Alain Resnais Research Articles

'Total Cinema', Literature, and Testimonial in the Early Films of Alain Resnais

'Total Cinema', Literature, and Testimonial in the Early Films of Alain Resnais

Cinematic Free Indirect Style: Represented Memory in Hiroshima mon amour

Cinematic Free Indirect Style:Represented Memory in Hiroshima mon amour Leah Anderst (bio) He: You saw nothing in Hiroshima. Nothing. She: I saw everything. Everything. —Duras 151 These opening lines of Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour inaugurate the film's focus on vision and highlight its distrust of vision as a form of knowledge. She, a French actress, a tourist about to depart, wants to see Hiroshima. She wants to know the city, the remains of its traumatic history; and the monuments it has erected to preserve that history. He, a Japanese architect living in Hiroshima, knows that she cannot "see" the city, cannot know its past through her vision. And so he disputes her vision of Hiroshima; he disputes her knowledge of his city and his past. "From the first moments of Hiroshima mon amour, therefore, the central epistemological question of the film is laid out for us: how and what can we 'know,' through the epistemological instrument of the gaze" (Craig 27). Film narrates by "seeing" scenes and images, and it narrates with sound and with editing. Hiroshima mon amour interrogates not just seeing but also cinematic agency and narration, especially narrative representation of memory and history. This film narrates memory, and it narrates history. In the fabric of its narration, however, in its use of cinematic free indirect style, Hiroshima mon amour creates moments of "plural narration," moments of dual or multi-visioned seeing where narrative agency becomes uncertain, and the film thereby dramatizes the difficulty of capturing history and memory through narrative. Hiroshima mon amour tells the story of the brief love affair between an unnamed Japanese architect played by Eiji Okada and Emmanuelle Riva's unnamed actress on her final day shooting a film that takes place in Hiroshima. The film opens with a [End Page 358] fifteen-minute prefatory sequence, a series of scenes that juxtapose close-up images of the lovers' bodies embracing with images of Hiroshima. The two characters speak over the Hiroshima images, and their voices are "flat and calm, as if reciting" (Duras 15). With its combination of voice-over narration, documentary and fictional images, and a score that at times complements the images and at other times conflicts with them, this opening takes advantage of cinema's multiple tracks to move between perspectives and distinct registers of discourse. This opening establishes the multiple cinematic perspectives that will "see" and narrate this film. The first portion of the opening sequence details what Riva saw while visiting Hiroshima: a hospital, a museum visited four times, and a public square. The image track matches her slow and deliberate voice-over narration. We see the hospital, the museum, and the square while she describes them in voice-over. Among these images are short intercut scenes of the lovers' bodies. Following a shot of the hospital corridor, following an image of Peace Square outside the museum, following explanations and ephemera related to the dropping of the bomb, and following reenactments and archival newsreels documenting the bomb's immediate aftermath, the scene cuts to extreme close-up shots of the intertwined arms of the two lovers. Complementing this visual return is a corresponding return on the sound track. This opening sequence begins with a slow, melancholy series of notes that becomes the musical "theme" of Riva and Okada's relationship. Each time the image cuts away from Riva's descriptions of Hiroshima and back to their lovemaking, the sound track marks the same change, even if only for the duration of two or three notes. In one of the newsreels of this opening, injured children and adults receive care in a crowded hospital, and Riva's voice-over narration remains present over these images. Nurses and doctors lightly dab the victims' deep wounds and burnt skin with small pieces of cotton while Riva speaks. "Hiroshima was blanketed with flowers" she says, "there were cornflowers and gladiolas everywhere, and morning glories and day lilies that rose again from the ashes with an extraordinary vigor, quite unheard of for flowers till then" (Duras 19). As we watch these victims receiving care, Riva describes a city covered in flowers, a city in the process of rebirth...

Fighting the Fever: Archives of Atrocity in Alain Resnais' Nuit et brouillard and David Grossman's See Under: Love

