Whereout are the popular end-time films inspired? Where do they get their visual ideas and stories from? Considering that the Bible is by far the most filmed book in the world, and is also the most popular pretext for intertextual connections in the form of allusions, quotations or borrowings of motifs and plot patterns, it is striking that the most visually powerful book in the Bible, the Revelation of John, is still waiting for an actual film adaptation. The only film that has reached out in this direction is the last part of the major television project The Bible, with the laconic title The Apocalypse (US/IT/DE 2002; director: Raffaele Mertes). However, this apocalypse for slipper cinema actually only visually realises a few scenes from this book, in particular parts of the "throne room" vision and that of the "apocalyptic horsemen", and instead mainly attempts a vita of John on Patmos. Although a dedicated film adaptation of the Book of Revelation has not yet been made, this book is nevertheless at the forefront of the biblical books that have inspired cinema since its beginnings: as a source of motifs, symbolisations or plot patterns. Of course, it is always necessary to ask with which gesture or in which mode biblical apocalypticism is received in films. Based on two borderline positions of the genre and an overview of motifs, two films will be discussed in more detail below, before a final section summarises the considerations and outlines fundamental tendencies in apocalyptic cinema.
Two borderline positions in the spectrum of apocalyptic film
The ultimate ending
In cinema, the world has already ended several times in the recent past, completely and finally, without a sacred remnant of energetic people surviving who could have made a new beginning after the catastrophe.
The 2011 film year in particular stands out here - with three relevant films by renowned directors of 'arthouse' cinema. There was Lars von Trier's Melancholia (DK/CH/FR/DE 2011): actually a typically Trierian chamber drama about obsessions and the abysses of relationships, but it is massively charged with the threat posed by the star "Melancholia", which is on a looping collision course with the Earth and simply swallows it up in the end. At first, people try to console themselves with the (false) prediction that the star will probably pass by the earth, and they even marvel at the new second moon in the sky.
But when "Melancholia" finally hurtles towards the earth, the symbolic tent poles under which three of the protagonists sit down are of course nothing more than a moment of inner reflection before the death of the earth.
In the same year as Trier, US director Abel Ferrara also presented his version of the end of the world with 4:44 - Last Day on Earth (US/CH/FR 2011), which was only released on DVD/BR in Germany. The title of the film, which is set in the present day, refers to the time at which, in Ferrara's film, the world finally becomes uninhabitable and absolutely all life is extinguished because the ozone layer disappears completely at the indicated hour of the night. The end announced by scientists in the film with rare unanimity actually occurs: a clear reference to relevant forecasts on climate change.
The third and most interesting example of these cinematic 'endgames' is The Turin Horse (HU/DE/FR/CH 2011), directed by the Hungarian cinema apocalyptic Béla Tarr. His film is aesthetically the most radical, theologically the most interesting and at the same time the most disturbing of the three films mentioned. Tarr has always explored the border regions of film dramaturgy and visuality, which in his case means that he slows down the narrative speed to the maximum in order to charge the long, sometimes static shots with density and depth. For the 146 minutes of the Turin Horse film, Tarr needs a total of 28 shots - extremely slow, circular tableaux in which little or almost nothing happens. These 28 shots, just as many as an action scene in Hollywood cinema chases through in a few seconds, are spread over six days according to the intertitles. These six days allow the six days of the biblical creation story in Genesis 1:1-2:4a to run backwards. Life, nature and communication between an old coachman and his haggard daughter, who live somewhere in a windswept wasteland, together with their horse, who first refuses to work, then refuses all food and drink, become increasingly extinct.
As an insert tells us at the beginning, the animal - parable-like, of course - is supposed to represent the horse that Friedrich Nietzsche embraced on the streets of Turin on 3 January 1889 when a coachman beat it. This embrace was the beginning of Nietzsche's mental derangement, which then held him captive for the last ten years until his death.
At the beginning of the film, the carriage returns from the city, then everything comes to a standstill. At the end, on the shorter sixth day, the light in the actually well-filled oil lamp goes out first and cannot be restarted.
Then the embers in the hearth also go out, the last light with whose creation God had once begun his work of creation. And at the end of the film, the deepest darkness once again reigns on earth; everything has fallen back to the beginning. There is no glimmer of a silver lining, everything is finally over. Despite his biblically inspired narrative movement, Tarr also breaks with biblical apocalypticism. Because for them, the duality of downfall and rebirth after the catastrophe is constitutive, meaning that, to put it pointedly, Armageddon is followed by the Heavenly Jerusalem and will remain forever.
