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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.

Carl Friedrich Gauss showed remarkable mathematical ability from a young age. As a child he found a formula for calculating the sum of sequences of consecutive numbers, a type of arithmetic progression. The formula is explained and used in the text. The mythological origins of the 3x3 magic square known to the Chinese as the Luo Shu are discussed. Larger magic squares were introduced to Europe through the book Shams al-Ma’arif, written by sufi mystic al-Buni. In this work, the magic squares were associated with astrology. This association was perpetuated by European writers such as Cornelius Agrippa, and Luca Pacioli included magic squares in his book De Viribus Quantitatis (On the Power of Numbers). The most famous use of a magic square in art is in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melancholia I. Here the meaning of this enigmatic work is discussed.

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'.

The introduction commences with a ‘detour’ into the history of landscape art and the picturesque, suggesting ways that this mode pre-empted what may seem like more modern ideas about the interference between perception and representation. This discussion is folded into a brief account of the so-called ‘spatial turn’ and the interventions of theorists including Doreen Massey and Marc Augé, establishing an immediate context for the work of Keiller, Sebald, and Sinclair. Suggesting a twin heritage of the ‘English Journey’ on the one hand and the French Surrealists and Situationists on the other, the introduction then offers the tension between amant and amateur as a way of characterizing the balance of exotic/everyday, plan/coincidence, and high-brow/low-brow in these figures’ work. It considers the role of pedestrianism and melancholia before closing with a discussion of Walter Benjamin and Gustave Doré’s ‘New Zealander’.

The second chapter, ‘A Vagrant Sensibility: Patrick Keiller’s Robinson Films’, casts new light on Keiller’s later work, partly by considering it in relation to the idea of ‘left-wing melancholy’ and Svetlana Boym’s writing on nostalgia. If, as Raymond Williams wrote, ‘there is usually principle in exile, there is always only relaxation in vagrancy’, then this chapter shows how the vagrant wanderings of ‘Robinson’ through London and England are able to both ‘luxuriate’ and to produce a potent critique of capital, landscape, and culture. Beginning by reading the Robinson of London (1994) as an urbanist swayed not so much by the ebb and flow of the Baudelairean crowd as by the blips and dips of the free-market economy, it then examines the ‘English Journey’ of Robinson in Space before enquiring into Keiller’s own critique in Robinson in Ruins (2010) of Heideggerian dwelling as the process of ‘entering in simple oneness into things’.

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.

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.

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.

From tunnels and transport networks that intimately connect urban dwellers, the next subterranean structure that radically reconfigures the socio-spatial dynamics of the city is the urban cemetery. Movement and circulation were still the guiding urban rationale in the spatial organisation of the necropolis, from the displacement of the dead ex urbis to the removal of burial grounds like St. Pancras to build a major underground station. This chapter explores how the Victorians reconciled these utilitarian methods in treating the dead with the psychological trauma of death itself. The chapter argues that the removal of graveyards from churches away from the city centre replaced the traditional notions of a Christian afterlife with a Derridean ‘revenance’ that lingers in the interstices of life and death in a perennial haunting of the Victorian imagination. The ‘revenant’, which Derrida describes as ‘that which comes back’, articulates a new form of mourning in which spirits and apparitions of the dead become very much a part of the present and the world above. The following texts blur the edges of life and death, collapsing distinction between underground and aboveground.

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.