Speaking about the genesis of his novel ’Ayen ’erekh: ahavah (See Under: Love, 1986)1 at a symposium on ‘The Future of the Holocaust’, David Grossman genially teased his audience: ‘Everyone tells you what influenced you, who you learned from, or just stole from.’ And, he added, ‘the learned critics pronounced what had influenced me, and what I had borrowed. When, for the first time, I went and read those books and writers, I discovered that in fact they were right.’2 There is a suggestion, in this quip, of auctorial affinities and, paradoxically, of auctorial self-sufficiency slightly unsettling to the notion of intertextuality. There is, however, also a suggestion of an unacknowledged, pervasive archive, akin to an archival miasma, which the writer shares with others and inadvertently breathes and assimilates into his or her own work. Given his paradoxical suggestion of retrospective influence, it may be pedantic to try to establish if and when Grossman viewed Alain Resnais’ Holocaust documentaryNuit et brouillard (1955), and I will not attempt to do so here. Nevertheless, considering the history of the film’s reception in Israel, it certainly seems plausible that Grossman was aware of it and that it did indeed contribute to the archival miasma out of which his novel emerged and which also becomes a major concern in its narrative. In this article, I wish to suggest that See Under: Love initially delineates an archive of the Holocaust which evokes to some extent the archive presented in the earlier documentary and adopts a similar post-traumatic form of narration. However, exploring the shifts in perspective informing the intermedial reference, and drawing on Derrida’s notion of a mal d’archive (archive fever),3 I argue that Grossman’s novel subsequently engages in charting the case history of what appears to be ‘Holocaust

Re-Framing Renoir: Introduction

Re-Framing Renoir:Introduction Katherine Golsan (bio) Although Jean Renoir (1894-1979) is best known for his films of the French Golden Age of cinema in the 1930s, his creative output spanned more than half a century, and several continents. From the silent era to television, and from film to literary works and essays, he casts a long shadow in cinema studies. As one of the greatest auteur filmmakers of all time—who wrote, directed and (at least through the thirties) sometimes appeared in his films—his influence on other directors has been extensive and sustained. François Truffaut and Alain Resnais, as well as Martin Scorsese, among many others, credit him with a profound impact on their work, not to mention Satyajit Ray on the other side of the world, whom Renoir mentored in India. Recently, Wes Anderson claimed his own The Darjeeling Limited owed much to Renoir's The River, and traces of The Rules of the Game, considered by most to be Renoir's masterpiece, appear in more contemporary films such as Alain Resnais's Mon Oncle d'Amérique and Robert Altman's Gosford Park.1 Renoir's star has never waned in terms of serious critical attention paid to the singular socio-historical and aesthetic value of his films. In the 1950s, Andre Bazin devoted major essays to the vital aesthetic achievements of his cinema, hailing Renoir as the master of cinematic realism (particularly in his use of deep focus and extended takes), and Bazin's formal analysis of the pan in the murder scene of The Crime of Monsieur Lange remains a touchstone in discussions of the film (see O'Shaughnessy and Poague in this volume). Truffaut heralded him as "the greatest filmmaker in the world,"2 and gave him pride of place as one of the major influences on the New Wave. In large part thanks to the critic/directors of the New Wave and their publication, Les Cahiers du Cinéma, the sixties and seventies saw a renewed interest in Renoir's oeuvre, and works such as Leo Braudy's Jean Renoir: The World of his Films confirmed his importance on the American critical scene. In the 1980s, Christopher Faulkner's The Social Cinema of Jean Renoir provided a major re-assessment of the social and ideological importance of Renoir's entire production, and it remains an invaluable contribution to the field. More recently, Martin O'Shaughnessy's Jean Renoir, and Colin Davis's Scenes of Love and Murder: Renoir, Film and Philosophy have [End Page 1] brought Renoir into the twenty-first century in terms of the currency of his cinema, particularly with regard to a much-needed re-evaluation of these films in terms of gender issues. All of these works, among others, have greatly expanded the scope and depth of the field of Renoir studies, and, in several cases, have also challenged earlier clichés regarding the inferior quality of his Hollywood productions during the 1940s. Because shifts occur over time in the appreciation of any body of work, I hoped that this issue's open topic would serve as a barometer of the state of Renoir studies today in terms of what is currently of most interest, and why. This tack has elicited a broad range of absorbing essays, both with regard to period and approach. Some of Renoir's most canonical French works, such as The Crime of Monsieur Lange and The Rules of the Game, find their place here, as do his silent films and his Hollywood output, Swamp Water and This Land is Mine, and later productions such as The River and French Cancan. In considering this tremendous breadth, Leo Braudy in his Afterword explores race, gender, and colonialism as the primary lenses through which these essays engage Renoir today, preoccupations that attest to the enduring interest in films "created in time but now in some sense timeless." The title of this issue is intended to reflect these new perspectives, each of which confirms yet again why Renoir's work is so socially, philosophically and aesthetically valuable. These re-framings, in many cases of films that have long been the focus of critical attention, even...

