Transits essayistic thinking at the junctures of images in harun farocki’s respite and arnaud des pallières’s drancy avenir

This chapter argues that interrogate memory, testimony, narrative, representation and specific elements of audiovisual communication, filmic language and the essay form. It considers two films: Harun Farocki’s Respite and Arnaud des Pallieres’s Drancy Avenir. The concepts of ‘lacuna-image’ and of dialectical montage are particularly germane to Farocki’s Respite. Respite offers a form of thinking that does not aspire to totality and seamlessness, but whose strength is entirely in the (dis)junctures of verbal and visual montage. The sequence of the lecture is programmatic, inasmuch as Drancy Avenir is profoundly informed by Benjamin’s ideas on history and on the dialectical image. Images of trains and shots from trains and other vehicles are central to Drancy Avenir. Precisely like Respite, Drancy Avenir demonstrates that filmic essays are not just about the verbal; film thinks cinematically, via dialectical montage, but also by mobilizing utterly distinctive textual and communicative strategies.