I have wanted to see Abel Gance’s La fin du monde (1931) — one of the first talking pictures made in France — ever since I first read about it while researching an article on apocalyptic movies for Christian History magazine back in 1998.
The film concerns a comet that is heading for Earth, and it reportedly has a fair bit of religious imagery, too. But it has never been available on video, to my knowledge — at least not in North America — despite its similarities to recent disaster-from-space movies like Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998; my review); it also seems to have inspired Guy Maddin‘s excellent retro-silent short film The Heart of the World (2000).
So imagine my joy when The ScreenGrab provided a link to this site which allows you to download a copy of Gance’s film here. There’s just one problem. The film is in French, and the subtitles are in Italian, and I don’t speak either of those languages.
Oh well, hopefully I can get by on the visuals, and on what little I remember of my high-school French. (Which isn’t much.)
UPDATE: Apparently Turner Classic Movies does sell a DVD of the 54-minute version of this film that was released in the United States. The version linked above is about 90 minutes.
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