Art History in the Cinema Age

AbstractIn the art biennales of today, video has become, like it or not, a universal tool, a sort of “green card” for today’s art. It forms a convenient platform, especially when used with subtitles and especially for the artists of emerging countries, as long as they have access to this technique.Could the art history film equally become a language shared by the community of art historians? This type of film is characterised by the collaboration of a filmmaker and an art historian, such as occurred when Roberto Longhi and Umberto Barbaro together produced their film Carpaccio in 1948. Erwin Panofsky, Rudolf Arnheim and Carlo Argan have analysed cinema in this regard. Others have practised it in undertaking art history: Kenneth Clark is one example. Another is Carlo Ragghianti, who made 20 critofilms between 1948 and 1964 which he defined as “a reading and a critical analysis of artistic language realised through the visual language of cinema”.Is our contemporary era, marked as it is by the globalisation of art and the proliferation of films on art (documentaries, “art films”, experimental films, biopics), beginning thus to create its own art history? If so, of which sort?This art history through film has a comparative intention, marked by a re-reading of the art of the past, in the way that Bill Viola, for example, is enlivening painting. It has the potential to transform connoisseurship by enabling a new relationship to emerge between the eye and the artwork, but it is also a post-colonial history which bursts the boundaries between ethnographic films like those of Flaherty or Les Maîtres fous of Jean Rouch (1954) or Les Statues meurent aussi of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, and films of today’s highly ritualised “performance art” manifestations. As well it brings consideration to new approaches, such as those of the neuro-sciences and questions the force of images (David Freedberg) and their “agency” (Gell). Henri Storck has written: “The eye of the camera is much more powerful than our own”.In his book L’Intemporel (1973), Malraux wrote that “the museum of the audio-visual” had replaced the “museum of the imaginary”. With video and digital art, the art history film has entered a new era, while still remaining an important element of the teaching of art history, as had been wished for from very early on since the 1950s by the art historian Pierre Francastel.Already in the 1960s UNESCO played an important part in searching out and compiling an inventory of resources relating to film on art. Such investigation needs to be resumed today. But above all, it is the history of the “art history film” which still remains to undertaken at a time when the challenges of a now polycentred world are sketching out a different future.

Jean-Luc Godard: The Cinema in Doubt

Jean-Luc Godard: The Cinema in Doubt

Depth and Time in Merleau-Ponty and Deleuze

In a footnote in his second book on cinema, The Time-Image, Deleuze admits that his understanding of depth - one of the central notions in the book and thus in his theory on time and its presentation in cinema - can be traced back to Bergson and Merleau-Ponty. The reference to Bergson is not surprising as Deleuze made no secret of the Bergsonian inspiration of his philosophy and especially of his theory on time. However, with respect to Merleau-Ponty this does not speak for itself. After all, throughout Deleuze's oeuvre, references to Merleau-Ponty are rather rare and mostly negative. Deleuze considers Merleau-Ponty to be one of the representatives of those philosophies who seem to defend an immanentism but actually reinstall a transcendent layer. Deleuze's acknowledgement is thus quite remarkable, all the more because of the centrality of the notion of depth in this book and, in a way, also in his whole philosophy. A second reason why this acknowledgement is striking is that Merleau-Ponty's notion of depth is sometimes presented as the notion that indicates the divergence between the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty and Bergson. According to Fabrice Colonna, Merleau-Ponty deploys this notion in order to turn the extrinsic relation between present and virtual past that he discovers in Bergson, into an intrinsic one. This point of view does not only contradict the continuity between both authors proposed by Deleuze in the footnote, it also implies a divergence between the Bergsonian theory of depth by Deleuze and the one by Merleau-Ponty. In this article I will examine the range of this Deleuzian reference to Merleau-Ponty. How do both authors understand depth? Is there a common vector in both accounts? How far does this vector reach or where does it split up to take different directions? The specificity of each approach will be illustrated with a comparison between the movie Citizen Kane by Orson Welles and Muriel ou le temps d'un retour by Alain Resnais.

Sur un autre plan de la réalité : imaginaire, création et alcool dans Providence d’Alain Resnais

Providence by Alain Resnais (1977) offers a reflection on human imagination and the creation of art. Within the structure, narration and symbolism of the film, the motive of alcohol plays a decisive role, as all the characters are drinking wine during the whole story. The continuous flow of alcohol is an image of the flux of thoughts of an old writer, who uses his drunkenness like his art for meditating on his life at another level of reality, where he can lose and find himself at the same time.

The Neuro-Image. Alain Resnais's Digital Cinema without the Digits

Der Beitrag schlägt vor, das Kino des digitalen Zeitalters als einen neuen Typus des Bildes zu lesen: als Neuro-Bild. Im Rückgriff auf Gilles Deleuzes Kino-Bücher sowie sein Werk Differenz und Wiederholung argumentiert der Beitrag, dass das Neuro-Bild in der Zukunft begründet sei. Abschließend wird das Kino von Alain Resnais als Neuro-Bild und digitales Kino avant la lettre vorgestellt. </br></br>This paper proposes to read cinema in the digital age as a new type of image, the neuroimage. Going back to Gilles Deleuze's cinema books and it is argued that the neuro-image is based in the future. The cinema of Alain Resnais is analyzed as a neuro-image and digital cinema .

