Alain Resnais Research Articles

Visualizing the unseen: Stage and screen adaptations of Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall

Samuel Beckett’s radio play All That Fall (1957) has been adapted for different media. In order to understand the challenges it poses for any form of visual representation, this article will first show how the radio play exploits the acousmatic nature of the medium and its so-called ‘blindness’. In a next step, it will discuss how the various stage performances of All That Fall have dealt with these difficulties, in light of the author’s reservations about the matter and the restrictions imposed by his estate. However, Beckett did allow French film and television versions to be made during his lifetime – respectively by Alain Resnais and Michel Mitrani, the latter for Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française (RTF). This raises questions not only about how authors and cultural contexts impact the adaptation process, but also about the aesthetic differences and historical relations between theatre and technological media, which the article will additionally probe.

EXPLORING THE INTERPLAY OF MEMORY AND POETRY IN RIVE GAUCHE CINEMA: A STUDY OF MURIEL AND HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

This article examines the interrelations between memory and poetry, focusing on the films Hiroshima mon amour and Muriel, directed by Alain Resnais. It explores how memory and poetry are intertwined in the narrative and formal construction of these films, using logical principles shared between the two fields. The analysis of fragmentation, invention and associationism present in the cinematic narratives, reveals how memory and poetry influence personal identity and artistic creation. These films serve as outstanding examples of how cinema can explore the depths of human consciousness through the conscious use of memory and poetry.

Endless Exile—Alain Resnais’s The War Is Over

This paper aims to analyze the movie The War Is Over (La guerre est finie—France/Sweden, 1966, directed by Alain Resnais and a screenplay by Jorge Semprún). The idea is to point out a possible sociological discussion on exile, mobilizing the notion of mental images. The methodological approach is an internal analysis of the film to allow for the elaboration of sociological considerations along with the expressive elements of the film construction. To do so, we shall focus on the “leaps” within the movie’s narrative order, in which a main character (Diego) anticipates, through imagination, a series of sequences and events that might or might not have occurred. To discuss the notion of mental images and their relationship with the imaginary, the theoretical reference will be Cornelius Castoriadis’ book The Imaginary Institution of Society. This article will benefit from the discussions in the presentations about the film both at meetings in Brazil and at the last ISA Congress 2023 (International Sociological Association—Research Committee 37—Sociology of Arts). This text is one of the results of research supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP).

Rupture of Body and Mind in Hiroshima Mon Amour:

Alain Resnais has devised a narrative of fractured identity, trauma, and incommunicability in Hiroshima Mon Amour. With its minimal aesthetics, intricate movement and jettisoned conventionality, the film becomes a new map for theorizations in literary, cultural, and psychoanalytic spaces. This study uses these spaces for a phenomenological inquisition of “rupture” by positioning the subjects of the narrative within them, thus creating a spectrum for identity analysis as well. By delineating the characters as fragments and totalities, it strives to provide a critical reading of trauma and the separation it postulates in the corporeal identity. Kristevan conceptualizations of “abject” and “melancholia,” Freudo-Lacanian postulation of “spatial geometry,” and Kantian “spatiality” are used as modalities for the demarcation of new narratives within literary, social,cultural, and epistemological dialectics. The study further aims to structuralize rupture as generating new cartographies of spatiality while hinging on the film’s narrative framework of storytelling through the body and the mind.

