The visions of apocalypse in cinema: the philosophical presuppositions of the banal genre

The article is a continuation of the considerations for first time announced in “How is film philosophy possible?”, the article published in “Problemos”. The discussion of the presuppositions of film philosophy as a peculiar way to analyze cinema now leads to a philosophical interpretation of a mass culture phenomenon apocalyptic movies. The article shows that an apocalyptic film could be treated as a reproductionof the fixed cliché, a mythological structure or a phenomenon determined by various cultural, social and historic contexts. It is presupposed that apocalyptic film is determined mostly by the concept of time. In an apocalypse film, two types of events, “small” and “big”, are usually distinguished. In the “small” events, the everyday time reigns, while the “big” events are the domain of the global apocalyptic time of the end. The plot of an apocalyptic film is based on the transition from everyday to global disasters and attempts to restore the everyday order of “small” events. Analyzing this type of the plot structure, the time of the everyday and the time of the apocalypse are treated as general contexts which determine and transform the field of the apparently banal genre