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This chapter argues that Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011) is and may perhaps forever be the only rigorously apocalyptic film in the history of cinema. Before Melancholia there were already movies in which the last still perfectly coincided with the annihilation of everything. One example is Ted Post's Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970): As he lay dying, Taylor (Charlton Heston) murmurs with his last breath that the day of the last judgment has arrived (“it's Doomsday”) before he collapses and sets off the atomic explosion that destroys the whole Earth. Yet there is a narrating voice that actually continues after or over the final image, that continues to recount, that becomes the huckster for a potential sequel that could still be shot someday. This is not the case with Melancholia. Until the final credits begin to roll, there is at least the radical suspension of an absolute silence that, for a few moments, allows us to glimpse the possibility of an archi-fade to black, of a total erasure after the ultimate image. The end of the film as end of the world would then also be the end of cinema itself. A cinema, finally, in the end.

Chapter two begins with the contention that conflict texts are all, to some extent, texts of mourning and traumatic grief, rather than violence and traumatic experience. Using Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s famous framework of the “Five Stages of Grief”, along with Freud’s work on mourning and melancholia, this chapter analyzes the representation of grief as a manifestation of trauma. This chapter concludes with several comparative analyses of funeral and ritual scenes, with special emphasis on the use of religion and rite as a method of encouraging healing.

Chapter 2 begins by looking at how medical and cultural histories of melancholy and unhappiness have traditionally defined and diagnosed such feelings as negative, unhealthy, and undesirable, even while recognizing their potentially enabling features. Freud’s essay of 1917 is seen to mark a definitive moment when melancholia becomes fully pathologized. In response to this, the chapter turns to the work of Walter Benjamin, who attempts to mine new readings of melancholic experience (and criticism) that show the latter to be profoundly social, political, and productive. This places his work at odds with the prevailing consensus, which characterizes melancholia as a personal psychological failing that is stifling, passive, and anti-social. The chapter closes with a section on ‘conscious unhappiness’. Revisiting Theodor Adorno’s work, this section affirms the importance and interconnectedness of affective and political refusal. Rather than seeking to avoid or relieve dysphoric feelings through psychic adjustment, conscious unhappiness amplifies unmet needs, giving voice to the suffering that arises from a social world in need of wholesale transformation. As part of its revolutionary critique of capitalist social relations, critical theory refuses to privatize the notion of happiness and in so doing aligns itself with the (negative) truth-content of unhappiness – the bad that cannot be made good.

The Renaissance scholar Marsilio Ficino believed that the symptoms of exhaustion were caused by planetary movements. Mixing medical, Neo-Platonic and astrological cures, Ficino tried to enlist the help of the celestial bodies to fight exhaustion. Literary and cinematic examples include W. G. Sebald's 'The Rings of Saturn' and Lars von Trier's film 'Melancholia'.

This chapter interrogates the question of how we should think about and respond to historical trauma. It argues that predominant responses to trauma in theory and practice are melancholic and eschew working through. It examines two sets of dominant responses: mainstream responses that attempt to secure the state by adopting simplistic meaning-making narratives and theoretical responses that focus on the traumatic wound, resisting its assimilation or forgetting. Both sets of responses posit Manichean binaries that shut down the political and work against comprehension. Rose's much more difficult notion of working through offers a profound critique of these melancholic responses, resisting their one-sidedness in the pursuit of an anxiety-filled journey towards comprehension. Her inaugurated mourning promotes an inherently political response: the struggle to situate traumatic events allows connections to be made between the traumatic interruption and the broader socio-political and historical context in which it took place and points to ways in which the possibility of recurrence might be mitigated in future.

This chapter explores the question of melancholy as “matter,” explains how and why melancholy still matters, and where it continues to circulate. It first reviews the various definitions of the phrase “melancholy assemblage” and looks at the oddly polychronic position of melancholy within neuro-reductionist research on the brain science of emotion. It then places melancholy against the hostile ontological backdrop of recent work in “object oriented” philosophy. Finally, it discusses the material poetics of melancholy assemblages at the present time by offering a critical reading of Striborg’s “depressive black metal” and Lars Von Trier’s 2011 film Melancholia.

