Alain Resnais Research Articles

State Violence, Justice, And The Suffering Of Others

In 1955, Alain Resnais's now canonical documentary, Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) ended with an ominous question, asking “who, among us, is keeping watch from this strange watchtower [of the ruins of Auschwitz] to warn of the arrival of our new executioners” who might bring about the return of the “concentrationary plague?” One man had already made it his mission to do so: the French writer and former political deportee David Rousset. Rousset had shaken the French world of letters and politics with the 1946 publication of L'univers concentrationnaire (The Concentrationary Universe), which warned of the civilizational and moral cesura that the Nazi camps had been. The term quickly became a widely used conceptual framework. Former deportee and Catholic writer Jean Cayrol borrowed from it to write his voice-over to Night and Fog. In 1949, Rousset published another text that created a scandal in Cold War France: an Appeal to “fellow deportees” calling upon them to “investigate the USSR's concentrationary universe” (Kuby, 46). This indictment fiercely divided the French left. In 1950, he brought a libel suit against another former deportee, communist writer Pierre Daix, who had accused him of amnesiac “apoliticism” (Kuby, 65–6; Dean, 61). Just before, in the wake of his Appeal, Rousset had founded an organization against concentrationary regimes with those, like him, who had been political deportees. In 1951, it put the Soviet Union on trial for crimes against humanity. Rousset and his organization were involved in many trials, eager to denounce the “new executioners” who had revived the “scourge of the camps” in the postwar world. For many today, he is an “exceptional” man because, as philosopher and critic Tzvetan Todorov argues, he was not paralyzed by the memory of “this painful experience”; instead, he harnessed it into action against dehumanizing state violence. For Todorov, Rousset had allowed morality to prevail over base political considerations.

Too painful to forget, too painful to remember: Ashes of memory in Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais’sHiroshima mon amour(1959) and Duras’sLa douleur(1985)

This essay threads the striking images of the couple’s embrace at the beginning of Hiroshima mon amour through an examination of the film’s exploration of memory and victim and perpetrator traumas. Duras and Resnais render the lovers almost indistinguishable as, they hold each other, encased in ash. As they embrace, something gently falls on them, encrypts them, isolates them from their surroundings but simultaneously embeds them in their respective histories. If, for Derrida, ash becomes the paradigm for the trace, we can see how this image becomes paradigmatic for memory’s unspooling threads; the film rejects an either/or memory or forgetting when it is a question of traumatic pasts. By re-reading Hiroshima mon amour through the powerful metaphorics of ash and against echoes of the international and dramatic rise in racist discourse, an increased anxiety about nuclear catastrophe, and a return to Duras’s wartime “memoir” La douleur, I show that these texts’ representation of memory and the rotating axes of perpetration and victimization open up larger questions about the trauma of both sides of the culpability line. This reading reveals the fluid border between victimization and perpetration in ways that help explain how both victims and perpetrators are traumatized. Interpreting the film and memoir in this way helps to blaze a path to envisioning an understanding of committing crimes as itself inflicting (self-imposed) trauma. The most optimistic possible implication (one that is completely unlikely) is that if perpetration is also viewed as traumatizing then perpetrators would no longer fling nuclear bombs at the racialized other and expect to sleep well.

La joueuse de go (2001) By Shan Sa: A Battle of Eroticism and Abstinence

Set in the Second Sino-Japanese War, Shan Sa's award-winning novel La joueuse de go features the cross-cultural love between her protagonists-narrators: a Chinese teenage girl and a Japanese soldier. Since its publication in 2001, the novel has received divergent remarks from literary critics, especially for its contentious portrayals of sexuality. Viewing Shan's representation of sexuality as a battle of eroticism and abstinence, this essay focuses on how the protagonists' respective sexual explorations reflect and influence their identity-quests and their reciprocal yet untold love. In the book, abstinence, a defining feature of their cross-cultural love, is depicted as eroticism in disguise. While the Chinese girl's sexual awakening empowers her to embrace her womanhood, the Japanese soldier's love encounters enable him to live for and as himself. Throughout the narrative, Shan creates various forms of duality, whether it be structuring the text as a game of Go or presenting the characters as doubles. As the most crucial metaphor of duality, Go serves as a site of reflection and introspection. Through their interactions on the grid, the protagonists complete the liberating process of self-rediscovery by letting the strangers within themselves emerge. Drawing on critical theories of écriture féminine and platonic love, as well as celebrated creative works, such as Alain Resnais' film Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), my analysis seeks to shed new light on the central issues of sexuality, identity, and cross-cultural love in Shan's sentimental tale.

