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.
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