Post-apocalyptic Films Research Articles

Climate Migration in Post-Apocalyptic Narratives on the Mainstream Screen

Through the perspective of ‘catastrophising thought’, this work undertakes a comparative analysis of five post-apocalyptic films dealing with climate migration: Waterworld, Snowpiercer, Interstellar, Mad Max: Fury Road and Mortal Engines in order to identify recurring themes within their dystopian societies. These narratives share an apocalyptic literary approach, intertwining biblical elements to draw a subjectivity that enables us to see the end of our known world order simultaneously as a new beginning. In the plots, technological development is related to the disrespect of ecological harmony and, therefore, extreme climate conditions. The changes in the films’ narratives lead to a new kind of spirituality and a new concept of home. This article concludes by evaluating how these findings relate to the real, contemporary world.

The rhetoric of ecology in the post-apocalyptic cinematic landscape

Contemporary post-apocalyptic films portray a world ravaged by ecological catastrophes, and humanity on the brink of extinction. Such films echo the urgent environmental discourses of the Anthropocene, while offering instances of a post-anthropocentric perspective and the new subject-formations it engenders. The article argues that the central rhetorical device that generates an ecocritical perspective in such films is the post-apocalyptic landscape. Cinematic space shapes the meaning of all films, and this is even more emphatic when setting is transformed into landscape (Lefebvre 2006). What is more, in the post-apocalyptic films, the landscape becomes the main site of the films’ “rhetorical enviromentality” (McMurry 2017). The article examines the post-apocalyptic landscape in I Am Legend (2007) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) and how it articulates the entangled relation between humans and the collapsing world that surrounds them. Using Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) post-human theory, I contend that these cinematic landscapes hint at an “eco-philosophy of multiple belongings” (Braidotti 2013, 49) and enact “a process of redefining one’s sense of attachment and connection to a shared world” (Braidotti 2013, 2019). Ultimately, I conclude that the affective appeal of these landscapes implicates the viewer in post-anthropocentric perspectives, thus prompting new modes of environmental consciousness.

DYSTOPIAN THEME IN SOUTH KOREAN LITERATURE AND FILM

The theme Dystopia began as a response to Utopian theory, which isrelated to perfect communities. A dystopia is an imaginary community or society that is dehumanized and is therefore terrifying with people who are forced to battle for survivalin a ruined environment with technological control and oppression by the governing authority. Dystopian novels or films can challenge readers to think differently about the current social and political contexts, and can even promptpositive actions for the future of human beings. Recently, not only America and Europe but also South Korea has witnessed the increasing release of a range ofdystopian or post-apocalyptic films and novels. These creations reflect the harsh reality of our modern life in which human beings have to confront disasters, pandemics and problems of the modern industrialized society. Though usually set in a future scene, the dystopian theme can function as an open gate, an objection from the present, or as the “archaeology of the Future”. The success of South Korean literature and film on this topic claims the strong rise of SouthKorean wave in the world’s pop culture. It also shows that sci-fi works with dystopian theme can be seen as an anti-social discourse as well as their possibility of merging with the mainstream works.

Jesus wept, robots can’t

Exploring the implications of the shortest of biblical verses ‘Jesus wept’ in contrast with the incapability of robots to weep or feel empathy and emotion as exemplified in the classic post-apocalyptic film Terminator 2, this essay argues that movement, gesture, body, experience and improvization are essential elements to any emerging valued world. Certainly religion, despite our strong association of it with the spiritual and the immaterial, does not and cannot exist, or even be imagined, apart from these distinctively human biological features. The study of religion must be, among other concerns, grounded in biology.

Samochody, które zjadły świat. Obrazy środków transportu w filmowych narracjach postapokaliptycznych

The article concerns the motif of the vehicle as an important element of post-apocalyptic world. Some post-apocalyptic films show visions of humanity after the catastrophe using the image of the car which not only constitutes the element of space, but often influences the motivation or performs a symbolic function. Visual aspect of post-apo cars, lack of traditional destinations and almost compulsive using of vehicles by the protagonist and antagonist in such films like Mad Max series (directed by George Miller), Hell (directed by Tim Fehlbaum), Downstream (directed by Simone Bartesaghi), Damnation Alley (directed by Jack Smight), The Book of Eli (directed by Albert and Allen Hughes) seem to be really important for the vision of future (and contemporary) humanity.

The Productive Textuality in Mad Max(2015) : A Post-apocalyptic Film in Pursuit of Flight for New Becoming

The Productive Textuality in Mad Max(2015) : A Post-apocalyptic Film in Pursuit of Flight for New Becoming

Children of Men's Ambient Apocalyptic Visions

Abstract:Alfonso Cuarón's Children of Men (2006) is part of the long stream of films that respond vividly to social crisis and the hovering threat of human annihilation and that have sought to reimagine the Judeo-Christian apocalyptic myth. But I will argue that it represents a unique take on this popular genre that I call the ambient apocalyptic. The film's sense of pervasive crisis is not linked to a singular apocalyptic event and it redraws the tropes of many popular post-apocalyptic films. Cuarón intricately builds into nearly every scene referential signals to specific current political realities. He does this, however, without overburdening his film with either apocalyptic literalness or undisturbed certainty. He uses a layered referential style that seeks to create a kind of visionary realism.