Bodies in Color, Black and White, and in Piles: The Dichotomy of Concentration Camp Aesthetics and Somatic Dance Practices in Sasha Waltz's Screendance Körper (2000)

This article analyzes scenes from the screendance Körper (Body, Sasha Waltz, 2000)—choreographed by Sasha Waltz and filmed by Jörg Jeshel and Brigitte Kramer. While Waltz's piece Dialoge 99, choreographed with the kinesthetic experience of Berlin's Jewish Museum, played a large role in shaping Körper's aesthetic, the filmmakers draw stylistically from juxtaposing color and black and white shots as well as the theme of piles from Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) in the screendance. Körper occupies a dichotomous aesthetic—by engaging with concentration camp-like treatment of human bodies and paradoxically highlighting consensual experimentation with bodily materiality and building on somatic practices.

When Movies Get Sick

Stevens offers insights about the impact of COVID-19 on film industry It has suddenly unfastened the values that traditionally attach to proximity, particularly regarding human bodies, as vocabulary focusing on the distance between them- social distancing, self-isolation, quarantine- become part of our quotidian language Distance has become the sign of intimacy- of respect, care, concern, shared understanding of a shared world, a sense of belonging to a form of life Within discussions of film aesthetics, cinephiles tout the value of cinema for inviting audiences to attend to bodies in space, referring to the composition recorded by the camera and whose projection is offered up for our pleasure

Hybrid Anxieties by C. L. Quinan

Reviewed by: Hybrid Anxieties by C. L. Quinan Mallory Nischan Quinan, C. L. Hybrid Anxieties. U of Nebraska P, 2020. Pp 276. ISBN 978-1-4962-0681-7. $99 (hardcover). $30 (paper and eBook). In Hybrid Anxieties, Professor of Gender Studies C. L. Quinan brings together queer theory and postcolonial studies to investigate how identity intertwines with literature and film in the wake of the French-Algerian War (1954-1962). Arguing that the postwar period provided a context in which hegemonic masculinity could be challenged and reconfigured, Quinan shows how rethinking gender, sexuality, and nationality can be productive and redemptive. The works are situated after decolonization and the book is attuned to content and form, illustrating questions of identity and hybridity. Quinan connects the violence in Algeria and the 1961 Paris massacre, in which hundreds of Algerian protestors were drowned in the Seine, with the 2005 Paris riots and the 2015 attacks on Charlie Hebdo to show the legacy of colonialism in the neocolonial present. Showing inherent connections between queer and postcolonial theories, the book navigates fluidly between them while studying a crucial historical moment. Part One explores masculinity, violence, and memory, filling a gap in the scholarship on the French-Algerian war which lacks consideration of how forgetting shapes identity. Quinan pairs Alain Resnais' film Muriel, or the Time of a Return (1963) with Laurent Mauvignier's novel The Wound (2009), which follow former conscripts named Bernard who served in Algeria and center the male body and its trauma through the absence of the female body. Quinan continues with Michael Haneke's film Caché (2005) which follows Georges and his troubled interactions with Majid, whose parents worked for Georges' family before disappearing in 1961. Despite cultivating a life free of Majid, Georges is confronted with repressed guilt and refuses to take responsibility for his actions. Part One illustrates the violent effects of repressing the colonial past, but Quinan shows that the "disintegration of the protagonists' white French masculinity" suggests alternative possibilities (93). Part Two considers textual representations of queer identity and embodiment that question traditional narrativity, subvert norms, and deconstruct dominant modes of masculinity in the aftermath of the war. Chapter Three focuses on Pierre [End Page 186] Guyotat's novel Eden, Eden, Eden (1970), a censored text in which desire, sexuality, and colonial violence are inseparable. Quinan draws on Herbert Marcuse who reworks subjectivity to imagine a body that is no longer an instrument of labor, but of pleasure, free of normative institutions and kinship structures. Eden, Eden, Eden illustrates Marcuse's utopia and serves as a counterpoint to the masculinity described in part one. Quinan argues that reading Marcuse, Guyotat, and Foucault, whose cornerstone text History of Sexuality was undoubtedly influenced by Guyotat, together supplements poststructuralist, feminist, and queer forms of critique. Chapter Four reads memory through a queer lens and asks how diasporic subjects engage with memory in Leila Sebbar's The Seine was Red (1999). Though the characters illustrate hybridity through their backgrounds, Quinan does not focus on personal identities but considers how the novel challenges normative temporality through the intersection of gender, nationality, and memory. Wrestling with the event thirty-five years later, the protagonists retrace the protest, covering up WWII monuments with facts about the Algerian resistance. In their rejection of linear narratives of progress, they redraw "colonial cartographies" as a "counter-memory" to the official history in which the event has been willfully forgotten (131). Chapter Five reads Nina Bouraoui's Tomboy (2000) as a bridge between queerness and postcoloniality, arguing that expressing masculinity through the protagonist's changing female body dissociates masculinity from men and illustrates the in betweenness felt by many postwar subjects. Gender ambiguity and queer desire reinforce feelings of unbelonging while questioning borders of gender and nationality. In negotiating a hybrid identity born out of the French-Algerian War, Nina's fluid masculinity functions as a queer practice. Scholars have read Nina as either the author or a girl with an identity crisis, but Quinan takes an intersectional approach consistent with current modes of queer critique, showing entanglements between nationality, race, and gender. Hybrid Anxieties will interest scholars working on contemporary France or Algeria as it reflects how...