The three outlined endgames are thus radically linked not only by the moment of the complete interruption of human history, but also by the idea of the absolute end of our planet.
However, the concentrated, largely chamber drama-like works by Tarr, Ferrara and von Trier are exceptional phenomena. For when it comes to narrative reflections on the possible end of this world, cinema is dominated by large-scale visions saturated with special effects, such as the always apocalyptic superhero films. In purely quantitative terms, however, there are not so many films that look out for the end of the world. After the turn of the millennium, their frequency decreased somewhat, only to increase again recently, with new thematic accents, such as the focus on doomsday scenarios on the horizon of ecocide and the rapid advance of artificial intelligence. The dystopian to 'apocalyptic' visions associated with AI are unfolded in the film The Beast (FR 2023, directed by Bertrand Bonello), to name just one current example: The starting point of the story, set in the year 2044, is the AI takeover that has already taken place, which has 'discarded most humans as useless' and demands that those still alive have their 'DNA purified'.
In the wake of the multiple global crises of all kinds, an escapist tendency grew in cinema for a while after the turn of the millennium: the desire to offer distraction, diversion and 'something to laugh about' instead of spreading gloom. But even when reporting on the Cannes Film Festival in 2010, one critic moaned that the competition was "starting to get on her nerves with the doomsday mood it was spreading". The decidedly apocalyptic dramas are, so to speak, the tip of this iceberg of doom and gloom. Significantly, however, some of them have become unrivalled cinema mega-successes: James Cameron's Avatar (US 2009) grossed around 3 billion dollars worldwide and had almost 11 million viewers in its first cinema release in Germany alone. Roland Emmerich's equally successful Flood epic 2012 (US 2009), with box office takings of USD 770 million, seems almost outdone in comparison, although it had an impressive 3.3 million viewers in Germany alone. Hollywood is digging deep into its pockets for the lavish imaginings of the end and a possible 'after', but its success confirms the economic calculation. Fears of the end of the world can be capitalised on. So it came as no surprise that the Wall Street Journal once published a cover story on the subject of "How to make money with the end of the world".
Longing for the end
At the time (2003), a Cusanuswerk holiday academy on the subject of apocalypticism had the quite surprising title of Hope for the Cessation of History. Such "hope" can only be heard in very few of the films that have been inspired by biblical apocalypticism. No wonder! The films we get to see are largely a product of Western industrialised nations. They come from the sphere of economic power and the powerful have never been propagandists of apocalyptic upheavals and upheavals, unless these have been tamed in such a way that they are commercially attractive.
One of the rare exceptions to the authentic articulation of a "hope for the end of history" in cinema can be found in the Brazilian film Central Station (BR/FR 1997) by Walter Salles. This is in a sequence that shows a night-time pilgrimage in the Brazilian Sertão, the country's poorhouse. These are not staged, but documentary images that Salles was able to capture by chance on the sidelines of the shoot and which he then integrated into the film. At one point, this moving pilgrimage train echoes: "Set it on fire, O Lord, this night! Your earth, O Lord!" - Cries like this actually express a deep longing for the apocalypse. In this case, it is the longing of the poorest of the poor in north-east Brazil. The urgency of their cry echoes the urgency of the "Maránatha!", the "Lord, come!" of early Christian hope. However, it does not appear that the apocalyptic speech here is still a source of power for active change, as advocated by the liberation theological exegesis of the Revelation of John. The only hope for the poor and wretched here seems to be the actual end of this world brought about by God, a termination of this history.
A similar but militant mood pervades José Araújo's film O Sertão das Memórias (BR 1996), which is also Brazilian but unfortunately almost unknown in this country, which uses explicit motifs from the Book of Revelation to criticise current society and politics in the spirit of the option for the poor.
Only very few of the countless films that have been labelled "apocalyptic" in film journalism take us into the reality of the oppressed on the margins of society, to those who no longer see a future for themselves and therefore comfort each other: "If you hear about the apocalypse, don't be afraid! For us, the end of the world is the only salvation". These are the words of the voice-over narrator in the semi-documentary film Ladoni - Open Hands (MD 193), in which the then still very young director Artur Aristakisyan takes the audience into the beggar milieu of his Moldovan homeland. It is precisely from the awareness of the imminent end, which they perceive as saving them, that the people portrayed in this film gain their dignity: "Obviously," the narrator says again, "the time allotted to people has expired. [...] Heaven and earth die to leave the 'system'" - "system" as a cipher for the real existing society.
