World’s End or Cinema’s Future?

Abel Gance’s 1931 End of the World gets its first Blu-ray DVD release (from KINO) the same time that Public Image Ltd releases End of World, you had better believe something is happening in the culture. Given the inversion of language by politicians and the media and the collapse of constitutional law and the breakdown of social order, the “End” seems to be upon us, but only great artists such as Gance and John Lydon share the guts and vision to tell us.

Gance is best known for his 1927 silent film Napoleon — a spectacular four-hour three-screen biopic that Francis Ford Coppola restored in 1981. Gance won his place in film history for delirious, pioneering graphic experimentations that made him the art-house D. W. Griffith. Like America’s Griffith, France’s Gance thought in epic terms, which is how the end of the world became the subject of his first sound-era film. Bridging science fiction and political science, Gance forecasts how leaders across the globe panic at the approach of a comet predicted to destroy Earth in 114 days.

Based on the 1910 appearance of Halley’s Comet (here called “Lexell’s Comet”), the story raises worldwide anxieties comparable to those wrought by the disastrous social reactions to Covid. It’s a crazy movie, but crazy like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis — almost clairvoyant about mankind’s fate. Gance’s fantasy includes weather catastrophes, stock-market mayhem, media competition (and deception). Conflicts among actors, scientists, and oligarchs become orgiastic, exorcised by prayer vigils that can be responded to only with awe.

End of the World is more personal than those Y2K action flicks Armageddon and Deep Impact. Gance’s eschatological perspective is apparent from the opening scene, depicting theater audiences soon to face their doom. It’s what contemporary cinephiles would call meta. This amazing overture is, literally, a Passion Play, a performance of Christ’s crucifixion (Gance himself portrays the actor in the role of Jesus), as in the Passion Play still regularly mounted in Oberammergau, Germany. The pageant’s sensual, textured, black-and-white imagery features close-ups of theatricalized suffering; faces filled with spiritual expectation make faith palpable. It anticipates the Judgment promised after the Resurrection, fulfilling the cultural and religious orientation of the stage performers and their audience.

Following Gance’s magnificent pacifist epic J’accuse (1919), End of the World shows the filmmaker’s political skepticism after World War I. It comes in the words of Soviet anarchist Peter Kropotkin: “There are periods in human existence when the inevitability of a great upheaval, of a cataclysm that shakes society to its very roots, imposes itself on every area of our relationships.”

Neither a communist, nor a scold like Lydon, Gance uses Kropotkin’s warning to reveal the chaos inherent to sinful mankind. Gance recalls the thrill rides of Hollywood’s Cecil B. DeMille (The Ten Commandments, Samson and Delilah). Leaping imaginatively from the Crucifixion to anarchic communism (labeled the Federation of European States) pushes End of the World into a prophetic mythology as frenzied, abstract, and wondrous as Zack Snyder’s movies. Gance’s one-world vision (called Global Republic) uses hyperbolic montage, circling the planet like the awesome triptych imagery in Napoleon. Reaching for the hearts of the cinema audience — the goal connecting Griffith, Gance, DeMille, and Snyder — prevents End of the World from sinking into nihilism.

Stressing universal spiritual beliefs, Gance may intuit the end of the world, yet his cinema of extremes should inspire millennial filmmakers to go beyond partisan pettifogging; he demonstrates how they can respond to political chaos. Gance proves it is in the purview of artists to confront the social moment as directly as Lydon does in PIL’s End of World album. (Think of the lockdown-era concert where Morrissey reprised Skeeter Davis’s heartbreak song “It’s the End of the World,” then sneezed.) Plus, it’s fun bringing excitement, poetry, and integrity to the clarification of moral confusion.