The Crystal Ship:

Lisbon as Lazarean City after The Impossible

Abstract

For a city historically marked by a tsunami, the film “The Impossible” (J.A. Bayona, 2012) reclaims its crystal-image. It is with the crash of the great wave of the 2004 earthquake that the trauma of the 1755 earthquake that devastated Lisbon is reactivated. Lazarean city, it now haunts the space between the actual and the virtual, between survival and loss. It is the wreckage — including that of memory — that condemns us to drift within the crystal-image of this harbour city, we inhabitants turned passengers aboard what Deleuze called “the ship of the dead.”
The hand drew — the wave, the map, and the flooded interiors reminiscent of the phantasmagoric uncanniness of Max Ernst’s “Une semaine de bonté.” And the printer printed — these are the crystal-images of The Impossible, when in the operating room the survivor Maria sinks into the memory of the shipwreck of her living-dead body.
Drawing and reprinting are the methods that plastically sustain this visual essay, alongside the principle of montage, which situates the crystal-image in its affinity with the anachronism of Benjamin’s “dialectical image.” The Jetztzeit here is the experience of floating indefinitely between a disaster that has occurred and its possible recurrence.