‘World his­tory is noth­ing else than a rep­e­ti­tion of cat­a­stro­phes wait­ing for a final cat­a­stro­phe.‘
Bly me!

Dur­ing the begin­ning of the ethe­real yet gritty doc­u­men­tary Apoc­a­lypse Accord­ing to Cio­ran (1995), the exceed­ingly morose quote “World his­tory is noth­ing else than a rep­e­ti­tion of cat­a­stro­phes wait­ing for a final cat­a­stro­phe” appears on the screen among real war scenes of death and destruc­tion. Those famil­iar with Roman­ian philoso­pher Emil Cio­ran’s work will be any­thing but sur­prised by the quote, but for the ini­ti­ated, such a quote might seem a tad bit mis­an­thropic. Also dur­ing the intro­duc­tion, Cio­ran makes an appear­ance with his headed tilted down and with his hands cov­er­ing his head, is in his typ­i­cal and vir­tu­ally life­long state of despair; a cursed gift that enabled the Romanian-turned-unenthusiastic-Frenchman philoso­pher to write a num­ber of books that are often con­sid­ered the last great philo­soph­i­cal works of the Occident.

Cio­ran has been described as the “King of pes­simists”; no doubt a title that he deserves as he both wrote and prac­ticed his dis­dain for liv­ing for most of his adult life like no man before nor after him. In the film Apoc­a­lypse Accord­ing to Cio­ran, fel­low Roman­ian philoso­pher (of a later gen­er­a­tion) Gabriel Liiceanu (who also wrote a book on his elder) vis­ited Cio­ran dur­ing his last year on earth at his hum­ble apart­ment in Paris, France; a city the Roman­ian philoso­pher had been liv­ing in since a self-imposed exile 53 years ear­lier and described as an “Apoc­a­lyp­tic Garage.”

Cio­ran would spend his nights wide awake. In fact, in Apoc­a­lypse Accord­ing to Cio­ran, Cio­ran cites insom­nia as the unwanted inspi­ra­tion that sparked his despair and irreg­u­lar­ity; the two uncom­fort­able states that would help develop and fine tune the prowess of his poetic pes­simistic phi­los­o­phy. As Cio­ran explains in the doc­u­men­tary, insom­nia stirs lucid­ness and con­flict in the suf­ferer, hence­forth cre­at­ing a wholly atyp­i­cal and con­flict­ing per­spec­tive in the individual.

Dur­ing his youth, Cio­ran made a mor­bid hobby of col­lect­ing human skulls and using them as soc­cer balls, which is indu­bitably a purely coin­ci­den­tal metaphor for his pes­simistic yet often humor­ous and strangely joy­ful writ­ings. Nat­u­rally, prophets of doom tend to have a dis­tinct and refined sense of humor for such indi­vid­u­als would find life totally unbear­able if they were unable to find amuse­ment in things that also hap­pen to be stab­bing at their lost souls on a 24 hour basis. As he makes bluntly clear in Apoc­a­lypse Accord­ing to Cio­ran, futil­ity and death are the two themes that can be found in all of Cioran’s works and have haunted the unro­man­tic Roman­ian for most of his life.

Apoc­a­lypse Accord­ing to Cio­ran fea­tures a sound­track rem­i­nis­cent of the score fea­tured in Herk Har­vey’s sur­re­al­ist hor­ror mas­ter­piece Car­ni­val of Souls (1962) which might sound strange to those read­ing this review but it is undoubt­edly noth­ing short of com­pli­men­tary when con­sid­er­ing the real-life hor­rors and despair Cio­ran lived and wrote about on a day-to-day basis.

As one would expect from a doc­u­men­tary about Cio­ran, Apoc­a­lypse Accord­ing to Cio­ran is not an embar­rass­ingly emo­tional sen­ti­men­tal­ist look at the nihilist priest but a com­pli­men­tary cel­e­bra­tion of his rel­a­tively unevent­ful life and irre­place­able work.