The Sense of an Ending: Culture, Capital, and the Fate of (Late) Modern Europe in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999)

Abstract

As the imaginary deadline or vanishing point of the turn of millennium was drawing ever closer, its associated anxieties and apocalyptic woes offered a fertile breeding ground for suspense, horror, and the fantastic to experience a resurgence in Western cinemas. Roman Polanski’s fifteenth feature film The Ninth Gate, released in 1999, can be read among the various auteur-helmed evidences of such a trend, but also as a self-conscious exercise in the kind of trans-European filmmaking being promoted at the time within the continent, one in which Polanski himself had, willingly or not, already been cutting his teeth for almost two decades after his spiteful return from the US and Hollywood in the late 1970s. On the back of a border-crossing journey in search for three demonic books, this essay will argue, The Ninth Gate manages to discursively interlace both facets. The result, by way of an intermedial concern with the world of literature, a generic involvement with the supernatural, and a meticulous mobilization of cinematic space, location shooting and architecture, is a cynical, self-deprecating reflection on the precarious state of Europe at the time, caught between the memories of glorious but long-fading splendor and a crippling uncertainty about its future and place in an increasingly globalized world.