Pause, for Inventory (the “Apo”)
Pause, for Inventory (the “Apo”)
This chapter begins by discussing how Nietzsche, like Kant, also imagined a scene for the end of the world through glaciation. It then turns to the apocalyptic genre, arguing that the end of a properly and literally apocalyptic film must coincide with the end of the world. The final fade-out is destined to be that of the end of everything, including of film, which would end not only because there is nothing left to tell, but also and above all because its end includes—or is included in—general and generic disappearance. There is only one film that is worthy of this definitively final gesture which signs what is proper to the purely and absolutely apocalyptic genre: Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011), a kind of hapax legomenon in film history that ends with this black screen where the final point of the story affecting the characters and that of the universal history of humanity are mixed up at length and slowly but crazily exchanged—the one is constantly equivalent to the other in their mute oscillation.
Keywords: Nietzsche, end of the world, apocalypse-cinema, apocalyptic film, apocalyptic genre, Melancholia, Lars von Trier
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