Chantal Akerman: Afterlives ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson

Reviewed by: Chantal Akerman: Afterlives ed. by Marion Schmid and Emma Wilson Tessa Nunn Schmid, Marion. Emma Wilson, eds. Chantal Akerman: Afterlives. Legenda, 2019. ISBN 978-1-781886-39-7. Pp. 170. The thirteen essays constituting this edited collection offer diverse perspectives on the creative works and legacy of the Belgian film director, author, and installation artist Chantal Akerman. Her approaches to creating art as the child of a Holocaust survivor and representing mother-daughter relationships are recurrent themes throughout the diverse chapters. Unlike most studies on Akerman that focus predominately on her innovative films of the 1970s and 1980s, this book, centered on representations of identity and memory, gives more attention to her later films, installations, and literary productions. Instead of emphasizing her novel methods of filming women, the authors explore the multifaceted ways in which Akerman's works grapple with traces of the past, empathetic observation, and the representation of what is invisible or unspeakable. Her films and texts thus transmit secrets, traditions, or anxiety. According to Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Akerman's portrayals of Jewish identity seek to express an ineffable absence through the theme of non-belonging. Hilde D'Haeyere and Steven Jacobs explain how Akerman drew from American slapstick to create Demain on déménage (2004), a comedy haunted by memories of the Holocaust and exile. Comparing Akerman's films to Alain Resnais's Nuit et brouillard and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, Anat Zanger shows how Akerman represents processes of remembering and forgetting through thresholds, material objects, personal writing, and anxious gazes. Analyzing temporality and collective memory, the authors nuance the role of Akerman's mother Natalia in the director's depictions of mother daughter-relationships. For Jenny Chamarette, Akerman's films rethink the passage of time in a way that refuses aging by creating a genealogy of interchangeable female figures. Several chapters reflect on the director's polymorphic representations of pleasure and [End Page 274] sexuality. Alice Blackhurst demonstrates how Akerman represents mothers engaging in the ritual of smoking to see themselves independent of maternity, connect with the sensory world, and take pleasure in not having to explain themselves. Investigating how Akerman's films and installations allow for empathetic viewing, So Mayer draws from Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology to scrutinize cinematic attempts to document racial hate and question definitions of human rights. Essays by Albertine Fox, Adam Roberts, and Cyril Béghin study the ethics of the formal choices in Akerman's work with regard to gestures of listening, silence made visible, the musicality of her films, and her dramaturgical uses of light. Emma Wilson and Marion Schmid present Akerman as both a reader and a writer in her literary productions and cinematic adaptations. Refusing to negate the artist's lived experience and position within a global collective memory, this book provides methods of understanding cinema and art in relation to the creator's personal history, particularly with regards to familial memories of trauma. The diverse theoretical frameworks utilized in the essays allow for interdisciplinary discussions of Akerman's oeuvre and propose new approaches for film studies. Elegantly written, this publication will interest scholars of European cinema, documentaries, multimedia art, cinematic adaptations of nineteenth-century literature, cultural memory, and the Holocaust. Tessa Nunn Duke University (NC) Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French