Van Gogh e o Cinema: palavras, obsessões e texturas

How does the filmmaker, in building a perspective on painting, maintain the identity of cinema itself? How does cinema film the creator’s relationship with his work? How are aesthetic memory and the process of creative freedom filmable? Can you, through your film options, transcribe and interpret the painter’s creative adventures?And what are the concepts analyzed by the critical reception of these projects? Do they take into account the specificity of cinematographic codes? Do they compare what is not comparable or do they establish creative paths centered on the unavoidable differences between them? Do they define hierarchies and value judgments or do they lead a dialogic path?This communication intends to answer these questions, having as an analytical corpus the representation of Van Gogh’s work in cinema and the critical reception of that same filmic production. The filmic approaches of Alain Resnais, Vincent Minelli, Akira Kurosawa, Maurice Pialat, Andrew Hutton, Paul Cox, Alexander Barnett, François Bertrand, Dorota Kobiela/Hugh Welchman and Julian Schnabel will join the studies of João Mário Grilo, Jacques Aumont, Pascal Bonitzer, Alain Cohen, François Albera, François Jost and Luc Vanchéri.Cinema and painting seek, in this analysis, the possibility of an identity path and the attainment of what João Mário Grilo considers the “essence of the unquotable” in the struggle for a goal – “rescuing the aura of art and filming it”.

The nomadic subject as a cinematographic hero by Alain Resnais

The author of the work raises the issue of the phenomenon of nomadism in the context of the work of the French director Alain Resnais. The object of the research is the early works of the director, such films as "Last year in Marienbad", "Hiroshima, my love", "I love you, I love". The purpose of the work is to answer the question of how nomadic strategies allow the author to create non-linear narrative structures, oscillating characters and flickering characters in his films, and how understanding these strategies can help viewers and researchers in the act of deciphering works. The author also analyzes a number of phenomena related to nomadism, such as the rhizome, the body without organs, deterritorialization, escape, flicker. The novelty of the research lies in the application of nomadic strategies to the cinema of Alain Resnais. This approach makes it possible to use the current philosophical and art history prism to study narrative structures, intraframe space and characters. The author argues that Rene's cinematography can be viewed through a position of resistance to forms of power - suppression and control - which manifests itself in the violation of traditional forms of narration and the creation of split characters. To study the mentioned aspects of Rene's work, the author resorts to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The author also explains the position of the modern viewer and describes the strategies of looking, which can lead to a state of pleasure from interacting with nomadic works.

Retro Visions

Abstract While the trend for historical subjects in 1970s French cinema is often remembered in terms of la mode rétro, defined by an obsessional fixation on the Occupation, this article examines films that revisit two polarizing scandals during the explosive final years of the Third Republic. Alain Resnais's Stavisky (1974) recounts the mysterious death of a swindler that triggered a political crisis, leading to the violent street protests of February 6, 1934; Claude Chabrol's Violette Nozière (1978) dramatizes a famous case of parricide in 1933 that became a national obsession, pitting adherents of conservative bourgeois values against opponents of tradition and patriarchy. Rather than investigate the “myth” of resistance under Vichy, these films explore the fault lines of the bitter divide between Right and Left, recasting the prewar narrative through the prism of the 1970s to interrogate the legacies of fascism and the political stakes of interpreting history.

Participation

Aiming at rendering “somewhat irrelevant” the “question of sadism” in the critique of film’s “seductive epistemological promise,” Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit argued for a “participation in the film” that is “at once self-reflexive and self-shattering.” Such participation may bring about the very panhuman condition of “being-togetherness” that Bersani and Dutoit have registered in the ontology of Alain Resnais’s and Terrence Malick’s films. This peculiar “community of all being” is based on a specific (and paradoxical) kind of movement within the spatiality of a remembrance engendered by the inhibition of movement. Certain films thus render possible connection and participation due to the mobility they entail.

Цикличность и вариативность драматургии в фильме Алена Рене «В прошлом году в Мариенбаде»

In the history of cinema art Alain Resnais film «Last year in Marienbad» was marked as a successful step in the development of new dramatic types. The composition of the film «Last year in Marienbad» is cyclically organized and alongside with an extremely slowing developing plot it conceals its message. Conditional images with their hidden characters exist in the situation where outer conflicts are not shown and the action develops in an abstract limited space. Nevertheless, the authors managed to create a reserved cyclic but at the same time a variable structure of the film. The dramatic methods developed in the film are topical now and are actively used in modern cinematography. The article studies the ways the authors of the film use these methods and defines their functions in the drama of the film.

