Melancholia, or The After-All
Melancholia, or The After-All
This chapter argues that Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) is and may perhaps forever be the only rigorously apocalyptic film in the history of cinema. Before Melancholia there were already movies in which the last still perfectly coincided with the annihilation of everything. One example is Ted Post's Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970): As he lay dying, Taylor (Charlton Heston) murmurs with his last breath that the day of the last judgment has arrived (“it's Doomsday”) before he collapses and sets off the atomic explosion that destroys the whole Earth. Yet there is a narrating voice that actually continues after or over the final image, that continues to recount, that becomes the huckster for a potential sequel that could still be shot someday. This is not the case with Melancholia. Until the final credits begin to roll, there is at least the radical suspension of an absolute silence that, for a few moments, allows us to glimpse the possibility of an archi-fade to black, of a total erasure after the ultimate image. The end of the film as end of the world would then also be the end of cinema itself. A cinema, finally, in the end.
Keywords: apocalypse-cinema, apocalyptic film, apocalyptic genre, Melancholia, Lars von Trier, Ted Post, Charlton Heston
Fordham Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .
