Igrom slučaja, pre par dana sam pročitao ovaj tekst iz London Review of Books.
The year before the Costa Concordia fell on its side and killed 32 people, it starred in a movie. Godard’s Film socialisme has gambling and a brunch buffet, frantic disco, the banter of history, vanished gold, Palestine. Shot on HD, the footage transforms the enormous cruise liner into something mythical – dazzling, clean, massive, magnificent. There is the brilliant blue and rich yellow of its broad glossy decks and gigantic smokestack. The sparkling white of its bulk, and the white froth of its glorious wake. The ship is the dream, the passengers its dreamers. In one scene, Alain Badiou gives a talk on Husserl and geometry to an empty lecture hall on the ship, as if Badiou, too, is dreaming: the philosopher who doesn’t notice that there is no audience (or who understands that he is awake while others sleep, and can do nothing to rouse them). Godard’s film is divided into three parts. The first and third take place on the Concordia, but the third also interjects, into the ports at which the Concordia stops, historic newsreel and film images. When the ship arrives in Naples, Godard quotes, unattributed, Curzio Malaparte’s novel The Skin: ‘The plague had broken out in Naples on 1 October 1943.’ The plague is the Americans, who arrived that day, along with their American freedom, the presence or promise of which turns every woman, Malaparte chides, into a prostitute, and every man into a scheming wretch. The Skin celebrates, perversely and relentlessly, the desperation of Neapolitans, their double-edged gratitude to their American ‘liberators’. Naples, Malaparte declares, ‘the only city in the world that did not founder in the colossal shipwreck of ancient civilisation’, has survived only to face genuine ruin when the Americans arrive with their health, cheer, clean morals, tight-fitting uniforms and deep contradictions. But as Godard shows us, in his majestic views of the Concordia as an unearthly, glistening iceberg, pure and whole, the plague can be beautiful.
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by Somlói Galuska Sat Jan 31, 2015 5:48 pm