MARGUERITE DURAS E O TESTEMUNHO DO IMPOSSÍVEL EM HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

A couple of lovers meet in Hiroshima in August 1957. He is Japanese. She, a French actress, is in town to shoot a film about peace. Lying in bed in a hotel, she tells everything she saw in Hiroshima, the museums, the images, the survivors, the tracks. To which he replies, emphatically: Tu n'as rien vu to Hiroshima. Thus, she starts Hiroshima Mon Amour, text by Marguerite Duras, written as a script for the homonymous film by Alain Resnais, in which she creates a dialogue between these two characters, marked in different ways by the horrors of war. Her writing reveals the impossibility of talking about catastrophes like the one in Hiroshima – and all one can do is talk about this impossibility. Duras highlights the unavoidable character of the tragedy while, throughout the narrative, her character tries to elaborate on her own war traumas, provoked by the interest of her Japanese lover. Our objective, therefore, is to analyze how Duras' text builds a testimony of the impossible, stretching the limits of literature, and cinema, beyond an attempt at representation. In order to do so, we dialogue with thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Márcio Seligmann-Silva, whose theories about testimony and literature, or even testimonial literature, help to deepen this reflection.

Funeral de Estado (Sergei Loznitsa, 2019): o funeral do documentário

From Claude Lanzmann’s controversial interdiction of documentary images produced by genocidal political regimes, this article analyzes the discursive choices of the documentary State Funeral (2019), from Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa, against Harun Farocki’s Aufschub (2007), Alain Resnais’ Nuit et brouillard (1956), Vanessa Lapa’ The Decent One (2014) and Rithy Panh’s, L’image manquante (2013). All these films use archive footage. To what extent do totalitarian regimes’ official images, without the marks of enunciation of the director who manipulates them in the present, enable the image ethics, or do they resemble the perpetrators’ propaganda? The proposal presented here relativizes Lanzmann’s concept, but the contemporary director must turn explicit its discursive intervention and show himself as the film enunciator. In this way, he could re-signify and use these images. Authors like Cristina Teixeira Vieira de Melo, François Niney and Arlette Farge are discussed.

Cinematic Experience as Spatial Perception: Remembering the Remembrance

Architecture, designs experiences through movements and materials to explore and expand the memory. Cinema mirrors these experiences, by representing the architecture in movies. Alain Resnais’s film Last Year at Marienbad stems from this relationship between the notions of time, space and memory. The approach of this puzzling film, problematized the space-time relation by questioning the reliability of memory and opened room to raise questions about spatial perception: How do we perceive the perception of time and space in films? How can that ambiguous relation between time and space be translated in spatial terms? In this paper, these questions will be discussed in the scope of this film through a close reading with the inquiries of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze with their inter-disciplinary perspectives in order to extend this inter-sensory interval. As a conclusion, the interaction of this relation will be reviewed.

Algeria and the crisis of theimage-mouvement: checkingcinéma colonial’s imperial gaze inMuriel ou le Temps d’un retour(Resnais, 1963)

One of the most cryptic characters in Alain Resnais’s Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (1963) is a returning veteran who edits his own amateur video footage of North Africa while contending with his traumatizing memories of torturing a young woman in Algeria. This article’s fundamental argument is twofold: first, Bernard’s experience of editing and watching his footage is co-extensive with his private interrogation of the reductive, propagandist images of Algeria that he viewed in classic colonial cinema prior to serving in the war; second, Resnais’s portrayal of this process provokes spectators to reassess their own consumption of retrograde colonial culture and its impact on their perception of the colony. Key to this analysis is the imperial gaze that E. Ann Kaplan associates with colonial cinema’s reductive construction of the female colonial “other,” Stanley Cavell’s understanding of how film spectator’s “check” their engagement with cinematic narratives, and Gilles Deleuze’s understanding of politics in the image-temps. This article ultimately aims to deepen present understandings of questions regarding preservation, research, and interpretation that Muriel continues to raise sixty years after the signing of the Évian Accords.

