Constantin Costa-Gavras's cinematic career has been dedicated to stories of political, social, and personal corruption in a body of work that defines the ‘political fiction film’, as John Michalczyk has termed it. 1 Across that oeuvre, ranging (non-chronologically) from Amen. to Z , twice Costa-Gavras has veered into comic territory. Conseil de famille (1986) and La petite apocalypse (1993) bookend Betrayed (1988) and Music Box (1989) , two films about the invisibility of evil within the family. These two comedies, by contrast, work in
Wild, dark times are rumbling toward us, and the prophet who wishes to write a new apocalypse will have to invent entirely new beasts, and beasts so terrible that the ancient animal symbols of St John will seem like cooing doves and cupids in comparison. (Heinrich Heine, ‘Lutetia; or, Paris
v 11 v Imagining the apocalypse: nuclear winter in science and the world Paul Rubinson Imagining Mars; imagining nuclear war Although rigorously trained in the rules of the scientific method, the astronomer Carl Sagan frequently relied on his imagination. At times, in fact, he could only use his imagination, since his proclaimed field of exobiology consisted of the study of life in outer space – something not yet proven to exist. Sagan’s imagination was especially active when it came to Mars; at one point he even pondered whether the moons of Mars were
v 3 v Building peace, fearing the apocalypse? Nuclear danger in Soviet Cold War culture Miriam Dobson There was no Soviet equivalent of On the Beach; no Russian Bill Haley hoping he would be the only man left with ‘Thirteen Women’ when the H-bomb went off. Before the Gorbachev era, few Soviet writers and film directors portrayed human civilisation on the brink of self-destruction, as in Nevil Shute’s novel, or tried to conjure up a post-apocalyptic world. In the USSR, the first film to depict nuclear holocaust was Konstantin Lopushanskii’s 1986 The Letters of
models of a threatened apocalypse. My argument is that Kerouac’s novel provides a version of the ‘road’ which is echoed in later post-environmental apocalyptic narratives such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006) and Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse (2007). Kerouac also elaborates a version of subjectivity which underpins these later exercises in American Gothic as they all attempt to theorize the
