2019 – After the Fall of New York

You can’t expect to see it and survive by Fabio Pezzetti Tonion

Capable of providing a tangible form and to make concrete the paralysing anxiety of the nuclear nightmare, cinema has always confronted itself at the root of the problem of how could this fear be displayed. In this respect performing catastrophes was by far the most inevitable and ultimate climax the film was supposed to reach, in a perspective in which the film's outcome was conditioned, the real aim of the movie being the very impending threat, that anxiety arisen by time running relentlessly to the ultimate paramount destruction. The end was a foregone conclusion: a tangible manifesto of an age shaken by the cold war, the final catastrophe was supposed to close (if only metaphorically) every film seeking confrontation with the urgency of a burning issue such as the superpower clash. Far from being a means of consolation, a place of easy escape and amusement, once impressed on the screen, the perspective of total wipe-out acquired all the more the features of an obscure prophecy, which, deep inside, every viewer feared it might fulfil, since the present was weighed down by the idea of an uncertain future with no way outs and irremediably condemned. We deduce that what counts in this particular cinema, (which could be described as "catastrophe cinema") is the hic et nunc of the action. The film defines the present in which one lives and is the mirror of society and its moods. No space is left for what comes after the concept of future has naturally been banned, because if nuclear destruction is paramount how could there possibly still be a future?

Indeed that is the question (Will there ever be a future after the end of the world?) to which the Late Night Show section aims at answering in more or less an explicit and effective way in this year's Festival's edition.

Since the 60s and starting by British sci-fi, namely with The day the earth caught fire and again through Ray Milland's debut as a director (Panic in the year zero) up to films – twenty years later and with a different ideological weight – such as The Day After and 2019 – After the Fall of New York we are confronted with films, which, not only are able to tackle this question, but are also an eloquent symptom of the changed attitude towards the representation of nuclear destruction, explicitly witnessing the passage from catastrophe cinema to post-catastrophe cinema. Therefore post-apocalyptic films. Yet even though investigating unseen aspects of a future charged with current anxieties, these films aren't strong enough to claim a new statute of a view capable of going beyond films belonging to a previous ideological season. What they prove, in fact, is that cinema's view (and also the viewer's view, and, ultimately man's view) cannot observe the black heart of the abyss: as shown in Akira Kurosawa's outstanding sequence in Rhapsody in August portraying the old protagonist lady in the process of recalling to mind the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki. That represents the abyss, a huge evil eye open wide in the sky watching and looking over us. We are all dumb and aimless objects seen but unable to see. An evident metaphor of our impossibility to see, cinema seems to be unable to objectify the moment of total devastation. That moment, that annihilating climax, evoked and prefigured is always forbidden to our view. And even when it is current (as in Stanley Kubrick's Doctor Strangelove) what it leaves the audience with, is a feeling of impotence, the impotence of showing the horror right until the end. There is always a distance between the fact and the viewer, there is always a somewhat blurred vision which makes the perception blunt and incomplete, and cinema before the distress which is felt at the very moment of nuclear havoc can only depict what comes before and straight after that moment. Quoting Marguerite Duras, all that cinema can do is show the impossibility of showing Hiroshima. Because nothingness can't be shown yet the moments that come before and after can.

Being addressed to the more film enthusiast fringe of the Festival's audience, as it is, Late Night Show goes through some of post-catastrophe cinema's most emblematic works, seemingly passing with no gap from the great authorial cinema to Italian genre films up to American and English B-movies, following a chronological strand which is (could be ideally) opened and closed by two emblematic works: Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and The State of Things (1982). Emblematic in the way that they are able to convey how much tragedy's representation had changed. Resnais's film is the first great post-catastrophe film and not only does it investigate the quickness of shame of such an inhuman and dehumanising act, but it also confirms, with disconcerting lucidity, the impossibility to show that shame. What is left is a memento, a time-warped memory, which will never give the real dimension of Hiroshima's horror. Almost a quarter century later, with Wim Wenders everything falls into place, in a complex and stratified work presenting the images of a nuclear explosion's aftermath and its survivors. A film in the film (i.e. The Survivors) an unfinished work troubled by a thousand odds. A deeply sour and cold-blooded thought on cinema and death (or rather cinema's death in cinema) by which the German director confirms the filmability limits of the catastrophe. In this perspective The State of Things witnesses the inability of man to see thoroughly to the end (director Fritz's death at the end confirms just that). One is always left at the margins of the essential moment. Cinema's effort to penetrate this essentiality is always frustrated in the end. All that is left is that surreal landscape where Kurosawa sets his two-episode film Dreams. It is impossible to evoke cinema's reality, one has to go further in the nightmare dimension created by the Japanese maestro. It is right in that hallucinated darkness in that cinema's beyond, towards which only few have been able to push as far, that lays the heart of our impossibility (of our fear) of seeing.