The Sense of an Ending: Culture, Capital, and the Fate of (Late) Modern Europe in Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate (1999)

Abstract

As the imaginary deadline or vanishing point of the turn of millennium was drawing ever closer, its associated anxieties and apocalyptic woes offered a fertile breeding ground for suspense, horror, and the fantastic to experience a resurgence in Western cinemas. Roman Polanski’s fifteenth feature film The Ninth Gate, released in 1999, can be read among the various auteur-helmed evidences of such a trend, but also as a self-conscious exercise in the kind of trans-European filmmaking being promoted at the time within the continent, one in which Polanski himself had, willingly or not, already been cutting his teeth for almost two decades after his spiteful return from the US and Hollywood in the late 1970s. On the back of a border-crossing journey in search for three demonic books, this essay will argue, The Ninth Gate manages to discursively interlace both facets. The result, by way of an intermedial concern with the world of literature, a generic involvement with the supernatural, and a meticulous mobilization of cinematic space, location shooting and architecture, is a cynical, self-deprecating reflection on the precarious state of Europe at the time, caught between the memories of glorious but long-fading splendor and a crippling uncertainty about its future and place in an increasingly globalized world.

Keywords:

• Roman Polanski
• film studies
• transnationalism
• globalization
• European cinema
• horror cinema

Acknowledgements

The writing of this article was made possible by a doctoral scholarship from the Spanish Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad (research project FFI2013-43968-P). I would like to thank Celestino Deleyto, Maria del Mar Azcona, William Brown and Ewa Mazierska for their help, suggestions, and encouragement at the various stages of the writing of this piece, as well as my friends and colleagues at the English and Film Studies research program at the University of Zaragoza for all the films, travels, and beers together.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.