Hiroshima mon amour

If you grew up in the 50’s and 60’s and had the opportunity of seeing Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour(1959) which is currently completing a revival at Film Forum, you might have been haunted or even experienced nightmares from the images, in particular the initial scene of two entangled bodies whose skin is covered with a strange encrustation that could be mistaken for scar tissue. Then there were the shots of the Hiroshima Museum with its melted bicycle and stones, it’s pictures of deformed bodies and “anonymous hair” and it’s citation of the fact that the temperature at the city’s Peace Square was l0,000 degrees. Now more than fifty years since the film’s release, it’s remarkable that we have become so inured to the imagery of the aftermath of the atomic blast, that the traumatic effect of these self-same images is practically nil. Ironically this turns out to be Resnais’s central theme. Time has not only brought the director’s point home, but brought it close to home. Another thing that Hiroshima underscores is the fact that Resnais functioned best when he was dealing with collective memory, which he ultimately appears to value over that of the individual--despite its intrinsic frailty. Together with his earlier documentary about Dachau, Night and Fog (1955), Hiroshima  constitutes a powerful diptych dealing with both the trauma of war and the trauma of life. Last Year At Marienbad the film for which Resnais is perhaps best known, is mysterious, but for all Hiroshima’s complexity and its numerous self-contradictory koans (“I will remember you as a symbol of love’s forgetfulness” is one many examples that run through the movie), it’s remarkably specific. Emmanuelle Riva plays a French actress and Eiji Okada, is the architect who is her lover. As an 18 year old, during the occupation of France, she falls for a German soldier. She undergoes public humiliation, losing her hair much the way her Japanese counterparts lose theirs due to the bomb. There’s little polemical or didactic significance, but the historical connection is intentionally far more durable then the recollections of the characters in Marguerite Duras’s brilliant script. “I’m beginning to forget you; forgetting so much love is terrifying” the actress says as the brief encounter of the protagonists begins to implode. Freud said “hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences,” but it was Joyce Stephen Dedalus who commented that “history is a nightmare from which we are trying to awake.” The title of the movie should be taken literally. It’s Hiroshima that's the true love object of the film.

Alain Resnais’s "Life of Riley"

They say life is not a rehearsal, but Alain Resnais's Life of Riley (Aimer, boire et chanter and not La Vie de Reilly is curiously the French title) portrays human existence as a series of rehearsals which take place totally off stage. Resnais last work. which premiered at The New York Film Festival and is now in theatrical release (he died in March) may seem like a far cry from Last Year at Marienbad, the l961 film, staged in an aristocratic chateau which created the director’s international reputation. The landscape is suburban and Life of Riley poses as a comedy of manners about the entanglements of a series of couples. Riley is based on an Alan Ayckbourn play while Last Year at Marienbad was shot from a script written Alain Robbe-Grillet, a master of the nouveau roman, and memory, one of the major themes of both Marienbad and Night and Fog, his classic documentary about Nazi concentration camps, is not a major theme in Riley. But the two movies share a remarkably similar air of mystery, despite their radically different tones and settings. In Riley, for example one of the main characters George, who is involved sexually with nearly all the women, never even appears. George functions like Hickey in The Iceman Cometh. He gains his power by his absence. The only other character who is talked about, but who never manages to make an appearance is significantly the director, Peggy. While Marienbad evoked an air of menace, Riley presents similarly disconcerting notions under the guise of lighthearted comedy. Reality looks like a stage set filled with scrims and topiaries and there is even an audience to the play that is not being rehearsed, composed of workers and attendees at a 16 year old’s party. Meanwhile Resnais further usurps the viewer’s bearings by introducing animations, head shots held tight against an abstract hatched backdrop and recurring shots taken from the point of view of a car rolling through the English countryside towards destinations that are not necessarily those connected to the hermetic couplings taking place on the “set.” Jack, Tamara, Colin, Kathyrn, Monica and Simeon are the couples and Monica, Colin, Kathryn and George constitute the cast. But what is the play within the play of the movie and what if anything does it have to do with the action occurring on Resnais’s set?