This attitude places Ladoni's narrator alongside the farm labourers in Central Station and O Sertão das Memorias. Diametrically opposed to the hope for the end, which is fed by deep despair, are all the unabashed commercialisations of the end times, which almost reign supreme in cinema. The possible commercialisation of apocalypticism once found its striking expression in the advertising for the video edition of the film Armageddon - The Last Judgement (US 1998), which tells of the destruction of the earth by a giant comet, averted at the last second by a sacrificial death. The slogan on the large-format advertising displays for the purchase video read: "Do you have any plans for tonight? - How about 144 minutes of the end of the world for only DM 19.95!"
The most important subjects and motifs of end-time cinema
To present the variety of subjects and motifs of end-time cinema in detail within the spectrum just outlined from its edges would go beyond the scope of this article. So here is just a brief overview:
- Nuclear war and the post-nuclear world
- Ecocide - Mega natural disasters - New plagues
(viruses ...). - Deformation of biological life
- Collapse of technology
- Collapse of the human species vs. the triumph of technology
- Present readings of the Revelation of John
- Conspiracy of dark forces
- World conquest attacks by aliens
- "Conventional" war as an apocalyptic scenario
- Disintegration of the political and social order
- Big city hells
- Escalation of violence and homo homini lupus
- Escalation of the simulation
- Dissolution of human identity
- Dissolution of humane sexuality
The order in the overview attempts to at least tend to show a certain ranking in terms of quantitative distribution. Starting with the most frequent subjects, the list goes in descending order to the less frequent ones. The range of fanned-out end-time subjects also spans from global to individual and inner-psychological processes: from the man-made catastrophic interruption of history, as is often metonymically indicated in the explosion in the mushroom cloud, to the implosion of private worlds, for example in the collapse of families, relationships or - as in David Lynch's masterful Lost Highway (US 1996) - of identities.
In the diversity of this spectrum and in the immense success of individual exponents, cinema once again confirms its outstanding status as an indicator and seismograph, but also as a mediator and amplifier of states of consciousness. As was to be expected, the 'endgames' were shown on cinema screens with increased frequency towards the turn of the millennium. However, they continue to pulsate through the cinema as a clearly audible, dark basso continuo, somewhat less frequently, but with individual absolute top successes such as Avatar or 2012 (both: US 2009). - So you have to ask yourself: why do so many people expose themselves to cinematic visions of the end of time and are prepared to pay a lot of money for them (for Avatar, for example, 15 euros were charged per ticket in Münster due to its excessive length and the rental fee for the three-D glasses)? And what motivates the producers to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in such films? Why do they think people are interested in these gloomy spectacles? What functions does end-time cinema fulfil? - We will attempt to answer questions like these at the end of our tour.
Interim remark: On the terminology
Before we take a closer look at selected films against this backdrop, a brief understanding of the terminology is in order: The term "apocalyptic" has degenerated into a buzzword in film criticism and among film distributors' advertising copywriters, and its current inflationary use threatens to render it completely empty. Its meaning has already shifted massively anyway, as for most people "apocalyptic" now stands almost exclusively for all kinds of larger-scale doom, destruction and processes of dissolution or has even become a substitute word for heightened horror or unholy terror. The duality of doom and rebirth that is constitutive of the Jewish-Christian tradition of apocalypticism no longer plays any role, or only a very subordinate role, in this use of the word. In this respect, it is a "negative apocalypticism", as Ulrich H. J. Körtner calls it, which for its part can certainly activate positive, critical and resistant energies. Ulrich Horstmann, on the other hand, characterises apocalypticism that focuses solely on doom as "cropped" apocalypticism, as it is limited to the newness after the catastrophe.
But this much can already be said: regardless of the fact that a negative or 'docked' apocalypticism seems to reign for long stretches, most films still keep a window open at the end that at least keeps a spark of hope glowing, however small and inconspicuous it may be.
Two selected films in close-up
Instead of losing ourselves in the jungle of motifs and subjects, we will take a look at two exemplary productions below. The feature film The Road (US 2009, directed by John Hillcoat), based on the successful 2006 novel of the same name by Cormack McCarthy, for which he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature, stands for the post-atomic scenario that is particularly popular in mainstream cinema. Despite all the effort, The Road does not lose itself in special effects battles, but rather has a rather intimate character for long stretches and also gives space to theological questions. In this way, Hillcoat's film makes some of the basic coordinates of end-time cinema transparent, which most of the so-called "big loud action movies" lose in the thunderstorm of maximising appeal. - As an example of avant-garde arthouse cinema, The Road will then be contrasted with Derek Jarman's The Garden (GB/DE 1989), an experimental examination of apocalypticism that is far removed from commercial film and is also inspired by biblical traditions, but even more clearly and extensively than The Road.
