Alain Resnais 5 Short Movies FR subs EN ES PT

5 Short films by Alain Resnais

Texts by Laetitia Mikles

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Guernica

> Credits
1950. 13 min. Directors: Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens. Script: Paul Eluard. Director of photography: Henry Ferrand. Sound: Pierre-Louis Calvet. Editor: Alain Resnais. Music: Guy Bernard. Produced by: Pierre Braunberger. Production company: Pantheon Productions. Narrators: Maria Casares and Jacques Pruvost.

> Synopsis
On 26 April 1937', Guernica, a Spanish Basque town, was bombarded non-stop for over three hours by explosive bombs and incendiary bombs, leaving 2,000 dead, all civilians. Alain Resnais borrows from Paul Eluard's poetic tribute to the martyred town and combines it with the paintings produced by Pablo Picasso from 1902 to 1949. By teaming up the communist poet's anguished poem with the Spanish painter's art, Alain Resnais composes a cinematographic lament on the vulnerability of man and his terrible ferocity. The barbarity of war is described with all the anger of revulsion. Yet the painter, poet and director all distance despair to draw on words, pictures and art as hope for indomitable dignity: "Guernica! Innocence will out the crime."

> Note
Eluard's poem forms an ode to the faces of the thousands of victims of the bombardment. Resnais chooses the soft, fine lines ofPic'!sso's blue period: children dressed as harlequins, frail tumblers and fragile acrobats. Then, with a series of zooms, rapid cut montage and sub-set images, the film evokes the civil war. Taking his inspiration from the Spanish master, the filmmaker builds collages: he cuts out pieces of newspaper. "overlays" painted faces on them, pastes the whole thing onto graffitied walls and subjects it to a riddling of bullets. The music combines drums and trumpets (military instruments) with the sounds of war: sirens, gunfire and planes. Darkness suddenly portrays the cellar we share with the humble folk drawn by Picasso. The camera slides from a silhouette surrounded by darkness to an outline immersed in shadow. This slow tracking shot links those who will be brutally separated, crushed, destroyed. Suddenly, we glimpse through glaring flashes monstrous, twisted faces, half man, half beast, disjointed forms. Cropping splits and divides the picture in epileptic jolts. The frame is awash with panicked flickering. Resnais accompanies the tale of this bloodbath with the heads of animals dying in agony and disjointed human bodies painted by a Picasso horrified by the fate of his compatriots. This is a far cry from the softly affected canvases of the early days. The shock of this barbarous act was to change the painter's life forever. The horrors of war totally transformed the ways of drawing, composing, writing. Yet from this disarray was born a new human figure: a clay sculpture with allegorical power. Eluard, the optimistic pacifist, and Picasso, the impulsive, join forces to celebrate the indomitable vitality of man.

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Les statues meurent aussi (Even Statues Die)

> Credits
1953. 30 min. Directors: Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Script: Chris Marker. Director of photography: Ghislain Cloquet. Sound: Rene Louge. Music: Guy Bernard. Production companies: Presence Mricaine and Tadie Cinema. Narrator: Jean Negroni. Awards: Prix Jean Vigo (1954)·

> Synopsis
"We were asked to make a film on Negro art. Chris Marker and I had this question: why is Negro art in the Paris Museum of Man while Greek and Egyptian art is in the Louvre?" A commission from Presence Africaine magazine leads Alain Resnais and Chris Marker to celebrate the beauty and mystery of African objects. The directors ask whether, by calling them artistic objects, Western man has not distorted them. The authors vehemently criticise the acculturation mechanisms imposed on the African continent by colonisation and defend the idea of continuity and fraternity between the African and European civilisations.

