2012, Terminator, Blade Runner, Melancholia. There is no shortage of films evoking the end of the world, their success is growing. But what is their meaning ? Are they pure entertainment, allowing us to play with the idea that everything can stop ? For Peter Szendy, you have to take them very seriously, because they express the deep nature of cinema – and tell us, in their own way, what a world is.
Peter Szendy is a philosopher and musicologist at Paris-Ouest University. It is on the notion of listening and his relations with the political power that his first research carried (Listen, a story of our earsMidnight, 2001 ; Listening: aesthetics of espionageMidnight, 2007). Pursued, in 2008, by a study of the melody and the power of its psychic effects (Tubes: philosophy in juke-boxMidnight). His reflection has been about cinema since. In The cinema apocalypse. 2012 and other ends of the world, Capricci Editions, 2012it shows, through an analysis of films evoking the apocalypse, that cinema is carried, because of its very nature, to evoke the end of the world: far from being a genre among others, the film-catastrophe seems to designate the very essence of cinema.
Film the end of the world by lavaDesidees
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Shooting and editing: David Bornstein.
Final scene of Melancholiafrom Lars von trier
