Scenes in a Library: Alain Resnais and Toute la mémoire du monde

Steven Ungar

doi:10.1353/sub.2012.0019

The films in this larger set include Aubervilliers (Eli Lotar, 1945), Paris 1900 (Nicole Védrès, 1947), Le Sang des bêtes (Georges Franju, 1949), Hôtel des Invalides (Franju, 1952), Les Statues meurent aussi (Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Dimanche à Pékin (Marker, 1956), Lettre de Sibérie (Marker, 1957) Moi, un Noir (Jean Rouch, 1957), L'Opéra Mouffe (Agnès Varda, 1958), Chronique d'un été (Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961), and Le Joli mai (Marker, 1962). Since the sole film Vigo cited in 1930 was Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's 1928 Un Chien andalou, the social cinema he had in mind should not be equated with instances of cinéma engagé such as Jean Renoir's La Vie est à nous (1936), commissioned by the French Communist Party at the height of the Popular Front mobilization (Buchsbaum). (Three years later, Hiroshima mon amour was screened hors compétition at Cannes because festival officials claimed that its perspective on the atomic bombing might damage Franco-American relations.) Among the exchanges surrounding Nuit et brouillard, a March 27, 1956 letter to the State Secretary of Industry and Commerce from the Cannes Festival's chief delegate, Robert Favre le Bret, disclosed the mix of commercial and diplomatic issues at stake in its exclusion from regular competition at Cannes: [Nuit et Brouillard] is a film that personally moved me deeply and that deserves to be widely distributed, but [. . .] it is contrary to the very spirit of the Festival and would above all open the door to other evocations or positions that would completely deform this event by making it a field of passionate arguments, which it is necessary at all costs to avoid if the Festival is to subsist. Sitting at my place in the reading room, said Austerlitz, I thought at length about the way in which such unforeseen accidents, the fall of a single creature to its death when diverted from its natural path, or the recurrent symptoms of paralysis affecting the electronic data retrieval system, relate to the Cartesian overall plan of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and I came to the conclusion that in any project we design and develop, the size and degree of complexity of the information and the control systems inscribed in it are the crucial factors, so that the all-embracing and absolute perfection of the concept can in practice coincide, indeed ultimately must coincide, with its chronic dysfunction and constitutional instability. [First published in 1946 as L'Univers concentrationnaire] Rousso, Henry.

Scenes in a Library: Alain Resnais and Toute la mémoire du monde

View Online

Abstract

Details

Metrics