The philosophical war: Beyond the Cartesian subject in Alain Resnais's La Guerre est finie (1966)

ABSTRACTThis article provides a detailed formal analysis of constructs of subjectivity in the early feature films of Alain Resnais, culminating in a close reading of his 1966 film, La Guerre est finie/The War is Over. I argue that Resnais offers a unique and illustrative example for how cinema is aligned with twentieth-century philosophy, in particular through his modes of deconstructing conventions of film language so as to challenge classical understandings of the binary or hierarchical relationship between subject and object, interior and exterior, real and imaginary.

The Kraken Wakes

At one point in Wild Grass , the protagonist Georges is typing at his desk late at night. As Mark Snow's wistful music plays, the camera commences a slow tour of the room, encompassing a picture, a lamp, bookshelves, and an African mask on the shadowy wall. When it reaches the heavily draped window, though, we realize that time has been compressed; suddenly it is morning outside. His wife enters and greets Georges fondly. It is such a graceful shot. It could belong to a cohesive and humane film in which art (personified by the eager typist) masters space, condenses time, and rejoices in the unity of a loving couple. But Wild Grass is not that film. Consider, just for a start, the unseen narrator's commentary on the scene (adapted from Christian Gailly's novel, L'Incident ), which describes a disordered and suggestible mind: ““He kept writing about what he believed his life to be. He ended up believing it. No, he believed it. He wrote it, so he believed it.”” Notice too the simple fact that the camera spends as much time on objects as characters. Starting with its title, Wild Grass subverts anthropocentrism. The film opens with a series of oddly impersonal images: vegetation, the back of a woman's spiky hairdo, designer shoes, a stolen handbag swinging from an invisible thief's hand. The mobile viewpoint for some of …

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This article purposes a consideration on themes relevant to Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory, by means of two short-stories by Clarice Lispector, two poems – one by Manuel Bandeira and one by Cecilia Meireles – and one movie by Alain Resnais. Concerning all these examples, the aim is to deal with issues related to meaning, body, absence, touch and the eroticism movement – and to investigate traces of the body denial as an absolute truth or as a closure of meaning in the female characters, since they sometimes behave themselves as saints, sometimes as whores. In Noli me tangere , an essay by Jean-Luc Nancy based on a Biblical episode, we become aware that the contact between resuscitated Jesus and Maria Magdalena does not actually happen – and this is a motive scene for composing a consideration on the chosen corpus .

Who Killed Brigitte Bardot?: Perspectives on the New Wave at Fifty

Who Killed Brigitte Bardot? Perspectives on the New Wave at Fifty Vanessa R. Schwartz (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. A bloodied and lifeless Bardot sprawls across a red Alfa Romeo in Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le mépris [Les Films Concordia, 1963]). Let us begin by contemplating an image of Brigitte Bardot, the most famous woman in the world when the New Wave was taking shape fifty years ago. The image comes from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le mépris, 1963) and is of a bloodied and lifeless Bardot sprawled in a red Alfa Romeo (Figure 1). This image of her violent death not only reminds us of the New Wave’s deep discomfort with Bardot’s celebrity at the time, but also serves as a marker of a greater historiographic unease with Bardot more generally within Film Studies. Her career and films have been largely sidelined in favor [End Page 145] of a narrative that has overplayed and privileged the history of the New Wave; Bardot becomes important only insofar as she starred in the films of directors such as Jean- Luc Godard who then self-consciously offered visual unpackings of her enormous celebrity while (perhaps unwittingly) contributing to furthering it. Louis Malle, in A Very Private Affair (Vie privée [1962]), explicitly treats the issue of celebrity by having Bardot play a character so trapped by her own fame that she even suffers one of the earliest paparazzi “death by flashbulb” murders depicted on the screen. Now that the New Wave is by some accounts “officially” fifty, perhaps, like a wise middle-aged person, it can be sober and mature enough to admit its excesses and exaggerations, its partis pris, and, finally, come to terms with who “it” murdered to get ahead. In particular, I am interested in bringing together recent feminist reevaluations such as Geneviève Sellier’s in Masculine Singular: French New Wave Cinema (which has recently underscored the New Wave’s troubled relationship to women, gender, and sexuality) with broader historical contextualizations that shed light on certain aspects of the marketing of French film about which we ought to know more—marketing that made the New Wave possible in the first place—and in reintegrating film audiences when we are thinking about the New Wave’s history.1 The first step in coming to terms with middle age is to stop lying about it. We now accept that, while the term “nouvelle vague” was first used by Françoise Giroud in the pages of L’Express in 1957 in relation to an article about the youthful postwar generation, it had nothing to do with the cinema. Critic Pierre Billard coined the term in relation to film in the pages of Cinéma 58 when he made a list of forty filmmakers under forty. The year 1959 has become the benchmark date for the birth of the Nouvelle Vague because Claude Chabrol released Le beau Serge and Les cousins in February/March of that year, and because during the Cannes Film Festival, Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups) won for Best Director, Marcel Camus’s Black Orpheus (Orfeo Negro) won the Palme D’Or, and Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour played then as well, making it seem as if something was happening in French cinema. But 1959 has also been pinpointed because it was in that year, during the Cannes festival, that UniFrance Film (the French Film Export Association) gathered a group of filmmakers and critics at La Napoule, near Cannes, hoping they would proclaim that they collectively stood for a new and unified vision of film. They could agree on nothing more than that films should be an act of personal creation and that filmmaking was a vocation rather than a profession. In some measure, these two points of agreement have stuck as vital aspects of the New Wave’s notion of “auteurism,” although the problem of whether there is any unified artistic expression in the French New Wave seemed then, as much as now, to be a hopeless cause. Yet, despite all historical evidence to the contrary, ever since its “declaration,” the New...

