It has emerged that the Costa Concordia, the vessel that ran aground last week, had a recent role in a prominent art film. Brave souls who endured Jean Luc-Godard's recent film Socialismewill recall the lengthy sequences (some apparently shot on a camera phone) in which characters wandered puzzlingly about a huge cruise ship. That was, indeed, the doomed vessel.

Given that the ship seems to have been some sort of metaphor for western capitalism, its eventual fate surely kicks up all kinds of extraordinary resonances.