Not Passed over in Silence

I had planned to talk about “the ethics of the tracking shot,” my already misremembered version of a Jean-Luc Godard quote. Allan Resnais's Hiroshima Mon Amour had been the assigned film for my undergraduate cinema studies class, and to connect the Resnais film with the Godard quote—actually, “tracking shots are a question of morality”—was the plan. And why such a plan? I think the hope was to inaugurate a dialogue about the ethics of catastrophe, of trauma; of how one finds an ethical position for the human subject against the ground of disaster. As I look at it now I already see my unconscious process collaborating with the serendipity of my syllabus spooling out together over the course of the semester. All in all, if this panned out, it was to be something of a brilliant recovery for my jangled self. Having taught the class many times over the years, there was a degree of autopilot involved. I could work, I told myself, if I had to, without notes, in fact without any of the paraphernalia of teaching—notes, computer, pens, laptop, pencils, thumb drive, back-up hard drive, books, book bag, roster, manila folders, binder clips, Xeroxes, reading glasses, or wrist watch. Such was to be the actuality for this class where I corralled Godard, as the interlocutor, with Resnais on trauma. On October 28, 2012, at around 8:11 PM, Hurricane Sandy's surge had delivered in excess of four feet of water into my Jersey City ground-floor apartment. The foregoing list of all possible materials for teaching and pretty much any other practice in life was gone, floating away—or sinking down—in the Hudson River and the Morris Canal. I waded chest deep in water—and whatever else was in the water from explosively backed up sewer pipes—as I tried, over the course of about eight minutes (that is approximately how long it took the water to fill the room), to rescue stuff, before ultimately giving up and retreating upstairs.

Godard, with his line on morality, was notoriously tossing a barbed