Abstract
This essay traces the preponderance of French disaster films in the 1920s to a number of distinct but interconnected phenomena. First, the scenes of desolation featured in these films are examined in the context of the ‘apocalyptic imagination’ pervading French culture in the wake of the First World War. Then, images of appropriation of Parisian city-streets and monuments (in particular, the Eiffel Tower) are shown to invoke a nostalgia for a pre-industrial era. Finally, these films are shown to exhibit a self-referential preoccupation with the decline of the French film industry after the war, their aesthetics of destruction functioning as a marker of prestige rather than of economic pre-eminence, whose loss was in some ways perceived as the greatest disaster of all.
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