O testemunho da catástrofe em Hiroshima mon amour

O artigo busca realizar uma investigação a respeito da possibilidade da memória e representação da catástrofe a partir da obra cinematográfica Hiroshima mon amour (1959), roteirizada por Marguerite Duras e dirigida por Alain Resnais. Partiremos de uma breve introdução acerca do que pode ser definido como literatura de teor testemunhal, que desponta principalmente após as Grandes Guerras Mundiais no século XX, buscando em seguida situar a obra de Marguerite Duras, e o filme especificamente, sob o prisma testemunhal. Finalmente, mergulharemos na questão dos limites de possibilidade e impossibilidade de se testemunhar Hiroshima.

La guerre est fini y/o ¿La guerra ha terminado?: El film de Alain Resnais y Jorge Semprún y su papel en la exposición permanente del Centro de Arte Reina Sofía

This article analyzes the ambiguity in the film La guerre est finie ([The War Is Over] 1966, director Alain Resnais, screenwriter Jorge Semprún) whose declarative title becomes a question in the title of the permanent exhibit at the Reina Sofía National Museum in Madrid: Is the War Over? Art in a Divided World (1945-1968). The works invite the viewer to question the nationalism that catapulted the Spanish Civil War, whose victory marked the first triumph for European fascisms and concomitant genocides. While the film entirely lacks symbols of irrefutable national identity, the paintings incorporate and subvert certain icons of (regional, Francoist, Nazi or Fascist) nationalism, as well as emblems of the Spanish Republic and Spain. The artworks respond in theme and form to nationalist ideology and esthetics. Although the film—whose screenwriter Jorge Semprún had been imprisoned in the Nazi camp at Buchenwald—limits itself to implicit allusions to the eradication of the domestic enemy on Iberian soil and the so-called stateless undesirables exiled in foreign lands, the exhibit explicitly references Nazism and other 20th-century genocides. The collection of works exemplifies Aharon Appelfeld’s assertion: that only art has the ability to redeem suffering from the abyss. The film and the plastic works respond not only to nationalist ideologies and concomitant lived and witnessed experiences, but also to nationalist art. Through the visual counternarratives that give voice to myriad victimizations, these works make manifest and denounce, in theme and form, the anti-intellectualization and the fervent sentiment of political zeal.

Tracing a Lineage: Alain Resnais’s Painting Films and the Animated Aesthetic

Tracing a Lineage: Alain Resnais’s Painting Films and the Animated Aesthetic

A paisagem mental da memória no cinema de Alain Resnais

Na primeira fase de sua carreira, Alain Resnais discutiu a falibilidade e criatividade da memória ao ser ativada por processos mentais. Partindo do pressuposto de que o diretor precisou manipular o espaço fílmico para esculpir o tempo dos processos de rememoração no cinema, este artigo pretende examinar as estratégias de espacialização do tempo da memória em L’année dernière à Marienbad (O ano passado em Marienbad, 1961), segundo longametragem de Resnais. À luz do conceito de paisagem mental, a análise sugere que os cenários do filme se desfazem e deixam de ser subservientes a ações que obedecem a cronologias rígidas por meio do contraponto entre som e imagem, da duração dilatada dos planos e da repetição.

