August Blom - Verdens Undergang [The End of the World] (1916)

Verdens Undergang (1916)

English title: The End of the World

Danish/Silent/Black & White
Released in Denmark, 1916

Directed by August Blom.

Written by Otto Rung. 
Based on the novel La Fin du Monde by Camille Flammarion.

Cast:

Olaf Fønss...Frank Stoll - Mine Owner

Carl Lauritzen...Mineformand/Mine Forman West

Ebba Thomsen...Dina West

Johanne Fritz-Petersen...Edith West

Thorleif Lund...Minearbejder/Worker Flint

Alf Blütecher...Styrmand/Ship's Mate Reymers

Frederik Jacobsen...Den vandrende Prædikant/The Wandering Preacher

K. Zimmerman...Professor Wissmann

Moritz Bielawski...(uncredited)

Erik Holberg...(uncredited) 

 

A comet, passing by the earth, causes rioting, social unrest, and major disasters that destroy the world in this World War I-era film.

Scifist at Wordpress writes: 

"Danish August Blom is unfortunately one of those early film pioneers that don’t get much recognition these days. If remembered, it is chiefly for Atlantis, his ambitious film about the sinking of a large passenger ship – released in 1913, just a year after Titanic had gone down. Among film buffs he has a reputation for developing the genre of the erotic melodrama, and for being an early pioneer for cross-cutting of scenes for dramatic effect. Among fans of sci-fi, though, he is remembered for making the first post-apocalyptic science fiction film, Verdens Undergang, or The End of the World, made in 1916.

If Atlantis can be faulted for something, it’s that we never get a shot of the actual sinking of the ship, or even decks filling with water. One moment she is floating perfectly straight while people climb into life boats, in the next shot only the stern protrudes above the water line. Blom did not make the same mistake in The End of the World, depicting a comet brushing the Earth. Here we get superbly exciting scenes of burning meteorites scorching the landscape, houses on fire, explosions and water flooding buildings with people inside. With this film, Blom has captured an apocalyptic event on a truly epic scale, and the films deserves at least as good a reputation as Atlantis.

But this is no simple crash boom bang film, on the contrary. The director’s trademark was inhabiting his films with a multitude of characters, all involved in intricate plots. 

 Nevertheless, apart from a bit lackluster direction in the beginning of the film, it is as a whole quite beautifully filmed and the special effects of the apocalypse are simply stunning. Somehow Blom manages to rain burning bits of meteorite over a whole village (they used burning ”sparks”, presumably magnesium or some other highly flammable material) and creates large scale explosions and fires. In one scene he completely floods the set, with a woman sitting on top of a table. Andafter the disaster we get some absurdly haunting pictures of an actual flooded village, and a whole row of actually burned down buildings – those are not sets, that is clear. The post apocalyptic scenes on the southern sand dunes of Denmark are also quite beautiful.

The film itself was partly inspired by the passing of Halley’s comet six years earlier, and the onset of WWI created a need to tackle the war traumas in an abstract way. The war also plays as a background (though never mentioned in the film) for the moral tale, albeit a generic moral tale: greed is bad, power corrupts, and the humble and pious ones will prevail. Another significant theme is the class struggle, inspired by the rise of socialism and worker’s unions in Europe. Although August Blom clearly throws the bourgeois in a very bad light, he isn’t very kind on the raving hordes of revolutionaries, either. The betrayed fiancée is a grudge-holding, revenge-seeking and aggressive man who channels his own anger into a destructive and futile war against the rich, ultimately leading only to death and sorrow. Be content with your place in life, seems to be the moral punchline."