Links of Doom and Disaster! Apocalyptic Film and Moving Image Studies

Updated November 21, 2011

Image from Deep Impact (Mimi Leder, 1998)

Aside from the current stirrings of challenge to the disastrous, real-world, global order, Film Studies For Free was inspired to produce the below, awesome entry of links to studies of apocalypse and planetary disaster in film and moving image culture by three earth-shatteringly exciting things:

1. A very impressive digital-cinema screening of Lars von Trier's latest film Melancholia (Is cinema dead? FSFF thinks it may still have a few years of life left... Some good thoughts on this film are linked to here); 
2. A thrilling call for papers for an upcoming conference on The End, in relation to motion pictures (scroll to the foot of the post);
3. The just-in-the-nick-of-time appearance of a great, film-related, free-to-read-online book published by the wonderful people at OpenBook Publishers: Maria Manuela Lisboa's The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011). OBP have also produced a new, free-to read online version of Robert Philip Kolker's long freely available, classic book The Altering Eye: Contemporary International Cinema.

Now, if you don't mind, the all-too-easily scared FSFF will anti-climactically head for the hills (or, perhaps, for the sofa) to remove itself from all this eschatological excitement.

• Karin Badt. 'Apocalypse Too Soon: Wheeler Winston Dixon's Visions of the Apocalypse', Film-Philosophy, Vol. 9 No. 27, May 2005 
• Lior Barshack, 'Intimate Enunciations: Carnival and Apocalypse in Fellini', Cardozo Law Review, 31.4, 2010
• Brent Bellamy, 'We are Apocalyptic! [on Evan Calder Williams, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse (Zero Books, 2011)]', Reviews in Cultural Theory Vol. 2, Issue 2, 2011
• Adam Bingham, 'Images from the end of the world: Werner Herzog's La Soufrière', Senses of Cinema, September 2006
• Kurt Bullock, 'Vertical Apocalypse: Altered Noir Cityscape within Blade Runner’s Dystopia', SBCC.edu
• L.T. Copier, Preposterous revelations: visions of apocalypse and martyrdom in Hollywood cinema 1980 – 2000, PhD Thesis, UvA, 2009
• Sérgio Dias Branco, 'Being Her/She in ‘Who Are You?’”. It’s the End of the World. Again?!?: Why Buffy Still Matters, Conference at University of North Carolina at Greensboro, March 16, 2007
• H. Bruce Franklin, 'Don't Look Where We're Going: Visions of the Future in Science-Fiction Films, 1970-82 ("Ne cherche pas à savoir où on va": les Visions de l'avenir dans le cinéma de SF de 1970 à 1982), Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Mar., 1983), pp. 70-80 
• Asbjørn Grønstad, 'Coppola's Exhausted Eschatology: Apocalypse Now Reconsidered', Nordic Journal of English Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2005
• Mark Harris, 'The New Scene Canon - Chopping Choppers Unforgettably: The "Nowhere to Go but Down" Scene in Apocalypse Now', Cinephile, 6.1, 2011
• Despina Kakoudaki, 'Spectacles of History: Race Relations, Melodrama, and the Science Fiction/Disaster Film', Camera Obscura 50, Volume 17, Number 2, 2002
• Kate S. Kelly, 'Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Century Thompson, Kirsten Moana. Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Century. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007', Journal of Religion and Popular Culture, 22.1, 2010 
• New Richard Langley, 'American Un-Frontiers: Universality and Apocalypse Blockbusters',Vimeo, November 17, 2011 (originally screened at the American Frontiers conference, University of Birmingham, 12 November 2011)
• Bruno Lessard, ‘"It’s the End of the World!": The Paradox of Event and Body in Hitchcock’s The Birds', Film-Philosophy, 14.1, 2010
• Jeff Lewis and Kirsty Best, 'Pure Filth: Apocalyptic Hedonism and the Postmodern Surfer', Scope, Issue 2, June 2005
• Maria Manuel Lisboa, The End of the World: Apocalypse and its Aftermath in Western Culture (Open Book Publishers, 2011) [Apocalypse Now and Again; The World Gone M A D ; Is the End Ever; Falling Out with Hal and Hester; Utopia at the End of this; Libera Me Domine De Vita Æterna]
• Ewa Mazierska, 'Polish Cinematic Dystopias: Metaphos of Life Under Communism - and Beyond', Kinema. 2004
• Walter Metz, 'Atomic Animals: Toward the Re-Invention of Natural History and Science Filmmaking', IM: Interactive Media. 2. [2006]. 1-12
• Angela Ndalianis, 'Buffy, Angel and the Palimpsest Apocalypse', Slayage Online, 2003
• Conrad Ostwalt, 'Visions of the End: Secular Apocalypse in Recent Hollywood Film', Journal of Religion and Film, 2.1, 1998
• Conrad Ostwalt, 'Armageddon at the Millennial Dawn', Journal of Religion and Film, 4.1, 2000
• Iván Pintor, 'Melancholay and Sacrifice in Contemporary Science Fiction' FORMATS, No. 5, 2009
• Gyan Prakash, 'Imaging the Modern City, Darkly', in Gyan Prakash (ed.) Noir Urbanism: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton University Press, 2010)
• Justin Remes, 'Apocalyptic Premediations', Journal of Religion and Popular CultureVolume 22(2): Summer 2010
• Karyn Charles Rybacki and Donald Jay Rybacki, 'Visions of Apocalypse: A Rhetorical Analysis of The Day After', Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (34th, San Francisco, CA, May 24-28, 1984
• D. Bruno Starrs, 'Filmic Eco-warnings and Television: Rolf de Heer's Epsilon (1995) and Dr. Plonk (2007)', Forum, 5, 2007
• Kevin Stewart, 'The Zombie Aesthetics and the Post-Apocalyptic Franchise', Kinema, 2007 
• Kirsten Moana Thompson, 'Apocalyptic Dread, Kierkegaard, and the Cultural Landscape of the Millennium', Apocalyptic Dread: American Film at the Turn of the Millennium (New York: SUNY Press, 2007)
• Robert Torry, 'Apocalypse Then: Benefits of the Bomb in Fifties Science Fiction Films', Cinema Journal, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Autumn, 1991) 
• Roslyn Weaver, '"The Four Horsemen of the Greenhouse Apocalypse": Apocalypse in the Science Fiction Novels of George Turner', Forum, 5, 2007

