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.
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Jan 1, 2011
Heike Hardelauf + 10
Open Access