The milieu of buried stimuli: Relational theory and literary studies

In this series of reflections on the ways in which psychoanalytic theory has influenced his teaching, the author focuses on a change that began to take place around the time of his encounter with relational psychoanalytical theory. At the heart of that change was a shift in the direction of processual thinking and emotional presence, guided by several contemporary theorists but most importantly by Christopher Bollas. By showing how that shift altered his approach to Alain Resnais's Night and Fog and the works of Herman Melville, and how it led to the development of a course called “Race and Relationality,” the author suggests that relational theory, broadly conceived, can make it possible for literary critics to stay in touch with the bit-by-bit process of experiencing texts. In the midst of that process, we are in a state of consciousness that is much different from the state in which we analytically sort and interpret, and in that dim, intermixing milieu, we can come to know things that we would not otherwise have known.

영화 속의 역사, 역사 속의 영화:

This article attempts to examine a French documentary film directed by Alain Resnais in 1956, Night and Fog, and especially the historical context in which it was produced and accepted. The film was a typical historical movie in that it dealt the Nazi concentration camps in the 1930s and 1940s and showed the holocaust in World War II, and that it conveyed their history to the younger generations: it has been released on the TV public channels or for the secondary education in France for decades. And the film was born in the midst of growing memories of the deportation by enacting national memorial day of the deportation, establishing a memorial of the martyrs of the deportation, and publishing a collection of the deportation survivors’ testimonies. A rumor that this film was out of the nomination for the Cannes International Film Festival under the pressure of the West German Embassy gave rise to a great dispute and anger in French society in April 1956, thereby showing that the anti-German sentiment was still strong among the French. But the censorship taking issue with a scene that revealed the kepi of a French gendarme who guarded the camp at Pithiviers, was not highlighted by the press, thereby signifying that memories of ‘the collaboration by the Vichy regime’ were still suppressed. Since the 1980s when all the other memories were overwhelmed by memories of the holocaust, the film came to the fore as a pioneering holocaust movie. Although its title, “Night and Fog” implied the suppression of Resistance rather than the holocaust, and even the word “jew” hardly appeared in its narration, it can fall within the category of the holocaust film because it properly preserved and conveyed the essential images of the holocaust. (Dongduk Women’s University / greve@hanmail.net)

Don’t Look Down

Don’t Look Down

A Comic Book by Other Means: Alain Resnais and Stan Lee's The Monster Maker

A Comic Book by Other Means: Alain Resnais and Stan Lee's The Monster Maker

Image-Correction

The article attempts to identify a new type of attitude to time, which appears in the cinema of recent decades and is connected to the presentation of the process of changing the past and moving the hero into an alternative temporal series, with the past with its events being subjected to an optimizing correction. The films of Christ- offer Boe and Hong Sang-soo are the central object of the analysis, but the new modus operandi of the relation to the past revealed here can also be traced in popu- lar cinema. Particular attention is paid to the changing representation of the manip- ulation of the past in science fiction cinema. Examining the “strange” films of recent decades in a broader historical context and comparing them to previous attempts to represent alternative versions of real- ity (for example, the films of Akira Kurosawa and Alain Resnais), allows us to iden- tify “unplacedness” as the main characteristic of the new kind of cinema, when the change of past is not placed in the minds of characters, is not presented as a sub- jective interpretation of reality and is not relegated to the field of the fantastic and the fictional. It is presented as an ontologically real fact, dealing with everyday real- ity. The typology of the image developed by Gilles Deleuze in his book on cinema and the question he posed about the third type of the image make it possible to cre- ate the concept of the ”image-correction” uniting the phenomena in question. As an alternative to both “image-movement” and “image-time”, “image-correction” charac- terizes a new epoch in the history of cinema and creates conditions for its retroactive revision as a history of “corrective manipulation of time.”

