La Fin du monde (1931)
Directed by Abel Gance

Film Review

Abel Gance's reputation as one of the world's leading avant-garde filmmakers suffered irreparable harm when the director cast himself as a modern Messiah in a film that was to be his biggest misfire.  La Fin du monde (a.k.a. The End of the World) is pacifist propaganda at its most hysterical and very nearly put paid to Gance's career as a film director.  The film was originally intended to be a three hour long epic, made on a budget of five million francs with a new stereophonic sound system pioneered by Gance.   Unfortunately, the producers lost patience with Gance and took it away from him, drastically cutting it down to 105 minutes of barely intelligible narrative pandemonium.  The film could hardly escape being a major critical and commercial failure, with the result that Gance was toppled from his grand auteur pedestal and had no choice but to direct more conventional films for the rest of his career, his subsequent work being a pale shadow of his former achievements.

After its dismal performance in France, La Fin du monde fared little better when it was released in the United States by the American distributor Harold Auten.  On Auten's insistence, the film was aggressively truncated to 54 minutes, which included a pointless ten minute introduction by a scholarly astronomer, who elaborated on the film's scientific content.  The American version of the film, titled Paris After Dark, replaces most of the spoken dialogue with numerous intertitles, which only serve to render a totally confused film even more unwatchable.  In this version, the character played by Gance (the Cocteau-like poet Jean Novalic) is virtually excised, and it could be argued that this is a vast improvement.  That La Fin du monde has endured and remains one of Gance's best-known films is almost entirely down to its status as one of the earliest science-fiction films, a genre that is particularly rare in French cinema.

Based on the 1894 novel La Fin du Monde (a.k.a. Omega: The Last Days of the World) by the astronomer Camille Flammarion, the film was conceived as a warning against the forces that were driving mankind towards a second, and possibly apocalyptic, global conflagration, principally nationalism and capitalist greed.  As Abel Gance saw it, mankind had only one chance for survival: to band together and form a single World Republic, in which all the nations of the world are united in peaceful cooperation.  It is a vision that was shared by many other prominent writers and philosophers of the era, most notably H.G. Wells.  There is a striking overlap with Wells's 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, in which the world ends up being governed by an intellectual elite.  In the film, it is a scientist (an astronomer) who proves to be mankind's saviour and helps to bring about a new world order in which war is abolished.  The alternative is graphically illustrated in the tumult caused by a seemingly inescapable natural catastrophe.  Gance's thesis is that it is within man's power to choose his destiny: peace and unity or complete obliteration.

Whilst Gance's motives are undoubtedly sincere, he pretty well decimates his arguments through a combination of political naivety and artistic self-indulgence.  In comparison with his earlier anti-war piece J'Accuse (1919), La Fin du monde lacks clarity and leaves the spectator as hopelessly confused as the maelstrom of images and ideas it carelessly throws onto the screen.  Gance does himself no favours by casting himself as Jesus Christ in the opening sequence - any film director who presents himself as the Son of God and shows himself being nailed to a cross is asking for trouble.  As the poet Jean Novalic, Gance is reduced to playing a self-pitying form of himself, pathetically lamenting his inability to convince others of his belief that mankind is doomed unless he changes his ways.  Doubtless the film's jumbled narrative is the result of the last minute editing that was done after the producers took the film away from its director, but the wafer-thin characterisation, laboured moralising and overly simplistic politics are entirely Gance's.

We can forgive the film its technical imperfections - this was after all Gance's first experience of sound cinema and hardly any sound film made around this time was any better - but its rambling narrative and grandiose preachiness are much harder to stomach.  Gance does manage to redeem himself, partly, in the film's spectacular last fifteen minutes, which demonstrate the director's special talent for montage.  Combining reasonably convincing model shots with stock footage of a variety of natural disasters, Gance gives his film a visually arresting climax.  By cleverly distorting the images (possibly with the help of flexible mirrors) the joins between the different shots are cunningly hidden and the end result is remarkably fluid, a kaleidoscopic frenzy of chaos and terror that is utterly riveting, on a par with anything you will find in today's more convincing disaster movies.  Unfortunately, to get to this artistic highpoint the spectator has to sit through around ninety minutes of aimless to-ing and fro-ing in what vaguely resembles a badly cut version of a Louis Feuillade serial from the mid 1910s.

Today, the impression the film makes is very different to what Gance had intended.  Far from being the enlightened hero who would guide mankind to a new and happier dawn, the central character Martial Novalic has many of the characteristics we would associate with a totalitarian leader.  By announcing the end of the world, he creates a climate of fear which he then uses for his own political ends (benign as they may be).  He exploits the media available to him (newspapers and radio) to the full in his remorseless propaganda campaign, and even ends up killing his political opponents in cold blood.  Martial's sombre announcement that the world has only 114 days left to Armageddon instantly reminds us of another (real-life) merchant of doom and his famous 45 minute warning.  The World Republic that Martial instigates at the end of the film is not far removed from the Fascist regimes that had begun to take control of continental Europe at the time.  Quite unintentionally, La Fin du monde is chillingly prescient, and surprisingly relevant to our own time.  It is not, as Gance had wished, a film that illuminates a path to Utopia.  Rather, it is one that warns us against false prophets - particularly those who resort to playing the fear card to achieve their misguided political objectives.  It is they who are the real threat mankind faces, not rogue comets from the other side of the galaxy.

Film Synopsis

The astronomer Martial Novalic is horrified when he discovers that a comet is on a collision course with planet Earth.  With only 114 days to impact, Martial sets about trying to alert humanity to the encroaching disaster, but his efforts are frustrated by the unscrupulous stockholder Schomburg, who hopes to capitalise on an impending war between the major powers.  Coincidentally, Martial's brother, the poet and actor Jean Novalic, has foreseen the apocalypse, but no one paid any attention to his lunatic ravings.  With his brother confined to an asylum, Martial commits himself to creating a new World Republic in which all the nations of the world are united in peace, on the off-chance that mankind may survive the collision with the comet.  Once the comet becomes visible, order begins to break down across the globe.  Whilst some pray for a miracle, others abandon themselves to the pleasures of the flesh.  Meanwhile, the comet comes ever closer, bringing death and devastation in its wake...