There’s something about image that strikes deeper chords than description and memory can allow. It’s almost as if image has the capacity to unite both, the narrative of memory and the experience of remembering. It can happen when looking at old family photographs, or old film footage, but those have very precise personal connections. It becomes much more engaging when it happens with objects, and the car in particular.

It’s something that film can do that no other medium can quite achieve. Seeing an old car that one’s mother drove in another time is a very pronounced kind of nostalgia. The memory of that car can’t be preserved in personal memory, and even trying to re-create that same car in the contemporary world doesn’t have the same effect. Finding the right interior, matching the wheels with cheap rims can bring it back to life, but it’s always somehow new again. Seeing it in motion, on video, in another era, makes a statement that somehow moves far beyond words.

That is the effect that has caught the imagination of some of the best filmmakers. Trying to re-create nostalgia is a rather difficult thing, and it needs a very light and sure touch. In terms of pure nostalgia, Godard was and is undoubtedly the best at it. In some of his earliest films, there is almost the sense that he invented how people think about nostalgia today, at least in terms of image. The cars in “Breathless are not simply vehicles for the characters, but they are also vehicles for memory.

In the same way that his characters are made up of quotations of what a human being might be, the cars in his films have an ironic presence. They are always perfect, as if already represented, almost looking as though they have an awareness of their own cool factor. It is this sense of immediate nostalgia that gives his films a peculiar distance. The viewer becomes aware of time passing, and everything is subject to memory and reflection. Instead of finding a way back into the past, one could buy cheap tires for sale and put them on their vehicle right after the film is over. There would still be a sense that this has already happened, and look entirely stylish in the process. The car becomes a composite of possibilities, in the same way that human identities are made up of enormous distances between past and present, and even a recording on film won’t preserve the essence, only approximate it.

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