Introduction

Introduction Ginette Vincendeau, Editor (bio) The year 2009 was awash with fiftieth anniversary celebrations of the French New Wave, from the French consulate in Hong Kong to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Ciné Lumière in London to the Vieille Charité in Marseille and the Cinémathèque Française in Paris, and many other places in between. Festivals, retrospectives, and conferences commemorated what has become the landmark film movement in French cinema, widely seen as “an alternative cinema that was personal, radical and independent” whose effects “are still with us today.”1 As these words (culled from the Irish Film Institute program—but I could have picked any number of other sources) make clear, the dominant tone has been one of celebration. It is with this in mind that I approached the contributors to this In Focus feature. All are recognized experts on the French New Wave and on this period of French film history through their publications, but all share the desire to challenge our vision of the movement, or at the very least to push the boundaries beyond the recognized canon of filmmakers—traditionally understood as comprising two groups, one around the Cahiers du cinéma (François Truffaut, Jean- Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer, and Jacques Rivette), the other the “Left Bank” filmmakers Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker. Not that there is not a lot to celebrate about the French New Wave. Undoubtedly the nouvelle vague represented a break in filmmaking practice at the turn of the 1960s, introducing new ways of making films outside the mainstream industry, spreading the use of lighter technologies, ushering in an entire new generation of directors, stars, cinematographers, producers, and composers. It also, significantly, revolutionized the way people saw films and the way they wrote about them, in particular popularizing the politique des auteurs. This familiar [End Page 135] “legend,” or “myth” in Antoine de Baecque’s terms,2 whose gods are François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, surrounded by the other directors mentioned above, has been remarkably successful at perpetuating itself. This is in part due to the fact that most are still making films fifty years later (and in many cases films that still matter), as are many of the stars concerned—Jeanne Moreau and Jean-Pierre Léaud, to name but two. The brilliance, charm, and freshness of the films is clearly another important factor. For each new generation of film students and cinephiles, the modernist yet elegiac black-and-white visions of Paris offered by Breathless (À bout de souffle [ Jean-Luc Godard, 1960]) and Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cléo de 5 à 7 [Agnès Varda, 1962]); the cruel yet ardent sexual games of Paris Belongs to Us (Paris nous appartient [ Jacques Rivette, 1960]), Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianiste [François Truffaut, 1960]), Les bonnes femmes (Claude Chabrol,1960), and Jules et Jim (Truffaut, 1962); the sincerity and intensity of The 400 Blows (Les quatre cents coups [Truffaut, 1959]) and Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais,1959), all come as a fresh revelation. In short, these films of fifty years ago have a nonchalance and modernity that is still sexy and “cool” today. Wittingly or not, the New Wave directors were adept at perpetuating their own legend through a trick of historiography. Central to this is the famous polemical article by François Truffaut titled “A Certain Tendency in French Cinema,” originally published in Cahiers du cinéma in January 1954,3 in which Truffaut ferociously attacked French mainstream cinema, and in particular the somber melodramas and costume films of the so-called Tradition of Quality. The article spearheaded a veritable campaign by Truffaut and others such as Godard and Chabrol to denigrate mainstream French cinema and position themselves as the figures of renewal. This classic avantgardist strategy, aimed at creating a “distinction” (in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms) within the French cinematic field between the new generation and the rest, was successful not only in promoting the new filmmakers as both critics and cineastes, but also in creating a historiographical vacuum around the New Wave. For a long time, and to a large...

