"The photographs of Eugène Atget document the ghostly residues of a Paris on the verge of disappearance. Typically devoid of people or other signs of life, Atget's images capture desolate and seemingly unremarkable urban locations-an empty street, an enigmatic building-that seem pregnant with some kind of meaning, but obstinately refuse to disclose it. These were locations that would soon be wiped out by the urban modernization of the city initiated by Georges-Eugène Haussmann, which replaced sections of old Paris with wide boulevards."
"In Jafar Panahi's most recent film, It Was Just an Accident, a city's seemingly banal locales are similarly reframed as sites of some terribly important yet elusive meaning. But here, what invests the quotidian with portending significance is sound. On the outskirts of Tehran, a car mechanic opens up his garage late at night for a stranded traveler whose car has broken down."
Eugène Atget's photographs record deserted Parisian locations on the verge of disappearance, capturing empty streets and buildings that imply meaning yet refuse disclosure. Haussmann's modernization soon erased many of these sites. Walter Benjamin likened Atget's scenes to crime scenes photographed to establish evidence. Jafar Panahi's film It Was Just an Accident reframes banal urban locales as portentous sites where sound functions as contested proof. A squeaking prosthetic leg in the film becomes the central, disputed evidence linking a stranded traveler to past torture, turning ordinary spaces into arenas of accusation, memory, and uncertain justice.
Read at The Nation
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