Mainstream cinema: The Road
The Road was not released in Germany until October 2010, a year later than in the USA and most other European countries. The film does not achieve the intensity of McCarthy's novel, which the weekly magazine Focus praised at the time as "an extraordinarily moving, deeply stirring work - sublime, majestic, of biblical force." Nevertheless, Hillcoat's adaptation boasts remarkable performances by the actors and occasionally grandiose images, only that these are almost too beautiful in comparison to the gloom depicted by McCarthy.
The book and film are so disturbing because the tipping of the world into a post-apocalyptic state is set very close to our present, as the flashbacks to the time before the catastrophe of an obviously global nuclear war show images from our own day - according to the motto: "It could have happened today". In a darkened, dead and in every respect contaminated world, seemingly depopulated of all animals and almost all humans, a man and his son want to make their way further south, towards the sea, because he hopes to have a better chance of survival there.
The days, weeks and months of their long march are dominated by the constant, agonising search for food and water, which are only available in the form of tinned or packaged drinks. Other survivors have long since given up this search and have turned to manhunting and cannibalism. And our two hikers also repeatedly escape such dehumanised hunters only at the last second. The father is seriously ill, spitting blood and visibly deteriorating, while the ten-year-old son, on the other hand, is gradually maturing, also in terms of his own moral judgement. The moral complexity of life has, of course, been radically simplified: there are now only two camps, almost without intermediate stages: the decent and the dehumanised. The father, whose only concern is the survival of his son, likes to tell him "old stories of courage and justice" and explains to him again and again that they both belong to the "good guys" and that he, his son, must keep the "inner fire", the flame of goodness, if you like: the fire of the Holy Spirit, within himself and carry it on.
In the radically darkened world into which the film leads us, the memory of God and the Bible is not completely extinguished: At one point, the hikers are greeted at the entrance to a deserted village by a plaque on which is written in blood-red paint: "Jeremiah 19:6 'Behold the Valley of Slaughter'", as if this gruesome prophecy had now been fulfilled. Another time, the two travellers spend the night in a ruined church. The surviving frescoes in the choir seem like silent reminders of a heritage whose oblivion has led to catastrophe: There is a painting of a Christ the King offering the Eucharistic gifts to a soldier, inviting him on the path of peace and love; and there is another painting of Moses and Aaron, with the tablets of the law and the ark of the covenant, all reminding us of a God who liberates from the house of slavery and wanders through the desert with his people.
For the father, the fact that his son survived the atomic conflagration is like a living sign of God's closeness. At one point, the father says to himself: "If he [the son, R.Z.] is not the word of God, then God has never spoken." In this dark world, the child takes on almost messianic traits or the contours of the classic 'divine child', who gathers all hopes for the future and redemption in himself. When father and son once meet an old, almost blind man and spend the night with him, the old man mistakes the boy for an angel, to which the father replies: "He is an angel". But the old man then goes even further and says: "He's God to me."
In the night-time conversation between the three of them, God is mentioned again and the old man explains with scepticism: "If there was a God up there, he would have turned his back on us by now. Whoever created humanity will no longer find humanity here." The story, however, puts paid to this pessimism at the end, however much it may have seemed justified beforehand. By giving the old man - and later another man who has become a thief in his time of need - a tin of their precious food reserves and inviting him to dinner, the father and son demonstrate that there is still humanity after all. And they prove this to each other every day in their care for one another.
This suggests that The Road does not end as darkly as it began, and that one critic's talk of the film's "nihilistic hopelessness", as we have often read, overlooks the striking silver lining on the horizon: For towards the end, the son first finds a living beetle completely unexpectedly - so not all animals are extinct after all - and a little later, a bird even flutters up, as if the two have now actually arrived in a zone of less damaged life.
After the death of his father, the son comes across a young family with two adolescent children with 'clean' faces and a cute dog that had been secretly following them for a long time. The fact that this strong family, who have certainly survived a lot, takes him in is a promise for the son and for the viewer that the future is possible and open. The woman, who, as she says, had been so worried about the boy, now says to the boy: "Now we don't have to worry about anything. Is that okay?" And the astonished confirmation "O.K." from the happy and astonished boy is the last word before the end credits. The trail of hope could hardly be more striking without everything immediately tipping over into kitsch again.