DVD Reviews

High and Low/Tengoku to jigoku (1963) Japan Director Akira Kurosawa Screenplay Hideo Oguni, Eijiro Hisaita, Ryuzo Kikushima, Akira Kurosawa Based on the book King's Ransom by Ed McBain (aka Evan Hunter) Producers Ryuzo Kikushima, Tomoyuki Tanaka Directors of Photography Asakazu Nakai, Takao Saito Production Designer Yoshiro Muraki Costumes Miyuki Suzuki With Toshiro Mifune (Kingo Gondo), Tatsuya Nakadai (Inspector Tokura), Kyoko Kagawa (Reiko Gondo), Tatsuya Mihashi (Kawanishi), Tsutomo Yamazaki (Takeuchi), Yutaka Sada (Aoki), Isao Kimura (Detective Arai) Runtime 143 minutes DVD USA, 2008 Produced and Distributed by The Criterion Collection (region 1) Aspect Ratio 2.35:1 Sound Mix Dolby 4.0 Extras New, restored high-definition digital transfer with original four-track surround sound. Audio commentary by Stephen Prince. New subtitle translation. 37-minute documentary on the making of High and Low. Interview with Toshiro Mifune. Interview with Tsutomu Yamazaki. American and Japanese theatrical trailers. 35-page booklet with essays by Geoffrey O'Brien and Donald Richie. Muriel, ou le Temps d'un retour (1963) France Director Alain Resnais Producer Anatole Dauman With Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kerien, Nita Klein, Jean-Baptiste Thierree Runtime 111 minutes DVD UK, March 2009 Distributed by Eureka, The Masters of Cinema (region 2) Aspect Ratio 1.66:1 In The Pit (2006) Director Juan Carlos Rulfo Producers Eugenia Montiel and Juan Carlos Rulfo Runtime 84 minutes DVD Mexico, 2006 Produced and Distributed by Kino International Extras Theatrical trailer. Stills gallery. Optional English subtitles. Manufactured Landscapes (2006) Director Jennifer Baichwal Producers Nick De Pencier, Daniel Iron and Jennifer Baichwal Runtime 82 minutes DVD Canada, 2006 Produced and Distributed by Zeitgeist Extras Additional scenes with audio commentary by director. Edward Burtynsky's photo gallery. Video discussion with Baichwal and Burtynsky. Video interview with cinematographer/collaborator Peter Mettler, Al Gore and Baichwal at the Nashville Film Festival. US Theatrical Trailer. Optional English subtitles. Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972) France Director Maurice Pialat Screenplay Tito Carpi and Maurice Pialat Producers Jacques Dorfmann, Maurice Pialat and Jean-Pierre Rassam Director of Photography Luciano Tovoli With Marlene Jobert (Catherine), Jean Yanne (Jean), Macha Meril (Franoise), Christine Fabrega (Catherine's mother), Jacques Galland (Catherine's father) Runtime 102 minutes DVD UK, 2009 Produced and Distributed by Eureka, The Masters Of Cinema Series (region 2) Aspect Ratio Anamorphic Widescreen 1.66:1 Sound Mix Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono Extras La Camargue (1966), 6-minute essay-documentary by Maurice Pialat. 19-minute 2003 interview with star Marlene Jobert. 5-minute excerpt from the 1972 Pour le cinema: Special Cannes, featuring interviews with Jean Yanne and Maurice Pialat. 8-minute excerpt from the 1972 Vive le cinema featuring Francois Truffaut in conversation. 12-minute excerpt from 1972 Vive le cinema featuring Maurice Pialat. Original trailer, plus six other Pialat trailers. Booklet with new essay by former Cahier du cinema editor-in-chief Emmanual Burdeau. Passe ton Bac d'abord (1979) France Director Maurice Pialat Screenplay Maurice Pialat Producer Maurice Pialat Director of Photography Pierre William Glenn and Jean-Paul Janssen Editing Sophie Coussein, Martine Giordano and Arlette Langmann With Sabine Haudepin (Elisabeth), Philippe Marlaud (Philippe), Bernard Tronczak (Bernard), Patrick Lepcynski (Patrick), Valerie Chassigneux (Valerie) Runtime 81 minutes DVD UK, 2009 Produced and Distributed by Eureka, The Masters Of Cinema Series (region 2) Aspect Ratio Anamorphic Widescreen 1.66:1 Sound Mix Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono Extras Interview with Pialat contributors Arlette Langmann and Patrick Grandperret. Apres Le Bac (2003), a 26-minute documentary featurette by Serge Toubiana and Sonia Buchman. Original trailer, and six other trailers for Maurice Pialat features. A lengthy booklet with newly translated Pialat interviews. The dumbing-down of Tavernier and James Lee Burke By Patrick McGilligan

Igal Halfin . Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University . (Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies.) Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press . 2009 . Pp. vii, 485. Cloth $65.00, paper $27.95.