A sobrevivência da estátua

No poema de Manuel Bandeira o cacto é uma estátua. Essa estátua tomba e interrompe a vida na cidade. Na morte o cacto se historiciza e, nesse sentido, ganha vida. A montagem das imagens no poema e sua leitura vertical, livre, nos apontam para outras imagens como as da escultura negra de Carl Einstein e sua leitura por Chris Marker e Alain Resnais em As estátuas também morrem, ou imagens como as poses dos nativos em ¡Que viva México! de Eisenstein. A morte revolucionária e a intratabilidade fazem do cacto uma estátua sobrevivente.

On Haltof's Screening Auschwitz

On Haltof's Screening Auschwitz Michał Oleszczyk Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and the Politics of Commemoration. By Marek Haltof. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 198 pp., ISBN 978-0810136083. US $34.95. With his latest book, devoted entirely to a single film but drawing on years of studious research, Marek Haltof confirms his stance as the leading historian of Polish film working abroad. Based at Northern Michigan University, Haltof has significantly contributed to the field of Polish film studies (with his 2002 Polish National Cinema still serving as the basic single-volume history of Polish film, reissued in an expanded edition in 2018), and he has done much to remain in touch with the latest developments in Polish arts and politics, making him a uniquely equipped commentator on Polish film culture past and present. That Haltof should devote a nearly 200-page study to a film not currently available from any major distribution companies or streaming services is indicative of the film's richness and the dire need of reintroducing it to a wider public in a worthy edition that would highlight its aesthetic qualities and political significance. The work in question, Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948), is no ordinary film. Shot and released within three years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (which has since become a metonymic symbol of the Holocaust), the film was made by a survivor and shot on the very location the horrific events took place. Co-written by Jakubowska and a fellow political prisoner Gerda Schneider, The Last Stage was not just a pioneering work of feature-length narrative cinema dealing with the still-recent [End Page 104] Nazi genocide but also a fierce act of faith in filmmaking's power to write history (and stop history from replaying itself). Haltof 's approach is multidimensional and methodical. He offers a detailed production history of the film (significantly indebted to Alina Madej's archive findings and featuring a number of freshly unearthed facts) and Jakubowska's meticulously rendered biography as a political prisoner in a number of camps. The film receives a close reading, leaving practically no scene uncommented on, after which Haltof draws attention to the film's reception (in communist Poland and abroad), its implications for the wider politics of preserving Auschwitz-Birkenau as a historical site, and its eerie afterlife through other films in which it has been quoted—often as supposed documentary footage (Alain Resnais's Night and Fog [1955] and George Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank [1959] provide just two famous examples of such self-effacing appropriation). Perhaps the most interesting reading Haltof provides has to do with the film's ideological aspects, none of which could have been discussed freely in the director's homeland (and were largely ignored by international audiences) at the time of its original release. As Haltof reminds us, Jakubowska (who died in 1998 and thus saw the fall of communism) stayed a lifelong communist stalwart. She inscribed her vision of history into The Last Stage, in which the horror of the death camps is ultimately shown as an environment in which the power of the human spirit is forged and from which the new communist mindset emerges into its postwar dominance of Eastern Europe (here equated with salvation). In this respect, the key character of the film is Marta Weiss (played by Barbara Drapińska), a Jewish communist political prisoner whose multilingual skills save her from immediate death in the gas chambers and allow for her gradual gain of ideological awareness, culminating in a neophyte revolutionary confession: "It's only here in the camp that I understood how things are." Within the multibranched and rather unfocused narrative of The Last Stage, which doesn't follow any single conflict and doesn't focus on any particular character's arc, Marta serves as the closest thing to a stand-in for the audience. Through her eyes we learn about the inner workings of the camp. Her bravery and martyrdom is celebrated in the much-discussed final reel, in which the imminent Soviet intervention is seen not only as bringing about the dismantling...

