]he apocalypse,” he points out, “is in fashion” (ix). To say nothing of the dread that has accompanied Donald Trump’s presidency, nor of the alarming proliferation of jingoistic political movements throughout the West, one finds today a glut of apocalyptic texts (films, novels, television programs) as well as a reciprocal body of criticism that addresses this “fashion” in one way or another. Szendy’s signal contribution to the latter eludes the rigid historicism, systematic classification, and/or political signposting that some readers may expect from a book with this title. Contrary to much contemporary literature on the topic, which tends to decode the genre’s utopic/dystopic narratives allegorically, Apocalypse-Cinema argues that films depicting the end of the world—particularly those of the blockbuster variety—illuminate a subterranean topography of cinema itself. Within the most recognizable generic conventions— such as atomic detonations, glacial freezes, interplanetary collisions, overwrought deadline structures, and extravagant special effects that at once suture and rend the surfaces of the world—Szendy excavates the representational limits of cinema and, as such, the thresholds of understanding an event that remains without prior model, or put differently, totally referential and fictional.

The book begins with a confessional-autobiographical mode of address that recalls the opening of Jacques Derrida’s The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), in which Derrida relays an encounter with his cat that unfurls into an expansive reassessment of animals and conceptions of animality. The confrontation with otherness that enraptures Szendy and catalyzes Apocalypse-Cinema is the ten seconds or so of silent black screen that takes place at (or just before) the end of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). Following the film’s terrestrial depiction of the Earth’s incineration, this uncomfortable moment of darkness serves to remark the impossibility of post-apocalyptic survival. There is no diegetic “after” at or beyond the end of Melancholia. The end of the film—the arrival of the apocalypse—leaves no potential for renewal.¹ This moment at or just before the end of Melancholia generates what Szendy calls “a cinema of the afterwards…a cinema that comes after it all, after everything has disappeared” (3). A “cinema of the after-all,” which, Weber explains, plays on the French idiom après-tout (as in “ultimately” or “nevertheless,” but also “after everything” [xi]), does not simply name the portrayal of the end of all life within a given diegesis (3). Szendy views the exemplary finale of Melancholia as responding “purely and absolutely to the demand that is proper to apocalypse-cinema: that the last image be the very last image, that is the last of them all—of all past, present, or future images” (2). A proper cinematic apocalypse, a true “cinema of the after-all,” therefore, revisits both the Greek word (and New Testament usage of) apokalupsis as disclosure or revelation and the conceptualization of cinema as a medium that reanimates the world by rendering things visible. What is brought to life within Melancholia’s closing ten seconds—the film’s disclosure, one might say—is the impossibility of any future revelation or image after the annihilation of the world. The inventiveness of Apocalypse-Cinema stems from Szendy’s near obsession with this brief moment of silence and darkness, especially the way in which he interweaves it with the history of cinema and the complications attending to generic codification. For him, the film’s denouement broadcasts the generic “demand,” what he calls “the strictest law of the apocalyptic genre (if indeed there is a genre): that the end of world is the end of the movie…Or vice versa …: The end of the movie is the end of the world” (1, 2).

The first confessional chapter of Apocalypse-Cinema establishes the method and stakes of Szendy’s provocative study, as its moves from the apocalyptic genre to the singularity of spectatorship to the general conditions of cinema. The book is guided by a conviction in an indispensable correspondence between movies, on one hand, and the so-called “real world,” on the other. Enduring Melancholia’s soundless black frames before the reassuring appearance of its credits, according to Szendy, leads to calling into question a spectator’s disavowal of her experience with the film as “only a movie, after all” (3). A “cinema of the afterwards,” such as the one produced in von Trier’s film, sticks with you; it is a cinema with an indefinite end that resists being shaken off as “just a movie”; it is thus a cinema that deconstructs, rather than reifies, the fiction/reality (or cine-world/real-world) dichotomy. Many readers of Apocalypse-Cinema will likely recognize that the deconstruction of this opposition was also something Derrida performed in his 1984 essay “No Apocalypse, Not Now: Full Speed Ahead, Seven Missiles, Seven Missives.” In that essay, Derrida contends that “real-life,” or that which apparently counters the expansive literary field (which includes cinema), cannot fully understand its own destruction and constitution through knowledge and proof alone because its end—the total apocalypse—takes or has its proper place within virtual, fictional, and/or cinematic worlds. Properly engaging the possibility of this referent—and by extension, “real-life” and “the world”—requires fictional practices such as apocalypse-cinema. Although it is left unstated in the book, Szendy appears to hold cinema as the privileged medium, and “apo” (a French abbreviation for the genre) as the privileged filmic code through which one encounters not just the end of the world as a referent without reference, but also the knotted imbrication of cinema and what goes by the name “the world.” Melancholia’s production of the remainder-less obliteration of the world through its own self-erasure transfixes Szendy; it is this dual erasure that stays with him (and presumably, us) after the movie’s end, after it all.

