Juror #2, Here and Oh, Canada, respectively by Eastwood, Zemeckis and Schrader and also Cronenberg’s The Shrouds remind us that we still are inside cinema, or rather inside the Nineteenth Century’s Frankenstein complex: recreation of life, a symbolic triumph over death (Burch, La lucarne de l’infini). Frankenstein’s myth is cinematic: the dream of life triumphing over death, of a constant mutation which reproduces life, as does Vertov’s kino-eye, questioning and exceeding the human eye’s representation to establish a new vision in virtue of the technological dispositif, that is cinema, surely analog cinema. The question (also Jean-Luc Godard’s) which is opened (and is also staged by many films, “auteur” and “popular” ones alike, from Wenders’ Bis ans Ende der Welt (1991) to Neveldine and Taylor’s 2009 Gamer) can only be: which horizons are revealed or what life is reproduced by a representation that is not only digital but cyborg, connected to satellites, to portable devices linked to other eyes and other bodies and a multitude of other devices? Which also means: how do we avert the danger of reducing to mere representation (and therefore not to sense) the genocide taking place in Gaza? The stakes, like in Jeanne Dielman (released fifty years ago), have to do with breaching the mode of production of representations. 

The cinema we are interested in is that material and immaterial body that is the analogon of thought (this is the reason we are devoting a special to Cronenberg’s film and are preparing a dossier of Kamal Aljafari’s cinema), of a corporeal thought, capable of feeling and suffering, even at a distance; an absence that makes the present; those bodies in Gaza are there and resist, into images here; and a presence that refers to an absence: those images are here because they are bodies there; bodies that suffer and produce suffering and response.

We want nothing to do with the Schiffbruch mit Zuschauer and the lucretian iocunda voluptas, with solid security of land as opposed to the raging sea – that the apologist of the magnifiche e sorti progressive call sustainability (that which in times of crisis reproduces capitalism, its injustices, its contradictions, its wars). 

Vous êtes embarqué! Pascal shakes us from our pleasure, that which Hal Foster called “fascist” speaking of the spectatorial consumption of images of the First Gulf War: that which contemplates from far away. Land is not still anymore, but it is not enough to suffer with those others that the sea violently returns to land, dissolving their solidity. Like the brave ones that embarked towards Gaza, we do not solely need to get busy making the Lesbarkeit der Welt more interesting, as Blumenberg suggests, but also to interrupt the course of the world and the continuum of spectatorship and that which Stiegler calls “misère symbolique”, taking the risk of foundering or maybe letting the sommersi of history finally be salvati.

T.D.

Translated by Elisa Mancioli