It’s Still There

Daniel Blaufuks’s video Als Ob/As If formally interrogates the history of Holocaust imagery using a close visual examination of the 1944 “Staged Nazi Film” shot in Thereseinstadt. Layering his footage from present-day Terezín with a number of earlier films and television shows shot at or about the Nazi concentration camp, he contemplates the role of the image, both still and moving, in the creation of memory and history of the Holocaust. His video and phototextual book connect to literary explorations of the Czech concentration camp—by Georges Perec, W. G. Sebald, and Jiří Weil—as well as cinematic documentaries about the Nazi murder of European Jews by Alain Resnais, Claude Lanzmann, and Jean-Luc Godard. By focusing on contemporary Terezín, Blaufuks also brings to light aspects of memorialization within post-totalitarian societies investigated by filmmakers Petra Epperlein and Chantal Akerman, as well as by scholars of the Holocaust and post-Soviet Eastern Europe.

On Haltof's <em>Screening Auschwitz</em>

On Haltof's Screening Auschwitz Michał Oleszczyk Screening Auschwitz: Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage and the Politics of Commemoration. By Marek Haltof. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2018. 198 pp., ISBN 978-0810136083. US $34.95. With his latest book, devoted entirely to a single film but drawing on years of studious research, Marek Haltof confirms his stance as the leading historian of Polish film working abroad. Based at Northern Michigan University, Haltof has significantly contributed to the field of Polish film studies (with his 2002 Polish National Cinema still serving as the basic single-volume history of Polish film, reissued in an expanded edition in 2018), and he has done much to remain in touch with the latest developments in Polish arts and politics, making him a uniquely equipped commentator on Polish film culture past and present. That Haltof should devote a nearly 200-page study to a film not currently available from any major distribution companies or streaming services is indicative of the film's richness and the dire need of reintroducing it to a wider public in a worthy edition that would highlight its aesthetic qualities and political significance. The work in question, Wanda Jakubowska's The Last Stage (Ostatni etap, 1948), is no ordinary film. Shot and released within three years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp (which has since become a metonymic symbol of the Holocaust), the film was made by a survivor and shot on the very location the horrific events took place. Co-written by Jakubowska and a fellow political prisoner Gerda Schneider, The Last Stage was not just a pioneering work of feature-length narrative cinema dealing with the still-recent [End Page 104] Nazi genocide but also a fierce act of faith in filmmaking's power to write history (and stop history from replaying itself). Haltof 's approach is multidimensional and methodical. He offers a detailed production history of the film (significantly indebted to Alina Madej's archive findings and featuring a number of freshly unearthed facts) and Jakubowska's meticulously rendered biography as a political prisoner in a number of camps. The film receives a close reading, leaving practically no scene uncommented on, after which Haltof draws attention to the film's reception (in communist Poland and abroad), its implications for the wider politics of preserving Auschwitz-Birkenau as a historical site, and its eerie afterlife through other films in which it has been quoted—often as supposed documentary footage (Alain Resnais's Night and Fog [1955] and George Stevens's The Diary of Anne Frank [1959] provide just two famous examples of such self-effacing appropriation). Perhaps the most interesting reading Haltof provides has to do with the film's ideological aspects, none of which could have been discussed freely in the director's homeland (and were largely ignored by international audiences) at the time of its original release. As Haltof reminds us, Jakubowska (who died in 1998 and thus saw the fall of communism) stayed a lifelong communist stalwart. She inscribed her vision of history into The Last Stage, in which the horror of the death camps is ultimately shown as an environment in which the power of the human spirit is forged and from which the new communist mindset emerges into its postwar dominance of Eastern Europe (here equated with salvation). In this respect, the key character of the film is Marta Weiss (played by Barbara Drapińska), a Jewish communist political prisoner whose multilingual skills save her from immediate death in the gas chambers and allow for her gradual gain of ideological awareness, culminating in a neophyte revolutionary confession: "It's only here in the camp that I understood how things are." Within the multibranched and rather unfocused narrative of The Last Stage, which doesn't follow any single conflict and doesn't focus on any particular character's arc, Marta serves as the closest thing to a stand-in for the audience. Through her eyes we learn about the inner workings of the camp. Her bravery and martyrdom is celebrated in the much-discussed final reel, in which the imminent Soviet intervention is seen not only as bringing about the dismantling...