Igal Halfin details the story of turmoil and death at Leningrad's Communist University, adding to the works that probe the Terror in particular sites or organizations. This book draws on the concept of the Soviet self developed by Jochen Hellbeck. It will therefore find favor with those who feel that available evidence allows access to the deepest reaches of the Soviet psyche. In any event, Halfin makes a useful contribution to our understanding of the Terror's dynamics. Several related images appear frequently in the book: the Black Mass, the devil and demonization, messianic times, depravity, and purity. These are presented almost cinematically, à la Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Nothing takes place outdoors; the only settings that matter are the meeting halls of the Communist University and, above all, the seemingly endless interrogation chambers of the NKVD. There, Halfin argues, “Communists feared they were indeed the wicked enemies their interrogators accused them of being. At least in part, terror was in the soul” (p. 23). In this “salvational time” and apparently these salvational rooms, “the soul was becoming transparent” (pp. 109, 105). The accused participated in relinquishing their very selves and accepting ones that the NKVD created. Prisoners underwent “total voidance of their personalities” (p. 258). All of this self-abasement was driven by a “hypermoral” and “hyperrational” (pp. 8, 2) quest for absolute purity as the final days approached. “Deviants”—anyone less than perfect—could not be saved, only destroyed.

Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France (review)

Reviewed by: Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France Anne M. Kern (bio) Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France, by Dorota Ostrowska. Wallflower Press 2008. $85.00 hardcover; $28.00 paper. 256 pages In Reading the French New Wave: Critics, Writers and Art Cinema in France, Dorota Ostrowska sets out to reveal the extent to which the histories of avant-garde film and literary movements in France during the 1950s and 1960s are inextricably intertwined. The murky relationship between the nouveau roman and nouvelle vague has been addressed by other scholars,1 but Ostrowska approaches the subject from an innovative angle: instead of training her eye on the films and novels themselves, her focus is on the contemporaneous critical discourse generated around literary and cinematic production. This wide-ranging, ambitious study gathers together an array of figures that helped to shape French literary and cinematic developments in the latter half of the twentieth century, including such unexpected protagonists as Jean- Paul Sartre, Gérard Genette, the Surrealists, Alfredo Bioy Casares, and Jorge Luis Borges. Reading the French New Wave is presented chronologically from 1951 to 1967, with special emphasis on Holocaust survivor, critic, novelist, and filmmaker Jean Cayrol, to whom Ostrowska devotes an entire chapter. Some of the most famous members of the nouvelle vague, such as Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, appear only marginally in the book. This is a deliberate strategy on the part of the author, whose focus is on figures such as Cayrol whose ties between the nouveau roman and nouvelle vague are clear, and on figures who meditated directly on [End Page 172] one medium from the vantage point of the other (e.g., director Eric Rohmer, who thought film might eclipse the novel and attain the status of “new visual literature”).2 One of the merits of Ostrowska’s study is her insistence on looking beyond the few names and concepts that have come to be associated with these movements; as she highlights in the introduction, the most intense phase of the nouvelle vague (from about 1959 to 1962) comprised dozens more directors and critics than the eight or so filmmakers normally associated with the term. The author carefully weaves each strand of her historical narrative in order to define a very specific, yet stubbornly elusive concept: the “cine-literary,” in which cinematic and literary elements “are presented as equivalent to each other and hybrid in nature.”3 Ostrowska begins by painstakingly outlining the historical conditions that brought the two movements into being. The author’s overall strategy is to be synthetic and recursive; she stops to summarize within chapters as well as at the end of each one, which is particularly helpful given the range of material she covers. She connects theoretical developments of the cinematic and literary avant-gardes from the 1920s to those of the 1950s (e.g., photogénie and roman pur) and adumbrates the creation of the journal Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, foregrounding the nouvelle vague’s filmmaking as it emerged out of the crucible of Cahiers’ critical practice. Ostrowska contends that far from being truly emancipated from the language and concepts of literature, the Cahiers critics in the 1950s created a taxonomy of cinema based heavily on literary comparisons and antecedents. The theoretical terms developed by them (écriture, mise-en-scène, politique des auteurs)—many of which have been foundational to cinematic discourse—are also derived from literary references. “This created a paradoxical situation,” she explains, “where the definition of pure cinematic form was based on a literary framework.”4 At the same time, the novelists and critics associated with the nouveau roman—including Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Jean Cayrol—drew on many of the same inspirations as the Cahiers group: American authors such as William Faulkner and John Dos Passos, the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, and the interconnection between artistic production and strong critical practice. Though filmmaker Alain Resnais has mostly abstained from writing about film and has never fit neatly into the nouvelle vague mold, Ostrowska locates a kind of apotheosis in his partnerships with nouveau roman...

