Alain Resnais

Hunter Vaughan interweaves phenomenology and semiotics to analyze cinema's ability to challenge conventional modes of thought. Merging Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception with Gilles Deleuze's image-philosophy, Vaughan applies a rich theoretical framework to a comparative analysis of Jean-Luc Godard's films, which critique the audio-visual illusion of empirical observation (objectivity), and the cinema of Alain Resnais, in which the sound-image generates innovative portrayals of individual experience (subjectivity). Both filmmakers radically upend conventional film practices and challenge philosophical traditions to alter our understanding of the self, the world, and the relationship between the two. Films discussed in detail include Godard's Vivre sa vie (1962), Contempt (1963), and 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her (1967); and Resnais's Hiroshima, mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and The War Is Over (1966). Situating the formative works of these filmmakers within a broader philosophical context, Vaughan pioneers a phenomenological film semiotics linking two disparate methodologies to the mirrored achievements of two seemingly irreconcilable artists.

The Holocaust is often described as beyond representation. Drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives, this ground-breaking collection of essays by leading international scholars takes the Scrolls of Auschwitz as its starting point. These powerful hand-written testimonies, which were buried in the grounds of the crematoria at Birkenau in 1944, seek to bear witness to mass murder from at its core. The accounts, which are often marginalized in studies of Holocaust testimony, are frequently highly literary and ask significant questions of the notion that Auschwitz cannot be attested to. The volume also includes a number of essays that consider other forms of testimony, in media such as film, literature and video, which have also been marginalized as they fail to conform to dominant ideas about the nature and structure of the event.

The real and beyond in Alain Resnais and Federico Fellini: from origins to the years of the dream

Thèse dirigée par Didier COUREAU, UGA préparée au sein du Laboratoire UMR 5316 Litt&Arts (Arts & Pratiques du Texte, de l'Image, de l'Ecran & de la Scène) dans l'École Doctorale Langues, Littératures et Sciences Humaines. Thèse soutenue publiquement le 10 décembre 2018.

In the contemporary political sphere, the need to address the complex interactions between colonial pasts, present day violence, and audio-visual representation has never appeared more urgent. This is particularly true of France’s troubled relationship with Algeria where, even after decolonization, episodes of violence — police repression, torture, and terrorism — were often excluded from popular, political and historical accounts on both sides of the Mediterranean. By engaging in close readings of work by both European and Algerian filmmakers — including Michael Haneke, Alain Resnais, Assia Djebar, Xavier Beauvois, and Nadir Moknèche — Maria Flood’s wide-ranging study links historical and memorial omission to film techniques that emphasize gaps, spaces, and exclusion, ultimately offering conclusions that inform wider thinking of the ethics of cinema in the face of violence.

Grief's emotional progress has a hidden grammar. Its syntax unfolds through aching desire, nostalgia, sadness, physical pain, anger, odd joy, even dullness and banality. It is absolutely singular, isolating a person from others and the familiar. It also throws a person outside him or herself, casting one into strange, even radically impersonal, relationships. Mudi has been written on the causes and mechanisms of trauma, yet this essay addresses less-discussed temporal aspects of remembering and memorializing the death of an intimate and the deaths of large groups of foreign bodies. First, it examines the topic of moving past and even forgetting grief, that is, how such processes are possible, and the emotional and ethical consequences when people move on. The function of time in grief is important here because traumatic memory complicates a linear chronology of emotional progress. The second section of the essay investigates these temporal aspects of grief in relation to communal loss. It looks at how individual and international forms of memory might relate to each other. The third part brings together the two previous sections around an idea of giving grief. Can someone and a nation give a memory of a traumatic event? What would it mean to gift grief itself? Is there anything psychologically , ethically, or politically desirable about this gesture? The temporal mechanisms of the gift, I suggest, offer not unprobiematic but potential solutions to issues that arise when one considers the scale of international mourning.

This is a review essay of <Jonas Mekas: Again, Again It All Comes Back to Me in Brief Glimpses> (MMCA, Seoul, Nov. 8, 2017- Mar. 4, 2018), arguably the biggest- if not, as I noted in the review, THE first- retrospective of Mekas’s career in Asia.

Parting ways with the popular understanding of Mekas as the pioneer and master of the diary mode of filmmaking (e.g. <365 Day Project>, (2007)) , marked by its irreducibly personal anecdotes and secrets, I draw attention to a different, almost counterintuitive aspect of his audiovisual images where the personal partakes of, if you will, ‘impersonal’ memories (of which Bergson and Deleuze spoke), or, a la Alain Resnais , <Toute la mémoire du monde>. 

