“The Passenger”: An Image Extracted from Mud
Adam Cichoń
a.cichon@al.uw.edu.plUniversity of Warsaw (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2707-9914
Abstract
At the fiftieth anniversary of the premiere of Andrzej Munk’s The Passenger, Tadeusz Lubelski said that for Jean-Luc Godard, this was the best war film ever directed. Although it would be difficult to find documents confirming these words, the author of the article decided to rethink this statement and answer the question why The Passenger could be considered as the best war film. In so doing, the author attempts to perform the “work of imagination” which Didi-Huberman proposed as a method of fight against “the unimaginable”, a fight which is always undertaken “in spite of all”. In this article, the premises of Didi-Huberman’s method and Benjamin’s historical materialism are used to rethink montage in The Passenger. This work is a unique example of a film finished after the death of its author. The unusual montage used in The Passenger invites reflection about the trauma of image. At the same time, it is an exceptional testimony of image extracted from the mud of “the unimaginable”, an image saved from oblivion.
Keywords:
Andrzej Munk, Jean-Luc Godard, Georges Didi-Huberman, trauma, unimaginable, Polish cinemaReferences
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Authors
Adam Cichońa.cichon@al.uw.edu.pl
University of Warsaw Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2707-9914
PhD student at the Faculty of “Artes Liberales” at the University of Warsaw. He received his MA in Philosophy from the University of Warsaw. He is currently working on his PhD dissertation, which focuses on the expression in Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of cinema. He takes an interdisciplinary approach that encompasses the fields of philosophy, film studies and aesthetics.
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Copyright (c) 2021 Adam Cichoń
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