This story belongs to a friend of a friend of a friend, one of those other people who you pass every day without recognizing.

She was on a motorbike. She was crossing an intersection. And then she was caught under a truck somehow, being dragged across the asphalt with the bike sparking beside her. Two paramedic students, who happened to be passing at the time, attended to her body. The news crew arrived and filed the report of her death. The truck and carnage was in the background of the shot no doubt, just out of focus. The reporter would have been standing beside the road looking ruffled, kindly, saddened, urgent.

Except that she wasn’t dead.

The ambulance arrived eventually and she lived, against all odds. Some weeks after that, while she was recovering, she received a package. I don’t know how it arrived, perhaps through a friend of a friend of a friend. It was a DVD. She watches it at every opportunity now. And yet no one else shares the intensity of her fascination. They find it too difficult, too eerie. It’s the news report that never went to air, the story of her death.

In 2002, while the Hungarian writer Imre Kertesz was preparing his Nobel Prize Lecture, he received a large brown envelope in the mail. The letter had been sent to him by the director of the Buchenwald Memorial Centre, the concentration camp where Kertesz arrived, in 1945 at the age of sixteen. Contained within the envelope was a copy of the original camp report from that day, February 18th. In one of the columns, Kertesz was able to read about the death of prisoner #64,921 – factory worker, born 1927. Kertesz had made himself two years older, so that he wouldn’t be classified as a child, and had given his occupation as “worker” rather than student in order to “appear more useful to them.” The war ended before he was able to fulfill the Nazi prophecy.

It would be too easy, as Kertesz himself realizes, to draw from these stories, some belief in an otherworldly order, in some sort of providence, or “metaphysical justice.” To do so, would be to sever “the deep and tortuous ties with the millions who perished and who never knew mercy. But if we are destined to be exceptions”, Kertesz continues, “we must make our peace with the absurd order of chance, which reigns over our lives with the whim of a death squad, exposing us to inhuman powers, monstrous tyrannies.”

Thinking of these stories, I think also, though aslant, almost inappropriately I know, of Tom Ford’s recent, somewhat overrated film, A Single Man, and how, in the face of his immanent suicide, the main character’s world acquires again the colour and smell of miracle. For less than a day, he lives like an angel, drenched in the last beauty of things, in the toxic Californian luminosity. In one particular scene, he stops a woman on the street, so that he can smell the ears of her small dog, a smell that reminds him of buttered toast.

I can understand that desire to watch and re-watch the scene of my own death. I can imagine it becoming an obsession, the desire to feel the drug of its liberation as often as possible – that uncanny trick of time, and the taste of coffee perhaps, since I would watch it over breakfast, and drink coffee that I shouldn’t be able to taste, in the wash of morning sun that I shouldn’t be able to feel washed by.

The privilege which Kertesz shares with this motorbike survivor, is the tangible evidence of his own miraculousness. While the rest of us, survivors in our own less cataclysmic manner, and without the adamancy of such proof, must find our own ways to die, our own ways, every morning, to get reborn.

A woman came into the shop yesterday and admitted to being a Virgo. Even though she was aching to read the final installment in Steig Larsson’s absurdly successful Millennium Trilogy, the size of the current trade-paperback was putting her off. The thought of having a third book on her shelf, which didn’t match the size of the first two, was overwhelming. She’d rather starve.

My own father, also a recovering Virgo, toiled similarly under the tyrannical reign of such extreme orderliness. You could hear him the whole length of the house away, restacking the dishwasher and swearing at the recklessness of our original design – the sheer idiocy of the way in which we’d placed the special ceramic cups next to the saucepans, the single-bloody-minded blasphemy of our plate order. In the garden outside, the pegs on the clothes-line were colour-coordinated – red red, yellow yellow, blue blue etc and the cracks between the bricks were cleaned of moss and other non linear, rhizomatic forms of rebellion, no exaggeration, with a small metal implement made painstakingly in the garage for just such a purpose. It was a way he had of keeping chaos in order, a way that brings to my mind the orderly rows of human bodies we tend to line up after some shocking disaster. Lists and straight lines render the terror, at least in part, manageable.