The Four Walls of Infinity: Unravelling the Concepts of Space, Time, and Continuity in Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad

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Alain Resnais

Alain Resnais, recipient of the Cannes Festival 2009 lifetime achievement award, is not simply a ‘difficult’ director, but also a director whose work is unusually difficult to condense into a single academic study. In this comprehensive assessment of his seven decade-long career, Emma Wilson actively identifies the ‘extraordinary departures and reinventions’ (p. 196) that occur within a body of work with vast internal differences in form, content and genre, and opts for a film-by-film approach, necessary, she insists, ‘to allow the later films to be viewed on their own terms and not to be overshadowed by such unequalled and inimitable works as Hiroshima mon amour and L'Année dernière à Marienbad’ (p. 196). Admitting that this deliberately selective tactic may seem ‘syncopated, even amnesiac’, Wilson justifies her methodology by revealing that while Resnais's films undoubtedly demonstrate continuity and coherence, any attempt to assess this in terms of ‘plenitude or completion’ (p. 198) is doomed to failure. From the aching sorrow of Hiroshima (1959) to the whimsical artifice of On connaît la chanson (1997) and Pas sur la bouche (2003), she argues that Resnais's work lends itself less to a vertical, rigid evaluation of a single aesthetic or intellectual position, and more to a horizontal, unstable investigation of the multiple ways in which the complex, ephemeral, disjointed experiences of the lived life might be rendered in cinematic form. Each film, she suggests, constitutes a tabula rasa, in which the director's interrogation of the fragility of reality and the fluidity of narrative is fully revealed in an intricate weaving of wider inter-textual patterns of flow and interconnectivity. Wilson demonstrates how individual films are characterised by a ‘vertiginous’ oscillation between fragmentation and fusion, and discusses spectatorship as an embodied process, anchored in Resnais's distinctive use of editing and tracking, forces that disrupt and mobilise the spectator – sometimes simultaneously – and give form to Resnais's conception of the tactile nature of cinema. His characters universally experience a malaise, imprinted beneath layers and veils of misunderstanding, unspoken desire, grief and loss, and Resnais's singular talent, Wilson argues, is to induce the same malaise in the spectator, using sensory equivalents to unsettle viewers, and to formulate filmic structures appropriate to the complex evocation of parallel histories and competing realities. Given Resnais's place in the modern canon it is perhaps inevitable that about half the book is given over to a sensitive discussion of the early work, including the documentaries made between 1948 and 1958, and the totemic feature films Hiroshima (1959), Marienbad (1961) and Muriel ou le temps d'un retour (1963). Thereafter, the book groups the later works into chronological segments, with a full chapter dedicated to Providence (1977) and three chapters covering a further eleven films. It is perhaps in this respect that Wilson's book will be of most value to students and researchers, who will look to it for its understanding of the less well-classified films, and her assessment of them as creative extensions of earlier priorities. This is a study that both informs and enriches the experience of (re)viewing Resnais's films and is all the more accessible for its recent reissue in paperback.

The interactive potential of post-modern film narrative - Frequency, Order and Simultaneity

A considerable number of contemporary films are now using narrative models that allow several adaptations on digital and interactive operating systems. This trend is seen in films such as Memento by Christopher Nolan (2000), Irreversible by Gaspar Noe (2002) and Smoking / No Smoking by Alain Resnais (1993), concerning the chronological organization of their narrative parts – here it is a question of order. Or in films such as Elephant by Gus Van Sant (2003), Groundhog Day by Harold Ramis, 1993 and Rashomon by Akira Kurosawa (1950), for the diegetic repetition – a question of frequency. Or even, in films such as Magnolia by Paul Thomas Anderson (1999) and Short Cuts by Robert Altman, 1993 which use the idea of expansion or compression of the narrative – a question of simultaneity. To change the accessibility of the cinematographic experience and to constantly re-evaluate the way in which the narrative tool is used, is from now on considered the interactive potential of the contemporary film narrative.