The Garden: the revelation of St John in an avant-garde arthouse film
The second example, Derek Jarman's The Garden (GB/DE 1989), is aesthetically completely different to The Road and clearly demonstrates the potential that can lie in an unleashed, experimental visual language and in unconventional montages of image and sound. The British painter, set designer and filmmaker Derek Jarman (1942-1994) is responsible for this film. Although a good thirty years have passed since The Garden was made, it has not aged. The Garden still allows the specific power of the film medium to be felt with particular intensity and moves in a broad artistic field between painting and video installation. Available on DVD and streaming platforms, the film is the culmination - and also the end point - of the apocalyptic imagination that runs as a deep trace through Derek Jarman's oeuvre: not only through his films, but also through his paintings and texts. The ecological crisis, life in the shadow of the potential for nuclear annihilation and - in 1980s England - the general depression of the Thatcher era form the background to Jarman's end-time consciousness. Equally important for Jarman was his intensive dialogue with visionaries such as the poet William Blake, the magician John Dee and, last but not least, John on Patmos. The Revelation of John fascinated Jarman so much that for many years he pursued the idea of working on it more extensively in his own film project. Despite several attempts, he finally had to abandon this project with the working title Neutron due to budget problems. Nevertheless, there is a published screenplay version of Neutron.
The great influence of the Revelation of John on Jarman becomes apparent when he noted in his diary in 1983: "The apocalypse has been fulfilled. It makes little difference today whether the end is delayed by four minutes or four decades: the means are there, we live with this reality every day and all our actions are overshadowed by it. And what is the right behaviour for an artist who lives with this monstrosity - we should go and slay the dragon."
Although the present appears to him to be the end times, Jarman does not simply want to wait fatalistically for the actual end. Rather, the pressure of the end times becomes an impulse to resist the "dragon". This "dragon" is described in the Revelation of John "as that old serpent, called the Devil or Satan, who deceives the whole world." (Rev 12:9)
Jarman will later depict the first seduction by the serpent in paradise in the prologue to The Garden. And the film that unfolds from this, leading to the other side of Eden, will also be an act of resistance, as Jarman sees it as the artist's task. This resistance also includes the hopeful, bright moments that he repeatedly sets against the darkness in The Garden, as in all his films. However, Jarman's artistic contribution to this resistance consists first and foremost in his efforts to de-automatise perception, which clears the view for the apocalyptic contours of the present. The Garden is the culmination of Jarman's typical aesthetic of interruption - the dissolution of narrative structures and the disruption of viewing habits through experimental image design and often purely associative montage.
In The Garden, the Christ figure is added as a particularly qualifying element that explicitly locates Jarman's world of end-time motifs in the religious-cultural tradition of Christianity - and in various facets.
In his apocalyptic figure, Christ is not used by Jarman as a seal-breaking initiator of end-time horrors. As a towering old man with a furrowed face, wearily wandering through industrialised landscapes and gazing in horror and pain at the creation destroyed by man, this Christ is rather a kind of index figure for the apocalyptic quality of today's reality. His presence defines the present as a time of decision and indicates that every person lives here and now in "their own, already eschatological situation of existence", as Karl Rahner once put it.
In this respect, The Garden is reminiscent of Federico Fellini's subliminally apocalyptic film La Dolce Vita (IT 1959). In the film's famous opening sequence, Fellini has Christ return symbolically in the form of a Pantocrator statue carried by a helicopter over the rooftops of Rome. And this return is then, as it were, the clef for the score of the subsequent film, which, significantly, was originally to be entitled Babylon, 2000 AD, in memory of the "Great Whore of Babylon" of Rev 17:1-18.
Like his earlier films, The Garden is also a document of Jarman's uncompromising search for original cinematic solutions to express the end of time, his search for a visual language beyond the megalomania of disaster films and beyond all considerations of commercial usability. Jarman also works with motifs such as fire, darkness, abandonment or the decay and agony of industrial society - motifs that are part of the fixed inventory of end-time cinema. But he does so with a very specific aesthetic that has much in common with the aesthetics of Judeo-Christian apocalypticism: The Garden is characterised in formal terms as follows
- through a fragmentation of the images as well as the narrative lines;
- through cascades of images that correspond to the rapid, sometimes almost exuberant sequences of images in the Revelation of John;
- by an enormous wealth of symbolic references, which often remain just as ambiguous and not infrequently just as hermetic as many symbolic references in Judeo-Christian apocalypticism;
- and by the affinity of many attitudes to dream and nightmare images, such as those evoked as mental images in the Revelation of John, which also point to the unconscious or - as the C. G. Jung follower Jarman would say - to the archetypal.
- Jarman himself once called The Garden a "dream allegory", particularly with regard to the latter characteristic, and as a dreamer he brings himself into the picture right at the beginning. The film then unfolds from his dreams. And his guiding idea is to weave the kaleidoscope of images through the Jesus narrative of the Gospels as a common thread.
