Film Review
Mankind's obsession with the Apocalypse dates back to the dawn of
history and so it is scarcely surprising that it should feature in
cinema so soon after the new medium was invented. August Blom's
The End of the World (a.k.a.
Verdens Undergang) was cinema's
first full-blown apocalyptic movie, a spectacular, groundbreaking
blockbuster that came towards the end of Denmark's Golden Age of
filmmaking. By this time, Blom had established himself as
Denmark's most productive and highly regarded film pioneer, with over
eighty films to his name (mostly shorts).
The End of the World was one of the
great achievements of his prolific career, a film that continues to
impress with its harrowingly authentic depiction of global disaster, in
which humanity is threatened not only by showers of fire from the
heavens but also clouds of poisonous smoke and floods of Biblical
proportions - not to mention some very dodgy dealing on the Danish
stock exchange.
The plot is so similar to that of Camille Flammarion's 1893 novel
La Fin du monde that it seems
likely that Blom may have drawn his inspiration from it. The same
novel would later be adapted by Abel Gance as
La Fin du monde (1931), a film
which (if we overlook the Utopian socio-political posturing) bears a
striking similarity with Blom's. Like Gance, Blom uses mankind's
impending doom as the basis for a morality play which becomes a fevered
onslaught against the excesses of capitalism. Right from the
outset, we have a pretty shrewd idea who will be spared and who will be
subjected to the most gruesome of deaths. It is
reassuring to know that the desire to see greedy speculators roasted
alive is not a recent phenomenon. The sequence in which the
miners rise up and attack a socialite gathering prefigures the Russian
Revolution, having an uncanny resonance with the storming of the Tsar's
Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks in 1917, the year after the film was
released.
When the film was first seen, in 1916, memories of a real-life
near-Apocalypse were still fresh in everyone's mind. In 1910,
many believed that Halley's Comet would bring destruction to the Earth,
and although the comet passed without any harm it was seen as a
harbinger of doom, with the outbreak of World War One following not
long afterwards. The scenes of mayhem and destruction that we
witness in Blom's
The End of the
World would be horribly familiar to a generation caught up in
the most violent conflict in history and, for many, it must have seemed
that the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were just over the horizon,
waiting to finish off the job that man had, in his abject foolishness,
begun.
It is hardly surprising that the film was so successful - it fed on
real anxieties and reflected the gloom of its time, whilst offering a
glimmer of hope that the virtuous would be spared God's wrath. It
isn't clear whether the damage is confined to a small mining town in
Scandinavia or takes in the entire globe, but the images of death
and destruction are so graphic, so convincingly realised, that they
must have left audiences profoundly shaken, even more fearful for what
the future held for them. Even by today's standards, the film is
pretty terrifying in parts, and it is doubtful whether the latest CGI
effects can surpass the stark realism achieved by Blom and his team as
they simulate an all-too-believable global catastrophe.
© James Travers 2013
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.
Film Synopsis
In a Scandinavian mining town, two sisters, Dina and Edith, live with their
aged father. Dina is engaged to a miner Flint, but decides to
elope with a wealthy capitalist, Stoll. As her sister enjoys a
life of luxury in the city, Edith remains in her home town and falls in
love with a handsome sailor, Reymers. A few years later, Stoll
has become incredibly rich and sees an opportunity to acquire even
greater wealth when his cousin, Professor Wisemann, a famous
astronomer, discovers that a comet is on a collision course with planet
Earth. News of this impending disaster creates panic on the stock
exchange, and Stoll buys up everything he can as share prices
plunge. Stoll then bribes a newspaper editor to print a bogus
report that the comet will pass by without causing any damage to life
or property. As the stock market recovers, Stoll makes a killing
and decides to host a party in the mining town on the very day his
cousin predicted the comet will strike the Earth. When it
becomes apparent that they face annihilation, the miners turn against
their rich overlords. Stoll and his wife flee to the safety of
the mines as fire begins to rain down on the Earth...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.