The End of ...? An Interdisciplinary Conference on the Study of Motion Pictures - University of Kent, UK, January 21, 2011

This one-day conference is for postgraduate students and early career researchers whose work incorporates the study of motion pictures and aims to explore the interdisciplinary conception and representation of “The End.”
     As the conspiracy theories for the end of the world in 2012 culminate in the mainstream disaster movie and the relevant literature, our concern and anxiety with closures remain within the margins of academic attention. In addition to the ubiquitous representations of “The End”, phrases such as “the end of cinema” and “death of celluloid” are recurrent in scholarly circles, calling forth a new era of engagement with film and other media. “The End” in the latter case evokes a new beginning that requires close examination: perhaps an analogy that could be extended to Film Studies as a discipline, outlining (or criticizing) its potential methodological changes in the future as well as in the past. The aesthetics of “The End”, however, is clearly evident in our direct engagement with time-based cultural artefacts. In other words, the study of various methods of narrative closure in film, music, literature and theatre can inform one of our fundamental obsessions: a good ending.
     We invite proposals for 20-minute presentations from candidates across arts and humanities, welcoming individual papers as well as group panels that investigate “The End” as a broad phenomenon that can be approached through a variety of methods. Possible research subjects include, but not limited to: End of cinema: changing patterns of distribution and exhibition; End of Theory: the methodological shifts in film studies as a discipline; End of story: the aesthetics and strategies of narrative closure, open endings, narrative inconclusiveness in relation to film and other arts; End of the world: recent preoccupation with the disaster film genres; End of cinephilia: alternative channels for watching and discussing movies; End of film: the death of celluloid, the rise of digital technologies and issues of medium specificity; Case studies of films or other media that address any of the aforementioned issues; Representation and/or conception of “The End” within the history and philosophy of art.
     The conference will conclude with a film screening and an introduction by the keynote speaker in the Gulbenkian Cinema, an independent cinema located within the university campus at Canterbury.
Please send abstracts (300 words) and a short biographical note to thendof2012@gmail.com. Deadline for applications is 15 November 2011. Should you have any queries, please do not
hesitate to contact us at the same e-mail address. Website: http://www.kent.ac.uk/arts/film/filmcentre/the_end_of.html
Conference Organization Committee: Emre Caglayan, Frances Kamm, Pete Sillett

Tina Pippin (ed.), Apocalyptic Bodies: the biblical end of the world in text and image (London: Routledge, 1999)