Serge Daney on Catastrophe
Posted October 26, 2006 by John Menick
A rough translation from Serge Daney in English:
Night of the Living Dead
We haven’t taken notice enough, in American cinema, of a tenacious and underground taste for the apocalypse. As if too much good conscience could only be carried through by bringing up the most definitive horrors – horrors which do not come without a certain pleasure, as clearly seen with DeMille (or with King in In Old Chicago or with Van Dyke in San Francisco), the filmmaker of the catastrophe and the accident, themes which gravity can impress and which productivity is not to be neglected since that on top of the photogenic destruction came the secondary benefits of revaluing the characters (at least those who survived) who, when reduced the state of rags, were more sublime and more human than ever. Great natural accidents but also ordeals largely-deserved by a futile humanity; it was so in DeMille’s movies and later in Hitchcock’s, or in these low budget Sci-Fi movies that were made suddenly possible towards 1950 by the idea of an atomic end, the abrupt mutations of a rebelling nature become absurd and monstrous, the ever so possible eradication of man, etc. (Five, Them!, Body Snatchers). And yet, there like elsewhere, the apocalypse disappointed, because men, stupid enough to deserve it, were also wise enough to stop it, opposing a united front from where – all differences having been erased – a feeling properly overwhelming of the human was coming to the light of day. Of the human as such, i.e. non-monstrous.
Cahiers du cinéma, issue 219, April 1970, [Serge Damey in English]’s translation
