“An End Without End: Catastrophic Cinema in the Age of Crisis”
Evan Calder Williams

Williams' essay was published in 2010 at Mute

The particularity of cinema in the age of crisis is in how viewers relate to it. It isn't those imagined trajectories of the world order's collapse that is particular to crisis, but the desperate searching itself. So for us to call for an apocalyptic cinema is to call solely for a combative, striving post-apocalyptic stance in relation to the catastrophe that is contemporary capitalism and its films. It is in the degree to which we neither sit and weep because Daddy is dying nor drool because everything is illuminated, but rather start to sift, sort, and scrap, to ask what we can use and what should be rejected in full. A post-apocalyptic cinema is not a kind of film: it is a kind of space, an urgent diagonal cut to be made across the futile stagnancy of the day, a reclamation of the ruins, a refusal that neither flees nor abandons.

—Evan Calder Williams, "An End Without End"