In this chapter, Schütte considers The Rings of Saturn as Sebald’s masterpiece. He presents the book as much more than a portrayal of Suffolk and its environs, instead a work that freely crosses genres such as autobiography, biography, travelogue and meditative essay.It explores many of Sebald’s literary preoccupations including human’s natural history of destruction, and the author’s belief in the Holocaust as not a singular, incommensurable event, but part of a recurrent chain of disasters we all have a degree of guilt for.

This chapter argues that von Trier’s response to the problem of evil and his cinematic style have evolved along with his views on representation. Once committed to the rejection of all cinematic illusion, his later films make use of it—not because he has changed his mind about the dangers of illusion, but because he has come to view an unnatural perspective as something necessary in order to reveal an evil to which we are ordinarily blind. This later style is herein referred to as “pessimistic realism.” In this light, the chapter focuses on two films in particular: Europa (1991) and Melancholia (2011). Both of these films grapple with the question of evil and the difficulty of seeing or representing it.

This chapter uses Melancholia as a case study for two related issues. First, it aligns a typically European “sense of an ending”—about the sustainability of a certain way of life—with epochal shifts in the cinema’s self-understanding as a realist medium, now “in collision” with the cold and lunar images of digital cinema. Second, the chapter tries to show how this crisis nonetheless gives rise to a sense of hope, insofar as an altered status is proposed for European cinema, namely that of a “thought experiment.” At once speculative and self-reflexive, von Trier’s cinema as thought experiment invites and accommodates a variety of hermeneutic approaches. It permits one to “think the unthinkable” while adhering to systemic constraints and sets up rules that redefine what we understand by “realism” and “reference.”

This chapter treats von Trier’s Melancholia as a reception of Euripides’ Bacchae, a world-ending tragedy in which women leave their work to worship a hypnotic foreign god and are bewitched by strange visions of two suns. The focus here is on the youths—Leo, in von Trier’s film, and the young King Pentheus, in Euripides’ play. Both navigate their way through something like the doldrums of adolescence, a process that may involve violence, aggression, murder (of self, of other), and the renegotiation of identity. One of these two youths is a king whose death in Euripides’ play is the result of an act of regicide. Furthermore, D. W. Winnicott’s work on adolescence in particular invites a reconsideration of the Bacchae, which can enable us to likewise reconsider the politics of von Trier’s film.

This chapter gives a reading of von Trier’s Melancholia with Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity. Gravity as a physical force and melancholia as a psychological force are compared and contrasted throughout; in both films, these two forces act unpredictably. In Melancholia, Justine, whose crippling depression weighs her down, is notably lifted out of her melancholia the closer a rogue planet careens toward Earth. In Gravity, Ryan Stone experiences a physical weightlessness that becomes utterly terrifying when the space shuttle she is attempting to repair is struck by satellite debris. Gravity and Melancholia both direct our attention toward the nonhuman things that inhabit our world, horizontalizing the relation between human and object—a preoccupation that has become a central theoretical concern due to the emergence of speculative realism.

This chapter further explores the themes of attachment in Melancholia. This film dramatizes a sense that humanity matters immensely, chastising the antihumanist impulse of some recent theory, while also showing, however, the extent of its influence. Von Trier, the chapter argues, lets our attachment to the world soak into our pores. That attachment is made up of experiences of joy and loss, memories of which still constitute us in the present, make us who we are, and yet are not in our control. The cultural world can be filled with ideologies that ridicule folding a sense of the fragility of this attachment into parochial interests, identifications, and a sense of responsibility. The film challenges these ideologies, even suggesting that the sensitivities wired into the affliction of melancholia sometimes help the one suffering it to come to terms with those attachments.

