To celebrate the launch of Living in the End Times by Slavoj Žižek, commonly known as “the Elvis of cultural theory,” independent UK culture magazine Little White Lies launched a creative challenge inviting filmmakers to submit short films responding to Žižek’s theory of the end times, based on the “four horsemen of the apocalypse”: Ecology (impending ecological catastrophes), Economy (the global financial meltdown), Biology (the biogenetic revolution and its impact on human identity), and Society (social divisions leading to the explosion of protest and revolutions worldwide.)

This one-minute entry by filmmaker Temujin Doran (remember him?) uses archival footage from the Prelinger Archives, one of the finest repositories of public domain films, to deliver a condensed, powerful and unsettling account of the present and vision for the future, somewhere between Vonnegut’s Armageddon in Retrospect and Richard Horney’s A is for Armageddon: An Illustrated Catalogue of Disasters.

Now, quick, scramble for an antidote with An Optimist’s Tour of the Future.