The exterior locations were Jarman's fisherman's cottage on the south English coast and its surroundings, dominated by the Dungeness nuclear plant.
Jarman then developed the film from the very heterogeneous material of outdoor and studio shots only at the editing table: comparable to a painter who has a palette of images that he can collage and rework. As with the frequently interrupted filming, the time for this important creative process was also limited, as his AIDS, which was already at an advanced stage at the time, repeatedly confined him to his sickbed. This illness and his commitment to the English gay movement are in the background when Jarman casts a homosexual couple as Jesus in the Passion storyline of his film: As a vehement reminder of Jesus' solidarity with the socially stigmatised, addressed first and foremost to the strong church circles in England, which, in the time of the Aids hysteria, had degenerated into nasty anti-gay statements and qualified Aids as God's punishment.
The film begins with a view of a reproduction of the famous resurrection fresco by Piero Della Francesco, which hangs behind the sleeping Jarman. The colourful bouquet of the following, aesthetically extremely varied series of images is then held together by the alienated scenes of the Passion, right up to the Stations of the Cross of the two Jesus figures.
The crucifixion and death are not shown, but substituted by an impressive apocalyptic image mediation. This is very much in line with the New Testament Passion stories, especially Matthew's, which, by incorporating apocalyptic motifs - such as the darkening of the sun, earthquakes or the resurrection of the dead - decisively transforms the death of Jesus into an apocalyptic, time-turning event. Jarman's Good Friday meditation in the form of an experimental film collage takes up typical end-time motifs (such as fire or blood-red and sulphur-yellow virages) and is overarched by chants from the Russian Easter liturgy. Death is thus outshone by Easter hope. The joy of Easter is then intensified in the final Pentecostal sequence, in which the two Passion figures are once again present, unharmed and joyful, in the circle of their followers.
In view of The Garden's many moments of criticism of the church and the expected accusations of blasphemy, it was a courageous but absolutely justified decision by the Catholic Jury at the 1991 Berlinale to award the film a "Special Mention" as an "apocalyptic picture of the present". And what is not always a matter of course with church awards: Jarman accepted the prize.
Some overarching observations and trends
End times and God's judgement
Biblical references are rarely as clear as in The Road in current apocalyptic mainstream cinema. Nevertheless, faith and God continue to play a prominent role in this cinema; and after all the religious rites, the sacred trees and a spirituality that intimately binds man and nature together, as James Cameron celebrates in Avatar, the religious could even gain further significance, albeit a religious one that is increasingly moving away from the Judeo-Christian paradigm to which Cameron was still strongly committed in his earlier films. With Darren Aronofsky's Noah (US 2014), however, another monumental biblical film hit the big screens, in which the world before the flood has a decidedly post-apocalyptic contour, thus bringing together the story of creation and the end times.
It is striking that a theme that belongs to the Jewish-Christian concept of the last things hardly plays a role in Hollywood cinema: The idea of a divine act of judgement, a final judgement. In the typical doomsday spectacles à la 2012, Armageddon, Deep Impact or Independence Day, God is certainly present, but usually only as the addressee of prayers for salvation, not as the initiator of end-time labour pains.
Only very rarely does cinema work with the idea of a divine judgement. And when it does, then the heavenly plan for the destruction of mankind, with which a God who has grown tired of mankind breaks the guarantee of existence for the earth given in the Noahic covenant, is sabotaged by opponents from within his own ranks, so to speak, and mankind is saved from the judgement of wrath. One of the few examples of this is the mystery spectacle Legion (US 2010; directed by Scott Stewart). In this film, God sends out his heavenly hosts because he is "finally fed up" with mankind and wants to cleanse the earth of them, to make a tabula rasa, as he once did with the Flood. However, it is the extremely strong-willed archangel Michael who rebels and sides with the humans. Because he cannot and will not believe "that the crown of creation has collectively proven to be worthless". Michael goes further here than his heavenly employer, who assumes the collective guilt of humanity. A memorable dialogue, which Evelyn Finger also quoted in the ZEIT in an article about the new boom of the apocalyptic, is the following: A human says to Michael: "I don't believe in God", to which the angel replies: "No problem, he doesn't believe in you either". As a sign that he is quitting the heavenly service, Michael cuts off his wings and prepares himself for the end-time battle in the seclusion of a small restaurant called Paradise Falls. As once upon a time in a little place called Bethlehem, the waitress Charlie is supposed to give birth to a child there on 24 December who will redeem mankind - why and how doesn't matter, or is simply assumed to be known from the Terminator films, where it was the same. In Paradise Falls, Michael "together with a group of stranded people (...) wants to take on the whole force of heaven." - This initial situation is still a relatively interesting experimental set-up, but the production turns into a "half-baked genre hodgepodge" and the story is so full of inconsistencies that Legion ends up being labelled "completely out of the question" by the Filmdienst critic.