This chapter begins by discussing how Nietzsche, like Kant, also imagined a scene for the end of the world through glaciation. It then turns to the apocalyptic genre, arguing that the end of a properly and literally apocalyptic film must coincide with the end of the world. The final fade-out is destined to be that of the end of everything, including of film, which would end not only because there is nothing left to tell, but also and above all because its end includes—or is included in—general and generic disappearance. There is only one film that is worthy of this definitively final gesture which signs what is proper to the purely and absolutely apocalyptic genre: Lars von Trier's Melancholia (2011), a kind of hapax legomenon in film history that ends with this black screen where the final point of the story affecting the characters and that of the universal history of humanity are mixed up at length and slowly but crazily exchanged—the one is constantly equivalent to the other in their mute oscillation.

This chapter discusses how bubble structures—the blob in The Blob (Irvin Yeaworth, 1958), the hologram in Escape from L.A. (John Carpenter, 1996), the submarine in On the Beach (Stanley Kramer, 1959), as well as the camera that falls to the ground and continues to film at the end of Cloverfield (Matt Reeves, 2008) or the ‘magic cave’ of the last moments of Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011)—can be seen and read on two levels at once. On the one hand, they appear in one form or another within the continuity of the plot. And, on the other hand, they constitute fragile filmic enclaves within acinema, ephemeral shelters in the general explosion of the cineworld. By narrating and auscultating itself from the perspective of its disappearance, cinema touches on a limit that is different from the one that would place the image and the fable in opposition within it. At stake is what is called its cinefication: in other words the constitution of the cinema and of its signs propped up on or dependent on the ultimate reference of its cineration, its becoming ash.

This chapter is in two parts – part one is by Thomas Elsaesser commenting on the unstable form of the essay film and making the case for practice based research to count as an essayistic form, exemplified by Agnieszka Piotrowska’s film Lovers in Time or How We Didn’t Get Arrested in Harare (2015) and her complementary book Black and White: Cinema, Politics and the Arts in Zimbabwe (2016). Part two consists of Piotrowska’s reflections on the making of her film, on the nature of postcolonial trauma in psychoanalytical terms and to what extent it can be worked through or ameliorated by creative collaborations. Piotrowska offers some further ‘behind the scenes’ insights into the experience of making a film in a post-colonial, post-traumatic environment, and the knowledge gained through this experience.

Chapter 3 argues that the main characteristic of modern sovereignty is that the means of the exercise of violence justify the ends of power. In this sense, modern sovereignty is the reverse of ancient sovereignty. This reversal is located in the sixteenth century and it is examined through the idea of absolute sovereignty that develops in the seventeenth century in theorist such as Thomas Hobbes. Shakespeare's Hamlet is read as a political play that criticises the idea of absolute sovereignty.

Contemporary Hungarian cinema has been often coined as "dark", depicting an "ontological melancholia" paired with a preference for the still image. In films by Béla Tarr, Kornél Mundruczó or Benedek Fliegauf for example, tableau-like compositions serve as "interruptions" revealing the single image as a site in-between where figuration happens. These painterly images relate to the narration metaphorically, triggering an aesthetic detachment of a "pensive spectator." This chapter focuses on a corpus of contemporary Hungarian films in which bodies are represented in pictorial compositions evoking either Andrea Mantegna's The Lamentation over the Dead Christ or Hans Holbein's The Body of the Dead Christin the Tomb, with the aim to identify 'the figural' that makes sense without a story. Relying on Kristeva's controversial "gendered" interpretation of melancholia, the chapter includes comparative analyses of films by Hungarian female and male directors (Ágnes Kocsis and Kornél Mundruczó, for example).

Los últimos de Filipinas (Last Stand in the Philippines, Antonio Román, 1945) is one of the most popular Spanish films of all times. Drawing from Henri Bergson’s notion of temporality, this chapter argues that the film revolves around a politics of time both informing and informed by totalitarian kitsch aesthetics. The film’s portrayal of a besieged colonial church standing defiantly against a Tagalog rebellion in the small town of Baler during the Spanish-American War in1898 transformed the colonial reality of the Philippines into political myth; a myth which, I argue, condensed to perfection Francoist kitsch ideology.