The End of the World (1916)
Directed by August Blom

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.

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...