L´année dernière a Marienbad, de Alain Resnais

El presente ensayo se enmarca en el ámbito de Filosofía y Cine, en el que se desarrolla la lectura de una estética de la diferencia y repetición, para localizar la ilusión de continuidad en la película de Alain Resnais. El eterno retorno, encontrado en el mecanismo cinematográfico es orquestado en la composición de Resnais a través de este filme y ofrece tanto una gama de sensaciones (vacío, horror, vértigo), como también relaciones con los problemas del cine dentro del cine: su relación con las artes, el problema de la espacialidad, la condición ontológica de la fotografía y el problema del tiempo en la imagen movimiento.

The visible library and legible spaces

In his 1956 film, Tout la mémoire du monde (All the memory of the world), French director Alain Resnais turned the black and white documentary footage of an automated retrieval system at the Bibliothèque Nationale into an ominously noire work. The film depicts an enormous open space criss-crossed with a matrix of metal rails. A robotic unit moves through it with eerie precision, its mechanism stopping to pull a book in crude imitation of a human motion. The tone has more in common with that of Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965) and Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962) than with any cheerful ‘Let's go to the library’ educational pitch. After all, this is a library into which no one can go. A fully machinic world, its combination of nineteenth-century technology and twentieth-century managerial aspirations eliminates human presence as part of its pre-steam-punk dystopianism.

Historia i obrazy. Niedokończony film Yael Hersonski

History and images: Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished The complex relations of the cinematic image with history and memory are the context for the analysis of A Film Unfinished. The author refers to other documentary evidence of the Holocaust Night and Fog by Alain Resnais and Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, to the concept of postmemory Marianne Hirsch and image epistemology Georges Didi-Huberman. This film presents the found footage — a Nazi propaganda document Das Ghetto subjected to the strategy of representation, which consists of a complex network of viewpoints, including various formal procedures. The au­thor reflects on the status of images combined with the testimony of the survivors, the diaries of the ghetto inhabitants, the statements of the Nazi cameraman.

Ontological Distances

This article explores two contemporary works (Kader Attia’s Open Your Eyes [2010] and Neïl Beloufa’s Kempinski [2011]), alongside Alain Resnais’s and Chris Marker’s 1953 classic short film Les statues meurent aussi (The Statues Also Die). The pieces belong to different contexts and periods. Resnais’s and Marker’s film coincided with the emergence of anticolonial culture and consciousness, which hinged on the African self-narrative and activist movements connected to the Parisian publishing house Présence Africaine. Attia’s work situates us in an indefinite period between World War I and the present and investigates the power relations between Western and non-Western worlds. Beloufa’s Kempinski overturns the idea of a globalized, materialistic future for everybody by filming dystopic yet realistic narratives. In this essay, the author examines how these three works are linked by a common investigation of ontological distances between Western and sub-Saharan societies and ways of exploring and conceptualizing these differences. Aesthetics and identity, heritage and museum-based practices, reappropriation and categorization are devices used to critically approach these pieces, which open a space for theorization and discussion on the concept of ontological distance. French anthropologist Philippe Descola’s ideas on existing differences in ontological conceptualizations of the world share a wide view of the world and its cosmologies akin to the alternative ways of thinking about the world that Attia, Marker and Renais, and Beloufa propose and provide a framework from which to reflect on what Attia, Marker and Resnais, and Beloufa grapple with in their works.

To Have Done with Representation

A significant portion of philosophical questions concerning the Holocaust revolve around the problem of representation, that is, how the event can be represented in a concept or in an image, if at all. This article argues that Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956) by Alain Resnais and Inglourious Basterds by Quentin Tarantino (2009) respond to the problem of representation in an original way by challenging the conventions of their respective genre. The juxtaposition of past and present images in Nuit et brouillard proposes a new form of remembering that liberates memory from the confines of the past in order not to lose sight of what is happening now. Inglourious Basterds, similarly, circumvents the problem of realistic representation by means of a counter-historical story in which Hitler is brutally killed in Paris. Pushing to the extreme the Americanisation that is typical of the Hollywood treatments of World War II, Tarantino offers a multi-layered spectacle of violence that culminates in the burning down of a film theatre as a symbol of Tarantino’s having done with representation.