Je t’aime, je t'aime

The French love memory. Proust’s masterpiece was A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, In Search of Lost Time or The Remembrance of Things Past, as it’s most often translated. The French philosopher Henri Bergson” wrote a tome entitled Matter and Memory in which he distinguishes between “habitual” and “pure memory." Freud said dreams were “the royal road to the unconscious” and Bergson showed how certain kinds of mnemonic processes, perhaps like the Proustian madeleine, go beyond either the “habitual" or “pure" to open a door up on the past. Alain Resnais’s Je t’aime, Je t’aime (l968) currently playing at Film Forum takes the form of a science fiction film and concerns a time machine. But it’s crude science fiction at best and really just an occasion for the exploration of memory. Here Resnais continues the style of exposition he famously introduced in Last Year at Marienbad (l961) where flashbacks and repetitions (like that of the films title “je t’aime, Je t’aime”) produce a skewed vision of illusion and reality. It’s a project that also consumed two earlier films, Hiroshima Mon Amour (l959) and the documentary Night and Fog (1955). Resnais’s central character Claude Ridder (Claude Rich), who is recovering from a suicide attempt, is recruited outside a mental hospital, primarily because he’s someone, who cares little about living and is willing to risk a voyage into the past. In going back in time, the narrative inevitably plumbs the mystery of why he has attempted to take his own life. There's something mysterious about Marienbad and the same air of suspense hovers over Je t’aime Je t’aime, but it's the kind of suspense that accompanies the unfolding of memory in a psychoanalytic session. Thus, it’s not clear if the death of Claude’s girlfriend Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot), a quintessentially anhedonic character, is an accident or murder and both Catrine and Claude are linked thematically by their lack of desire to live. Mice are frequently used in experiments on memory and besides the film’s inadvertent excursions into the neurological concepts of both episodic and procedural memory, the mouse is Je t’aime’s one concession to hard science.

Paris Journal VII: Jean Cocteau at the Cinematheque Francaise

Photograph: Hallie Cohen

The Cinematheque Francaise was the brain child of Henri Langlois. Along with Andre Bazin’s Cahiers du Cinema, it became the home for New Wave directors like Truffaut, Rivette, Resnais Godard, and Chabrol.  Now housed in a Frank Gehry designed structure, the Cinematheque has come a long way from its humble beginnings and is now as auspicious a part of the French cultural landscape as say the Louvre, the Grand Palais or the Paris Opera. It’s hard to believe that the Cinematheque and the directors who supported it were once the new boys on the block, many of whose early efforts were a rebellion against the techniques and methods by which many French films had previously been made. One could look at Les Quatre cent coups as both a film about adolescence as well as a metaphor for rocky development of an art form. One thing that can also be said about the Cinematheque is that it’s a hundred and eighty degree turn from the quadriplexes in which films are now shown around the world. Even American art houses like Film Forum serve popcorn, but while you can eat in the Cinematheque’s café, there are no concession stands. The Cinematheque is like the Vatican for film buffs and you don’t eat popcorn when visiting  the Holy See. October ll was the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Jean Cocteau the poet, playwright and director and along with an exhibition devoted to his life, the Cinematheque has been showing classics like Le sang d’un poete and La belle et la bete. A newly restored version of the surrealist classic with its statues come to life  recently enchanted a Sunday afternoon audience of children and adults. In the hands of Cocteau the classic fairytale is turned into one of the great essays on sexual initiation and its accompanying landscape of murderous and libidinous wishes. As the current exhibition demonstrates, Cocteau had an enormous impact on both past and present. He and Andre Bazin wrote one of the first books in French on Orson Welles and his poetic vision of cinema was enormously influential on many French directors. Could there have been L’Annee derniere a Marienbad without the surrealist innovations of a film like Beauty and the Beast?

Boredom

Boredom is an unfairly maligned emotion. Inspiration, which shares some qualities of the sugar high, is what most artists claim they seek while enthrallment is what makes most readers buy books or theater tickets —either enthrallment  (Fifty Shades of Grey) or edification (How to Win Friends and Influence People). Boredom is certainly not what the potential lover seeks of his beloved. However caveat emptor, passion is like madness, a form of idealization that’s nature’s way of facilitating biological urges amidst the shoals of consciousness. Similarly, catharsis which produces enchantment and enthrallment can be delusory and manipulative, Aristotle’s Poetics notwithstanding. Boredom is less tolerated today then it was in the era of Edith Wharton and Henry James or even later in the high modernism or post-modernism of John Cage and Merce Cunningham. Both the way in which James reticulated prose captured states of being and the way in which Cunningham and Cage sought to redefine the forms they employed required some degree of work on the part of their audience and the result in the case of Cage, in particular, could be intentionally boring. Today, life is moving so fast, there is no time for boredom. Posts come and go on Facebook like the women in T.S. Eliot’s Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, “talking of Michelangelo.” How prescient Eliot was about esthetics evolving into creative gossip! But count to a hundred or maybe a thousand before you lose patience with people or artworks. When Waiting For Godot had its US premiere in Miami’s Coconut Grove Playhouse back in l956, with Bert Lahr as Estragon, the audience was hardly enchanted. Now Beckett’s play is part of the canon, but is it boring to watch? And what about Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, in which not very much happens, or Robert Wilson’s The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin which went on for 12 hours?