CRASSH

The moving image should be the perfect vehicle for conveying loss. As a substitute for the real it is, by its very nature, both testimony to what is no longer there and a visible, material trace of that absence. Ideally, therefore, the moving image holds us in a permanent tension between the unutterable pain of loss and the substantiation of that pain in utterable form, allowing loss and absence to be the shadow haunting (and hence forestalling) any temporary and fetishised closure of meaning. Post-war films by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker (Les Statues meurent aussi, 1953; Nuit et brouillard, 1955; Hiroshima mon amour, 1959; La Jetée, 1962; Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour, 1963) - which, following Jean Cayrol’s notion of ‘concentrationary art’, constitute what one might call concentrationary cinema - achieve this tension in exemplary fashion. But has the concentrationary image central to these films (which so moved the critic Serge Daney that he saw it as an essential element of cinema) been swept away in recent times by the glut of overly-aestheticised and sensationalist images, leaving no space for loss (and mourning) to take place? Or does the moving image still have the power to create that concentrationary ambivalence in an age of visual overdose? This paper will consider the relationship between the concentrationary image and loss in the films mentioned above and offer some hope that new technologies and the over-abundance of images today do not necessarily mean the death of Daney’s vision of cinema.