> Note
The film opens with a satirical definition of culture, "this botany of death", accompanied by pictures of bas-relief decapitated by time, lost in a forest. The camera then leaves nature arid locks itself in the temple of culture: the museum. Strangely, this museum Contains ordinary everyday objects from everyday lives. This little curiosity shop (inspired by Tristan Tzara) invites Western visitors to challenge their ambiguous perception of African objects. They "overinterpret" and distort them by projecting their own values onto them. This criticism of ethnocentrism is at the heart of the debate launched at the same time among ethnologists, as shown by Jean Rouch in his films. A series of masks appears to loom out of the night, out of all context. The absence of any commentary helps to see them as they really are, to cast off any preconceived ideas, to admit to being ignorant of the history of Africa rather than to negate it. The voiceover comes in to give a different meaning to these objects: art, ornamental, useful, decorative, sacred, death and creation, everything is to be reconsidered. These so-called simple and "primitive" forms come from a rich, learned perception of the world, and that is a very destabilising notion for the white man. This series of masks, statues, details (wood designs, lines on skin, bark, fabric, etc.) paradoxically highlights its' singularity. The film condemns the criminal acculturation imposed on Africa, giving a new twist to contemporary films intended to show the civilising work of the white man. While the Africans live their art as a measured taming of death, the Europeans are the grave diggers ... unaware of destroying the very matrix of their own culture. The film's anticolonial stance caused a scandal. It was banned for ten years before finally being released, cut by one-third.

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Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog)

> Credits
1955. 32 min. Director: Alain Resnais. Script: Jean CayroL Directors of photography: Ghislain Cloquet and Sacha Vierny. Sound: Jacqueline Chasney and Henri Colpi. Editor: Alain Resnais. Music: Hanns Eisler. Produced by: Anatole Dauman, Samy Halfon and Philippe Lifchitz. Narrator: Michel Bouquet. Awards: Prix Jean Vigo (1956).

> Synopsis
In 1955, the French Second World War History Committee asked Alain Resnais to make a film to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps. The film is in two parts. 1933: the launch of Hitler's machine and the creation of the first camps, the description of their architecture, the hierarchy, and the heinous treatment of the camp prisoners. 1943: the description of the extermination, the gas chambers and the management of the death camps. Jean Cayrol's sober narration warns viewers tempted to avert their eyes from these horrendous images of the risk of seeing their memories become as murky as "frigid and muddy water".

> Note
Peaceful pastoral landscapes encircled by camera movements with barbed wire ... Night and Fog is structured using this terrible juxtaposition of the banal (a landscape, the name of a town) with the unique horrors committed by the Nazis. Resnais combines colour footage of Auschwitz in 1955 with black-and-white Nazi archival clips and the films shot by Sidney Bernstein, head of the allied armies cinema section, when the Bergen-Belsen camp was liberated. Rather than creating a chronological rift, the colour points up the contemporaneousness of the atrocities described. The reference to "normal life" is omnipresent in the narration written by Jean Cayrol, himself a survivor of the Mauthausen camp: "A concentration camp is built like a stadium or a hotel ... " Michel Bouquet's impassive voice endeavours to rationally explain the killing machine (other survivors have done this in literature: Primo Levi, Robert Anthelme, Germaine Tillon) , but admits that he is powerless to fathom the reality beneath "the outer shell" of the visible. When he comes to the bodies used like a vulgar raw material, the commentary cuts off: "From the bodies ... Words are insufficient." The film represents the crux of the Holocaust dilemma: the absolute necessity for a record and the unrepresentability of such a crime. Night and Fog also reveals a great deal about the pathological silence of its time: the words "genocide" and 'Jew" are never mentioned. It was not until Claude Lanzmann's Shoah that documentaries started addressing the Holocaust head on. Although the fact remains that the film compelled a highly disturbing duty of memory in the 1950s. It fell foul of the censors and, although selected at Cannes, was withdrawn from the official competition due to pressure from the West German Embassy in the name of reconciliation between the two countries.

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Toute la mémoire du monde (A11 of the World's Memory)

> Credits
1956. 2I min. Director: Alain Resnais. Script: Remo Forlani. Director of photography: Ghislain Cloquet. Editors: Claudine Merlin, Alain Resnais and Anne Sarraute. Music: Maurice Jarre. Produced by: Pierre Braunberger. Production company: Les Films de la Pleiade. Narrator: Jacques Dumesnil.

