A great follow-up to my Marienbad post – Resnais and labyrinths.
In 1956, Alain Resnais created a 20-minute long film entitled Toute la Mémoire du Monde (All the World’s Memory) that beautifully mixes documentary information with a fictitious style of filming and editing. What I just wrote is however symptomatic of a prejudice according to which documentary should tend towards objectivity in an attempt to capture the “truth” of what they are filming. We know that choosing such an ambition for a film is doomed to failure. On the contrary, when one voluntarily embraces the subjectivity of the documentarian, the chances are that the resulting movie would be much more powerful in communicating the piece of reality it is describing (we will see that soon in Peter Watkins’ movies). Toute la Mémoire du Monde is part of these movies. Through the dramatic journey of a book traveling through the registration and archival process of the Bibliothèque nationale de France
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Passing Time 
#1 by cathannabel on June 8, 2013 - 6:59 pm
And of course Sebald wrote about the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Austerlitz. Interesting questions about the link he made between the BNF and the site of an internment camp where Jewish prisoners processed goods looted by the Germans – see James Cowan’s paper in Monatshefte, 102, 1, Spring 2010
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#2 by decayetude on June 9, 2013 - 12:51 am
Great post, Cath:)i would like to explore the links with Sebald and Marienbad more, in the light of the Marienbad elegy in “Across the land and Water” and Hamburger and Jarays’ cryptic comments,quoted in this post of mine http://decayetude.wordpress.com/2012/12/08/what-happened-to-sebald-in-marienbad-conjecture-and-poemby-steven-benson/
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#3 by cathannabel on June 9, 2013 - 9:18 am
Thanks Steve – yes, there’s more to come on Sebald and Marienbad, I hope.
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