1951-1960Alain ResnaisArchitectureDocumentaryFranceShort Film
Alain Resnais – Toute la Memoire du Monde aka All the Memory of the World (1956)
With Toute la mémoire du monde, Resnais is setting the basis of his cinematographic project about places of memory. Within 20 minutes, Resnais is surgically, methodically analyzing the national library of France. With an hyperactive camera, he’s sneaking, he’s smelling, he’s feeling this huge building.
258MB | 20mn | 640×480 | avi
Language:French
Subtitles:English – hardcoded
A well-intended but too limited description of this very thought-provoking documentary. A copy/paste even from Wikipedia, of all sites, offers a better overview: “An essay on the potential and the limits of dutifully archived human knowledge, masquerading as a documentary on the organisation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.”. In this phase of his exploratory filmmaking, Alain Resnais – along with his collaborators – was tracking, seeking and exploring how time, the past vs the present, how stillness vs motion, silence vs voice-over, how the timeline of narrative itself can show us who are where we are.