> Synopsis
"Because their memories are short, men amass no end of notes." And to store this mountain of writing, men build fortresses. Alain Resnais presents a guided tour of the French National Library. From its domed ceilings to its basements, from its catalogue room to its reading room, the entire backstage of this temple of knowledge is revealed. The mazelike path of a freshly catalogued book discloses some of the secrets of this repository of our universal knowledge. The exploration of this huge dark labyrinth of a library is also a subtle way of evoking the much more convoluted twists and turns of mere mortals' memories.

> Note
Cicero dated the art of memory back to the poet Simonides of Ceos, who identified the victims of an earthquake by remembering exactly where they were seated around a banqueting table. Spatial distribution and rational organisation are said to be essential techniques for recollection. This same concern with systematic order is found at the heart of the National Library. Alain Resnais makes full use of frontal, horizontal and vertical tracking shots to underscore the labyrinthine arrangement of this repository of memory. With these sometimes antagonistic tracking shots, the director confirms Aristotle's observation that memory never travels in a straight line, but in broken lines with meandering in between. This incessant circulation of books (via trolleys, lifts and librarians) is reminiscent of the complex neuronal web of our brains, whose connections constantly need to be stimulated and activated to prevent entire segments of our knowledge from sinking into infinite shadow lands. High angle shots put man in his proper place: that of an industrious ant lost in a colossal building. A vertiginous shot lingers on a spiral staircase: the spiral being a symbol of the mnemonic vortex. It appears, for example, in Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock) in which the hero has to confront the wrenches of deceptive recollections. The accumulation of statistical data triggers another type of vertigo: the vertigo you feel when faced with the unquenchable thirst of the librarians for exhaustiveness and the insatiable appetite of the readers convinced they will find the key to happiness hidden amongst this mass of knowledge.

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Le chant du styrene (The Styrene's Song)

> Credits
1958. 19 min. Director: Alain Resnais. Script: Raymond Queneau. Directors of photography: Alain Resnais and Sacha Vierny. Editors: Claudine Merlin and Alain Resnais. Music: Pierre Barbaud. Produced by: Pierre Braunberger. Production company: Les Films de la Pleiade. Narrator: Pierre Dux.

> Synopsis
What is plastic? Where does it come from? Alain Resnais, assisted by narration in Alexandrine verse written by Raymond Queneau, details the stages in the making of the plastic objects that inhabit our everyday lives. The director takes the manufacturing process in linear regression: from the creation of the mould to the extrusion of the polystyrene, from its cleaning to its pigmentation, from the mysteries of the autoclave to the secrets of chemical distillation ... No stage of the production process is left out. With a certain fascination for industrial architecture and a definite penchant for mock corporate films, Alain Resnais turns around Pechiney's commission. A tongue-in-cheek ode to plastic, The Styrene's Song is also a lyrical serenade celebrating the mechanisms of plastic creation.

> Note
The few verses from Victor Hugo prefacing the film set the tone: we will not make do with a simple guided tour around the Pechiney factories to understand how the most indispensable and insignificant objects of our everyday lives are created. No, we will give you an epic poem. A playful Raymond Queneau composes a manual in Alexandrine and rich rhymes. He juggles puns, invents a dialogue between apprentice and expert initiator, and crafts sonnets in entertaining, poetic technical jargon. Alain Resnais took his inspiration from the modern painters to stage this witty ballad in praise of the chemist's creativity. The predominance of abstract and geometric forms and the celebration of primary colours (setting the different stages of manufacture against coloured backgrounds) evoke the paintings of Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian, Recurring motifs from the world of mechanical engineering and machinery (stylisation of metal volumes and juxtaposition of nested forms) are reminiscent of Fernand Leger. Pierre Barbaud's music, a symphony of discordant chords, frenetic percussion and lyrical waltz, sets the rhythm for the choreographed cut. The many tracking shots along the factory's pipes heighten the concept of assembly line aesthetics and recreate a "mechanical ballet". Man is curiously absent from this complex process. Relegated to the rank of spectator-extra or a mere functional link in the chain, the human beings appear to take part in a transformation that is beyond them. By taking the process in reverse from the finished product to the raw material, the director considers not just the manufacture of plastic, but the plastic creation itself: this ability to model the matter, to give shape to the substance, this creative power that runs through and transcends man.