If, as Szendy submits, the ending of Melancholia makes it “the only rigorously apocalyptic film in the history of cinema,” then, as the sole instantiation of “a cinema of the after-all,” it also serves as a sort of barometer to gauge how other thematically linked films respond to the “demand” placed upon them (3). This “gauging” can be read as Szendy’s modus operandi. This is not to say that Apocalypse-Cinema merely cites the shortcomings of apocalyptic films not named Melancholia. Instead, the book amplifies the particular conversations of each film under analysis with the “demand” or “strictest law” of “apo,” that the end of the movie be the end of the world. These films—Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008), Twelve Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), Watchmen (Zack Snyder, 2009), and A.I. Artificial Intelligence (Steven Spielberg, 2001), to name but a few—become emblematic of the genre itself as Szendy uncovers novel conventions and tropes that re-sketch formerly codified (and ostensibly delineated) terrain. Each chapter—save the seventh and the postface—follows an analogous nominal pattern of placing the conjunction “or” between an individual film title and a pithy fragment or word that encapsulates one of Szendy’s discoveries (“The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown,” “A.I., or The Freeze,” and “Cloverfield, or The Holocaust of the Date”). And yet, Apocalypse-Cinema is not a series of separable, self-contained reflections. Szendy’s analysis progresses in an additive fashion, with Melancholia always at or near the fore, and readers would benefit from reading the book with that structure in mind.

Szendy’s lyrical style, attention to the singularity of the films he examines, and incorporation of a wide-ranging philosophical and literary archive, make providing a condensed summary of Apocalypse-Cinema difficult, if not impossible. In spite of these challenges, the common thread that binds the text together is clear: Szendy traces what might be called the raw underbelly of cinema, the mutations of the performative double erasure occurring just after the Earth and Melancholia’s “embrace or grasp until death, their lethal and cosmic kiss” (49). Apocalypse-Cinema reads as an index of cinema’s capacity to annul or penetrate the spectacular veneer of its audiovisual prowess; by grappling with events without reference in the “real-world,” the medium, Szendy suggests, harbors an inherent destructive avisuality that reveals as much it fails “to show” in the conventional sense. One of the most lucid examples of this cinematic death-drive transpires during Szendy’s discussion of Akira Mizuta Lippit’s term “cinefication,” elucidated in the latter’s 2005 book Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Lippit develops this term through a homonymic analysis of the prefix “cine-”: cinema, as a practice that can be said to “cinefy,” conjures both movement or the movies (via the Greek kinema) and incineration, the reduction of someone or something to ash (via the Latin incinerāre). The double resonance of “cinefication” forms, Szendy says, “the knot where the themes and stakes of apocalypse-cinema are tied together,” which is to say that the cinematic production of the end of the world—even in its most commercial or generic guises—exhibits an antagonistic side of the medium that disrupts the smooth consumption of its spectacles (73). The term prefigures a sort of autoimmune cinema that Szendy harnesses in his original theory of film as a medium always already engulfed by the end.

Subject to an admirable, if sporadically too literal, translation, Apocalypse-Cinema is a key text for those invested in film and media theory, the burgeoning field of “film-philosophy,” speculative and science fiction studies, and the overlooked intersections of deconstruction and cinema studies. The book will also be of interest to readers seeking to think through the apocalyptic compulsions and obsessions that characterize Western (Christian) culture, as well as those whose interdisciplinary training and areas of specialization—continental philosophy, musicology, comparative literature, and French studies—reflect Szendy’s own. At first glance, the consideration given to Hollywood blockbusters may appear to be at odds with the philosophical or theoretical stakes of the project. However, in the place of the rote application that frequently undermines what passes for “film-philosophy,” Szendy invites readers with his prose and regard for the texts that are fortunate enough to entice him, and with which he, in turn, entices us. This will come as no surprise to those who have read his other translated works, such as Listen: A History of Our Ears (2008) and Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox (2012), or his more recent publications, Phantom Limbs: On Musical Bodies (2016) and All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage (2017).

Footnotes

1. For a trenchant analysis of survival in Melancholia, see Christopher Peterson, “The Magic Cave of Allegory: Lars von Trier’s Melancholia,” in Discourse, vol. 35, no. 3, 2013, pp. 400–422. Muse, muse.