Report on Madrid de Cine-Spanish Film Screenings

Abstract This report covers the eighth edition of Madrid de Cine-Spanish Film Screenings, the major marketplace for Spanish cinema, which took place on 17–19 June 2013. Based on industry sources at the event, it offers a survey of Spanish film over the previous year and identifies five trends in current production: post-apocalyptic films, romantic dramedies, genre movies, auteurist films and titles that are innovative in their distribution and exhibition.

John Cade

John Cade

Ruin, Gender, and Digital Games

Hail, solitary ruins! holy sepulchres, and silent walls! you I invoke) to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret terror, the vulgar regard, it excites in my heart the charm of delicious sentiments - sublime contemplations. What useful lessons! What affecting and profound reflections you suggest to him who knows how to consult you. When the whole earth, in chains and silence, bowed the neck before its tyrants, you had already proclaimed the truths which they abhor, and confounding the dust of the king with that of the meanest slave, had announced to man the sacred dogma of Equality! - C. F. Volney, The Ruins, 1791 Ruin, broadly defined as the decaying remnants of abandoned or destroyed physical structures, is a common aesthetic across many modes of artistic expression, including paintings, photography, literature, and cinema. It is perhaps not a surprise, then, to see similar ruin imagery appear as a common motif in the emerging medium of digital games. Indeed, ruin aesthetics serve as the primary setting in many popular games. The proliferation of such imagery across such a wide range of media reflects an apparent human fascination with ruin - a fascination that has been revealed by the few attempts to dissect it as quite complex and varied across individuals, cultures, and time periods. One of the many themes that emerges from such an analysis is the idea that the destruction of physical structures is paralleled by, and symbolic of, the destruction of social structures, thus associating ruin with liberation and freedom. Edensor alludes to this when he describes ruins as spaces in which the interpretations of practices of the city become liberated from the everyday constraints which determine what should be done and where (2005, 4). In this interpretation of ruin, it follows that if such physical structures were built by and stood as of a masculine-dominated society, then the ruins of these buildings symbolize the destruction of that society. These ruins then become a space that offers freedom from the same gender-oppressive institutions that once permeated them, and thus sites of empowerment. These associations of ruin with freedom from social constraint play out in artistic re-creations of ruin as well. During the French Revolution, the Jacobin association of physical destruction with social destruction played out in much of the art of its time, which was full of a joyful destruction of monuments (Goldstein 1977, 144). Modern postapocalyptic films often tie together ruin imagery and freedom from social constraints. For example, the film IAm Legend (Goldsman et al. 2007) juxtaposes images of a ruined city with images of the solitary survivor freely looting stores, hitting golf balls off the wing of an F- 15 and driving at breakneck speeds through the city streets with an assault rifle. These connections frame ruin as an icon of resistance and subversion; in turn, what is being resisted depends on what the ruined structures are taken to represent or to have once represented. Since digital games frequently use this aesthetic, it is not unreasonable to suspect that this thematic association may echo into these virtual worlds of ruination. The interactive nature of digital games makes them a more complex medium to analyze than traditional media. Instead of simply consuming the medium, players are given a participatory role in the creating it. Kirkland (2009) suggests looking at video games as texts, while emphasizing the unique nature of the texts as games. Calleja suggests in his Digital Game Experience Model that digital games should be looked at more as aesthetically designed experience (2007, 4). Most agree that it is important to take into account the partially user-generated nature in any kind of meaningful analysis, and any analysis of ruin and gender in digital games must acknowledge this. At the very least, the messages about gender communicated through and in connection with ruin imagery must be looked at in terms of both the visual setting of the virtual environment and the potentially gendered nature of the gameplay - in the actions afforded, encouraged, discouraged, and denied to the player. …

O-bi, o-ba: Koniec cywilizacji – postpiśmienny świat Piotra Szulkina

Pietrzak Maciej, O-bi, o-ba: Koniec cywilizacji – postpiśmienny świat Piotra Szulkina [O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization – The Postliterate World of Piotr Szulkin]. „Przestrzenie Teorii” nr 32. Poznań 2019, Adam Mickiewicz University Press, pp. 273–284. ISSN 1644-6763. DOI 10.14746/pt.2019.32.14.
 Piotr Szulkin made his mark in the history of cinema primarily as the author of disturbing visions of the future. His four films made between 1979 and 1985 comprised the science-fiction tetralogy, which is still one of the greatest artistic achievements of this genre in Polish cinema. The subject of the article is the third production of Szulkin’s series – the post-apocalyptic film O-Bi, O-Ba: The End of Civilization from 1984. In the film, the director creates a suggestive vision of a world destroyed as a result of nuclear conflict, in which the original functions of literature and the written word are forgotten. The author article analyzes the way in which forsaken literary artifacts are used in the post-literary reality of the film. An important element of his considerations is also the post-apocalyptic reception of the biblical text, on whose elements the mythology of the film’s world is based.