Left Bank Cinema: Memories of History and the Experience of Time

Vg Bijoy Philip

doi:10.12726/tjp.21.1

Abstract

In this paper, I use two films—Les Statues MeurrentAussi (Statues also Die, 1953) directed by Resnais and Marker and Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983) as representatives of Left Bank cinema to show how they construct experiences of time and memory using various modernist strategies. Key to this is the use of a mental journey genre in modernist cinema and the construction of a facial dispositif which leads to a perceptual experiencing of inner states. Les Statues MeurrentAussi is a key film in the history of French cinema as it highlights Alain Resnais’ and Chris Marker’s early commitment towards a politically avant-garde filmmaking style. The film was banned for many decades because it was highly critical of France’s colonial interests. The film is also a proof to the less emphasised collaboration between two pioneering directors and especially in their use of the essay film genre. Sans Soleil on the other hand is considered as a philosophical masterpiece because of its meditations on time and memory. In taking these two films, I hope not only to demonstrate cinema’s capability to generate affective spatio-temporal states but also to highlight a piece of film history which is often misappropriated under the tag of the French New Wave.

Highlights

Why the “Left Bank”When Richard Roud, classified Alain Resnais (1922-2014), Tattva-Journal of Philosophy, Vol 11, No.1Agnès Varda (b. 1928) and Chris Marker (1921-2012) as the Left Bank group of directors, he noted at the beginning of his article (1962) that classifications are only valuable if they tell us more about what is being classified
Marker and Varda together, and independently too, have a sizeable body of work, and enough correspondences and similarities between them to be considered an important group of film-makers with a significant intervention in cinematic history that is different from the French New Wave—the holy grail of European art cinema
The Left Bank directors never aspired for such an organized definition, and their work is best described through a series of shared aesthetic and political affinities which when put together in retrospect have made significant contributions through six decades towards answering certain fundamental questions about cinematic modernism and issues regarding a cinematic experiencing of memory, time and history

Summary

Introduction

When Richard Roud, (film critic, co-founder and director of the 1962 New York Film Festival) classified Alain Resnais (1922-2014),. Though the term Left Bank cinema evokes Marker, Resnais and Varda, in this paper I would be limiting my focus to the first two directors to demonstrate how they construct an experience of time and memory in their films through modernist stylistic techniques which lead to the fragmentation of the real. My discussion of modernism in Left Bank cinema revolves around the fragmentation of both narrative and the audio-visual textures of these films. When it comes to modernist aesthetics of self-reflexivity and fragmentation, there is no other place which is more fertile for this discussion than the essay film which is characterised by its digression from genre conventions and most importantly in its. Like the audio-visually dissociated images of modernist cinema, the essay film‘s sound and visuals have a greater tendency to remain dissociated than in documentary films which are driven by factual narration

Orphic Descent and the Facial Dispositif

Les Statues Meurrentaussi- Descent into Forgotten Histories

Sans Soleil

Conclusion