Artistically and dramaturgically more convincing are the films in which Christ returns to earth to either initiate a new gathering of humanity on behalf of the Father or to set the last apocalyptic labour pains in motion and prepare for the final judgement. In the satirical short film Ernst and the Light (DK 1995, directed by Anders and Thomas Jensen), which is still very popular in religious education classes, the new gathering fails with the first person to be called into a new circle of disciples because he, a representative for cleaning agents, is absolutely resistant to transcendence. In the short film Man Jesus (DE 1999, director: Cornelius Meckseper) and in the feature films The Book of Life (US/FR 1998, director: Hal Hartley) and Jesus Loves Me (DE 2012, director: Florian David Fitz), the Son of God, who has been sent back to earth, refuses to accept his father's apocalyptic plan of destruction and remains a renegade among the people he loves.
Man's work, not God's
In February 2003, the evangelical magazine Chrismon organised a survey on the subject of "How will the world end?": Only 5 % of Germans opted for the answer "Through God's judgement", while 42 % of respondents agreed with the answers "Through a global environmental catastrophe" and 14 % with the answer "Through a worldwide war" - whereby the latter answer would certainly achieve a significantly higher, perhaps even the highest value today. The survey result means that an overwhelming majority in this country assigns responsibility for a possible end of the world to humans alone. - In 1999, the American religious and cultural scientist Paul Boyer said in a lecture in Freiburg as the result of a large representative survey that 42 % of all Americans had answered the following question in the affirmative: "Do you believe that the end of the world will come in the biblical battle of Armageddon between the forces of darkness and the heavenly hosts led by Christ?" Boyer commented: "Millions of Americans read the biblical revelation as a 'roadmap' for future events." - However, only fundamentalist groups read the apocalypse radically as a "roadmap", which is then reflected in successful books such as the Left Behind series or the continuously updated website raptureready.com, on which global world political events are continuously commented on in the sense of a realisation of the announcements of biblical apocalypticism.
Hollywood, on the other hand, is much more optimistic and comforting. After all, the studios have to take into account the global market, where such roadmap concepts have little appeal.
In Hollywood apocalypses, man himself is almost always blamed for the ultimate catastrophe, rarely aliens and very rarely, and then usually rather indirectly, God himself. This is the case when the near destruction of the world is triggered by a defect in creation, as in Roland Emmerich's 2012, in which the earth's core is heated by neutrino radiation from massive solar explosions to such an extent that the earth's crust cracks open and the world is devastated. Although Emmerich's planet has changed its shape fundamentally at the end, it remains habitable and can be recolonised by the thousands who have survived the end-time floods in gigantic new arks.
However, the Creator is never explicitly held responsible for these floods in 2012, but rather the cosmos has been given a deistic momentum of its own.
The end is almost never the absolute end
Cinema very rarely subjects its viewers to an absolute ending. Commercial mainstream cinema never does, but always shows an after, a new beginning. This is essentially quite biblical, but the new beginning after the catastrophic upheaval is secularised here, insofar as it was neither God who imposed a judgement on humanity, nor is it God who sets a new beginning, let alone allows a kind of heavenly Jerusalem to descend from the sky. Instead, the apocalyptic appears to have an anthropological twist, insofar as it is people, in their mania for progress or their enthusiasm for war, who are responsible for the downfall. But then it is also the people - usually a holy remnant - who have the strength and imagination for a new beginning, as with the passengers of the new arks in the finale of Roland Emmerich's 2012. In the passage through the seemingly ultimate destruction, an unwavering optimism triumphs in the end, which has long been characterised as 'typically American'.