A Montage of Surviving Images: Deportation Footage in Varsovie, quand même … (1954) and Night and Fog (1956)

A Montage of Surviving Images:Deportation Footage in Varsovie, quand même … (1954) and Night and Fog (1956) Matilda Mroz (bio) and Ivan Cerecina (bio) In the early months of 1956, French director Alain Resnais completed work on Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog (FR), his now classic meditation on the concentration camps and their afterlife. The film struck audiences then, as it does now, with its mix of brightly rendered Eastmancolor footage of the remains of camps with archival footage and photographs from all around Europe depicting deportations to, and the machinery of, the camp system. While historians of post-war French cinema often hold up Resnais's film as the first concerted effort to make a film about the camps, it was not the first film to make use of this burgeoning archive of visual materials. Two years earlier, Yannick Bellon—Resnais's erstwhile film school classmate and collaborator—made Varsovie, quand même …/Warsaw Remains … (FR, 1954; henceforth Varsovie), a short documentary on the fate of Warsaw during WWII, in which we see several of the same archival images of deportations that appear in Resnais's film. Bellon's film, as well as others by the Polish director Kurt Weber (Pod Jednym Niebem/Under the Same Sky, PL, 1955) and the American Leo Hurwitz (The Museum and the Fury, US, 1956), point towards a complex set of competing historical and political discourses beginning to form around these images in mid-century archival documentaries. This article tracks the re-deployment of these images taken in and around occupied Warsaw, focusing on the shifting political discourses on the deportation to the camps, the Nazi project of racial annihilation, and the fate of Warsaw's citizens during WWII, in Night and Fog and Varsovie. In examining the migration of archival images between films contemporaneously released, this piece is interested in processes of re-assemblage, or what [End Page 103] art historian Georges Didi-Huberman has termed "re-montage." At base in Didi-Huberman's use of this term is a play on words: the French remonter means not only to "re-assemble" something but also to "re-surface" (say, from a body of water) or to rewind back in time. In their deployment of Nazi perpetrator footage, Night and Fog and Varsovie enact their own processes of re-montage, re-surfacing these images from wartime in a way that encourages us to pose questions about their "cultural survival."1 The visual treatment sections of this piece closely examine and compare the shared use of images and differences in voice-over across these films. By re-cutting these voices and images, our piece creates its own re-montage: we extract images from their wider placement within a film, consider their collisions with images from other films, and seek to place them back within their contexts with a renewed understanding of history as a "palimpsest" of views that shift and change over time.2 If, for Didi-Huberman, re-surfaced archival material has the potential to erupt into previous ways of conceptualizing history, to form a "breach in the history conceived," our collaborative written and audiovisual work seeks to create a further breach in the archive of images that are found in the films under discussion, by our process of extraction and re-mixing of repeated images.3 Following Didi-Huberman, we consider how archival images, in their movements across and between films, can be thought of as "surviving" or "returning" images, or "phantoms."4 The full extent and significance of the images that are shared between Night and Fog and Varsovie require a lengthier survey than we can conduct here; in the written section of this paper, we have chosen, instead, to focus on the circulation of one particular image, which we have termed Image X. A snippet of perpetrator footage showing columns of deportees on a Warsaw street, Image X makes visible the suffering of an anonymized collective, retaining an emblematic quality that has allowed it to play different roles in different filmic contexts. Hence our use of the signifier "x": something is marked out and made visible in this image, but "x" also crosses out, veils, or covers over...

The haunted Soviet landscape and nuclear melancholy in Andrei Tarkovsky and Alexander Gordon’s There Will Be No Leave Today (1959)

ABSTRACT A haunting past dominates the work of European filmmakers in the post-war period, and this article addresses the hauntological spectre of war in There Will Be No Leave Today, a very early film of Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky in partnership with Alexander Gordon. The article draws on Jacques Derrida’s Hauntology, Julia Kristeva’s abjection and Gilles Deleuze’s ‘out-of-field’ theory as a methodology to examine ideas of haunting and abjection in Tarkovsky and Gordon’s fledgling film in relation to the interconnection between spaces and their histories in the work. It also makes connections with contemporary cinema in Europe and as such explores Mikhail Kalatozov’s The Cranes are Flying and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour. I examine how the featured cinematic works compare and contrast with Tarkovsky and Gordon’s own stylistic vision and how the landscape in the films is a space of memory and historical trauma.