A Murder of Crows

Abstract

“A Murder of Crows” pivots on Vincent van Gogh’s late painting Wheatfield with Crows, apocryphally known as the artists “suicide note,” which has been cited in relation to the Nazi concentration camp system in Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog and Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du Cinema. Tracking the afterlife of van Gogh’s auspicious birds as a retroactive trace of an event that their inscription anteceded by half a century, the chapter shows how the skein of crows operate according to the convoluted logic of Warburg’s pathosformel. In Godard’s videographic archaeology of the moving image, the telltale flock of crows ultimately emerges as an elementary form for the shadows coming to life on the screens and battlefields of the last century, as well as an elegiac reminder of the unfulfilled promises of cinema itself.