Apocalyptic visions as catharsis and consolation
Apocalyptic mainstream cinema pays homage to an aesthetics of overwhelming, which is suitable for achieving cathartic effects. Fears of what is to come or could come are acted out in the cinema space and temporarily banished. On the one hand, the many cinema apocalypses certainly give expression to an understanding of existence that is characterised by a great and multiple awareness of crisis and fears of the future, fears that - as the overview of motifs and subjects has shown - stem from very different causes. On the other hand, the compassion in the productions of the catastrophic also cleanses the audience of the negative affects associated with it, even immunising them against them, as they not only emerge unscathed from each new end-time storm, but are also impregnated with the optimism of survival and new beginnings that is unbreakable for this genre. And significantly, the same technology, especially computer technology and AI, that enslaves people in successful films such as the Terminator cycle (US, from 1984; directed by James Cameron) or the Matrix films (US, from 1999; directed by the Wachowskis), is also the basis for these films being made at all. With the constant hunt for new, ever more impressive effects and simulations, this technology is being advanced so rapidly in the cinema industry that the Pentagon has often benefited from it in the development of new weapons systems. It can therefore be quite comforting for the viewer to experience 'live' in the cinema that the technology does not enslave them after all, but that it is mastered so perfectly that they can enjoy an equally perfect cinema experience.
Apocalyptic iconoclasm and apocalypse blindness
What is the purpose of all the apocalyptic iconoclasms in cinema? Are they ultimately intended to satisfy a latent desire for doom? Does apocalypticism become an "aphrodisiac", as Hans Magnus Enzensberger put it? Or is cinema's forced apocalypse frenzy ultimately even working towards a new apocalypse blindness? A blindness of open eyes, in which the temporary banishment of fears of the future in the cinema space obscures real contexts of disaster?
The situation is different in so-called arthouse cinema, which had to be largely ignored here. It is far less governed by commercial considerations and opens up greater scope for the individual visions of a film artist. In arthouse cinema, we therefore also encounter critical analyses of the present that sometimes refuse anything comforting, that seek to persuade their viewers in the "apocalypsis", in the "uncovering" of the contradictions and destructive tendencies of our time to denounce a saturated consensus, and films that seek to induce at least an inner resistance to the status quo. The appropriate artistic mode for this is an aesthetic of interruption, as in the oppressive visual inventions of the Englishman Derek Jarman, in his experimental apocalyptic films such as Last of England or The Garden, which are no longer narrative, but highly fragmented and collaged.
However, the interruption can also be formatted primarily in terms of content: as a break with the traditional end-time narratives laid out in the Apocalypse of St John. The aforementioned film mystery play The Book of Life by Hal Hartley, in which Christ, who has returned to earth for the parousia, refuses to complete the chain of end-time labour pains assigned to him by the Father, is a paradigmatic example of this. The plot, set on the eve of the turn of the millennium, began with the opening of the "Fifth Seal" (Rev 6:9-11) of the "Book of Life" (Rev 5:1-14) by Christ, who had returned to New York in human form.
But the film ends up being downright anti-apocalyptic: Christ already had great reservations about opening the Fifth Seal and hesitated for a long time. And he then moves further and further away from the idea of judgement on mankind. Instead of the final battle with Satan and his final destruction, Hartley ends up with an understanding between Christ and Satan - in the footsteps of the old apokatastasis concept prominently represented by Origen, i.e. the idea of an end-time all-round reconciliation. Together with some people, the two finally celebrate the dawn of the new millennium. Hartley's film ends with far more than just a silver lining with the idea of a loving Son of God who remains faithful to mankind despite all their failures and is always ready to forgive. - On the morning of New Year's Day, the Son of God, who has emigrated from heaven, finally sinks the "Book of Life" into the sea off Manhattan.
Against the old longing of people to somehow be able to be certain of the future - even if it is in the form of historical models - Hartley sets a long litany of open questions in the off-screen inner monologue with which the film ends, which, despite all the foreseeable dangers, does not want to arouse fear but curiosity about the 'adventure of the future' and keep the future open as a space of possibility. In the prologue to this litany, Hartley's Jesus says:
"The new year came, the new millennium, in the form of a simple day in a long life full of similar days. But every one of them was filled to the brim with possibility, the possibility of doom and hardship and the possibility of perfection. - It was good to be among them again. Among the innocent and the guilty. All equally helpless and all utterly lost. - And, as scary as it was to admit, they all deserved forgiveness."
This idea sticks: a Christ who emigrates from heaven to remain among the people he loves, loved despite all their weaknesses, faults and guilt. As an advocate for humanity, he stands up against the simple dualisms of the fundamentalists, against those who believe they have the power to define the course of history and the arrival of the final judgement, in which they believe they are on the safe side. The threat of the violent termination of history is overcome by the basic options of love of enemies, comprehensive forgiveness and the radical divestment of all power.
Of course, the question of whether justice is conceivable without a judgement remains unanswered, a question that is generally avoided in cinema, but at least should be kept open by theology. And then there is also the question of whether a final all-reconciliation remains conceivable after the judgement, after passing through such a judgement and through a perhaps new idea of a "purgatory".