For many years, especially the ones during which I was listening to a lot of Rage Against The Machine, my father represented an absurd order, against which I was waging chaos. (I must have been reading Lacan at the time, if I remember correctly, because I also spent inordinate periods of time looking at myself in the mirror.) We inherit the world of our parents, after all, and it takes about 15 years or so before we realize what a mess they’ve made of it, what a diabolical system of stupidities and inequalities they’ve abided, and abetted and bequeathed.

Two films reminded me recently of this enduring and universal tension between fathers and sons, between the order, which "The Father" represents, and the chaos, which his literal replacement, "The son", promises. These divisions are by nature, reversible, of course. The Father’s order weakens upon closer examination and is revealed as chaos. It is The Son, so to speak, who must teach him the new order.

Not long after Hugo Weaving was the voice of an evil robot / car, in Transformers, he became Kev, a struggling father and thug in Glendyn Ivin’s wonderful, Last Ride, a film which disappeared somehow without a trace, and without winning every single Australian film prize, for which it seemed destined. The ride in question is a desperate lurch through South Australia, undertaken by Kev and his young son Chook in a series of stolen cars, while the forces of consequence and disaster gather and close on them. Kev, charged with the job of protecting and teaching his young son, struggles against his own erratic cruelty, even repeating in one sublimely terrifying scene, the vicious methods of his own father, by abandoning Chook in the middle of a salt lake.

The Road, John Hillcoat’s rendering of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, might be viewed in this context as an auspicious companion to Last Ride, it’s strange mirror. The road tells, similarly, the story of a father and son who travel across a bleak, beautifully rendered desolation toward nothing really.

According to the historian and sociologist Theodore Zeldin, Humanity’s job has always been to produce more humanity. To begin with, this was a matter of numbers – of survival and procreation. Gradually, it has become a question of dignity, of humaneness. Amidst the chaos, these films ask by extension, how do we find ways to order our most noble impulses, to institutionalize dignity, to extend, even by a little the amount of goodness in an already broken world bequeathed to us by the previous generation?

At the end of his book, Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino, proposes one such possibility:

“Learn and seek to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Fritz Lang’s Metropolis played last night at the Astor, twice – once on the main screen and once, simultaneously, as a cropped reflection in the glass cabinet where the emergency fire hose is kept.

From its inception, cinema was obsessed with its own creation, with the miraculous production of itself, the reproduction of life. It rehearsed this infatuation, subliminally in part I think, through the character of the toiling scientist, the scientist driven half mad by his own brilliance, and by the scientist’s bastard offspring, his mirror – the monster or robot.

Cinema, of course, was one among many new technologies, which were rapidly changing the world. Amongst these early filmmakers, there is a noticeable ambivalence, towards the uncertainty of this technological future, and toward their own part in its conception. The scientist is driven mad by his God-like power; his hubris and his narcissism are his downfall.

This obsession with the scientist is, more accurately, an identification with the chemist, with his concoctions and innumerable steaming beakers, and thus naturally with alchemy. No doubt this has everything to do, also, with the original process by which photographic images were drawn out from their chemical baths in the dark room. Early cinema can be thought of, in fact, as the literal reenactment of this process – the revelation of images, by some miraculous process, to those gathered in a dark room.

Behind cinema, like its shadow, stands the anatomy lesson of history, the revelation not of life, but of death. The scientist who unveils his robot, his monster, reinterprets the scene in which the physician unveiled the inner workings of the human body.

Watching Metropolis, you realize how dramatically the early film-makers actually defined the genre, how different film would have been without them. When Guy Madden made his brilliant silent film Brand upon the Brain! in 2006, he drew upon this history of scientific obsession, to create a portrait of his own father as a mad scientist, forever toiling underground, cooking up potions made with the brain-sap he collected from orphans. And in Victor Erice’s 1973 masterpiece, The Spirit of the Beehive, 6-year-old Ana, too young to understand the distinction between fact and fiction, becomes obsessed with Frankenstein’s Monster, believing him to be a sort of spirit. Which is what photography, and by extension cinema is after all, a second self, a sort of spirit, cut from life or risen from death.

The other day I found this photograph (here), one of the first ever taken. The man’s name was Robert Cornelius and the year was 1839, yet it feels like it could have been yesterday. It’s like looking at a spirit, or the atom from which cinema was born.