Armed with an arsenal of audacious concepts, Peter Szendy confronts the torment of blockbusters with style. Before venturing to spend your next night out at the silver screen, be sure to take this thrilling film survival manual with you." -Philosophie Magazine "In this prodigiously intelligent book, Peter Szendy reflects on the specific nature of apocalyptic cinema. Organized as a series of brief essays on individual films and recurrent cinematic strategies, Apocalypse-Cinema offers brilliant insights on a genre that has yet to receive all the critical attention it deserves." -- -Marie Helene Huet Princeton University "Apocalypse-Cinema is a brilliantly-executed, timely book, a tour-de-force encounter with a major film genre that has been too much neglected by 'serious' film scholars. Szendy's survey of the highs and lows of the 'apo' canon is nuanced and impeccably grounded in contemporary philosophy and film theory." -- -Terry Harpold University of Florida

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.
Les mer
By analyzing many films, by drawing on the philosophy of Lyotard, Nancy, and Derrida, this book suggest that in the apocalyptic genre, cinema is at work on its limit. Apocalypse-cinema is both the end of the world and the end of the film, the consummation and the (self)consumption of cinema.
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Table of Contents 1. Melancholia, or the After-All 2. The Last Man on Earth, or Film as Countdown 3. Cloverfield, or the Holocaust of the Date 4. Terminator, or the Arche-Travelling Shot 5. 2012, or Pyrotechnics 6. A.I., or the Freeze 7. Pause, For Inventory (The "Apo") 8. Watchmen, or the layering of the cineworld 9. Sunshine, or The Black-and-White Radiography 10. Blade Runner, or the Interworlds 11. Twelve Monkeys, or the Pipes of the Apocalypse 12. The Road, or the Language of a Drowned Era 13. The Blob, or the Bubble 14. Postface: Il n'y a pas de hors-film, or cinema and its cinders
Les mer
Armed with an arsenal of audacious concepts, Peter Szendy confronts the torment of blockbusters with style. Before venturing to spend your next night out at the silver screen, be sure to take this thrilling film survival manual with you." -Philosophie Magazine "In this prodigiously intelligent book, Peter Szendy reflects on the specific nature of apocalyptic cinema. Organized as a series of brief essays on individual films and recurrent cinematic strategies, Apocalypse-Cinema offers brilliant insights on a genre that has yet to receive all the critical attention it deserves." -- -Marie Helene Huet Princeton University "Apocalypse-Cinema is a brilliantly-executed, timely book, a tour-de-force encounter with a major film genre that has been too much neglected by 'serious' film scholars. Szendy's survey of the highs and lows of the 'apo' canon is nuanced and impeccably grounded in contemporary philosophy and film theory." -- -Terry Harpold University of Florida
Les mer
Armed with an arsenal of audacious concepts, Peter Szendy confronts the torment of blockbusters with style. Before venturing to spend your next night out at the silver screen, be sure to take this thrilling film survival manual with you.”
Les mer

Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9780823264810
Publisert
2015-09-01
Utgiver
Vendor
Fordham University Press
Høyde
216 mm
Bredde
140 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet
Antall sider
182

Forfatter
Oversetter
Foreword by

Om bidragsyterne

Peter Szendy is David Herlihy Professor of Humanities and Comparative Literature at Brown University and musicological advisor for the concert programs at the Paris Philharmonie. His books include Of Stigmatology: Punctuation as Experience; All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage; Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World; Kant in the Land of Extraterrestrials; Hits: Philosophy in the Jukebox; and Listen: A History of Our Ears..