“Memories, they say my images are my memories. No no no! These are not memories: this is all real what you see - every image, every detail, everything is real, everything is real and it’s not a memory, it has nothing to do with my memories anymore. Memories are gone, but the images are here, and they are real! What you see, every second of what you see, here, is real. Is real. Right there in front of your eyes, what you see, it’s real. There, in front of you. Yes, from that screen, it’s all real.” (Jonas Mekas, <Outtakes From The Life of a Happy Man>, 2012)

In this paper, I use two films—Les Statues MeurrentAussi (Statues also Die, 1953) directed by Resnais and Marker and Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983) as representatives of Left Bank cinema to show how they construct experiences of time and memory using various modernist strategies. Key to this is the use of a mental journey genre in modernist cinema and the construction of a facial dispositif which leads to a perceptual experiencing of inner states. Les Statues MeurrentAussi is a key film in the history of French cinema as it highlights Alain Resnais’ and Chris Marker’s early commitment towards a politically avant-garde filmmaking style. The film was banned for many decades because it was highly critical of France’s colonial interests. The film is also a proof to the less emphasised collaboration between two pioneering directors and especially in their use of the essay film genre. Sans Soleil on the other hand is considered as a philosophical masterpiece because of its meditations on time and memory. In taking these two films, I hope not only to demonstrate cinema’s capability to generate affective spatio-temporal states but also to highlight a piece of film history which is often misappropriated under the tag of the French New Wave.

Paru en 1974 aux éditions du Chêne, l’album "Repérages" réunit soixante-dix-sept photographies de repérages d’Alain Resnais, sélectionnées parmi des milliers de clichés par son ami et collaborateur, l'écrivain Jorge Semprun. Ce livre d’artiste est la première publication française à reconnaître une valeur esthétique singulière aux repérages réalisés par un cinéaste. L’ambitieuse préface signée Semprun invite à envisager ces images à la fois comme des archives documentant la genèse des films, réalisés ou non, et comme une « œuvre photographique » à part entière qui formerait la matrice visuelle et philosophique de l’imaginaire resnaisien. L’étude génétique et iconographique de "Repérages" voudrait éclairer la fonction de la photographie dans la méthode de création de Resnais comme dévoiler l’origine "secrète" des motifs récurrents et des obsessions qui traversent son cinéma.

Rossellini, Resnais, Pasolini, Ivens, Marker, Antonioni, Malle. C’è stata una stagione – orientativamente tra gli anni Cinquanta e i Settanta – in cui alcuni grandi cineasti europei hanno compiuto viaggi in Asia per realizzare film, documentari, inchieste, spinti chi da curiosità intellettuale, chi da militanza politica, chi da contingenze di lavoro. Le loro opere hanno spesso fatto parlare di sé: alcune sono state considerate imprescindibili (India di Rossellini), altre hanno causato incidenti diplomatici (Chung kuo - Cina di Antonioni), alcune hanno «inventato» nuove forme di racconto (Lettre de Sibérie di Marker), altre ancora offerto sguardi inediti su avvenimenti capitali del Novecento (Hiroshima mon amour di Resnais). Orient (to) Express è il primo libro che considera questi film come un fenomeno frutto di un’unica temperie culturale, terrain d’entente grazie al quale riconsiderare alcune questioni teoriche che hanno attraversato la storia del cinema. Prima di tutto il concetto d’autore, poi le adiacenze tra moderno e postmoderno, il carattere visibile e fotogenico delle immagini e ancora l’orientalismo come pratica politica e come genere. La stessa esperienza del viaggio appare cruciale in questa ricerca per la sua dimensione pragmatica e archetipica e perché espone i registi a malintesi e incomprensioni, slanci e insicurezze, rendendo i loro film degli oggetti controversi, complessi, talvolta rabberciati, assolutamente da studiare.

O livro de Denilson Lopes desenvolve, em uma perspectiva sócio-histórica e transdisciplinar, a relação entre melancolia e neo-barroco. A melancolia – sensibilidade estética, catastrófica, antiutópica – se define pela aflição diante da passagem do tempo. Trata-se de uma sensibilidade cristalizada como um imaginário no período barroco e que retorna na segunda metade do século 20 como neo-barroco.
Dentro da fragmentação do texto é possível vislumbrar cinco partes: neo-barroco, camp, dandismo, viagens e leveza. E para sua análise o autor escolheu três romances – A Menina Morta, de Cornelio Penna, Crônica da Casa Assassinada, de Lúcio Cardoso, e Ópera dos Mortos, de Autran Dourado – e quatro filmes – O Leopardo, Ludwig e Violência e Paixão, de Luchino Visconti, e Salão de Música, de Satyajit Ray.
A partir das categorias tempo, espaço e subjetividade, a obra é realizada por duas mediações: a imagem material, poética e cronotópica da casa como ruína, labirinto, teatro do mundo (espetáculo e artificialidade); e o personagem alegórico dos herdeiros e príncipes despojados de poder. Linhagem que inclui os poetas ultra-românticos, os dândis decadentistas, os punks góticos e todos aqueles que não se adequam ao império da velocidade e efemeridade contemporâneas. Os que delicadamente se afastam do centro das atenções.
Os romances traduzem uma tradição do Barroco no Brasil, distinta da expressa na literatura hispano-americana contemporânea. Já os filmes, ao diluir ou perverter as fronteiras entre cinema clássico e moderno, constituem um solo sobre o qual pode ser pensada uma narrativa de pós-vanguarda.
Para além de interesses acadêmicos, o livro é um acerto enviesado e pessoal com os anos 80, uma viagem pela dor e pela solidão, um confronto com a fugacidade dos afetos e uma busca quase desesperada de beleza e leveza. Para Denilson Lopes, a melancolia constitui, neste fim de século, uma porta de entrada para repensar nossa época por meio da arte, o que levaremos para o próximo milênio, o que queremos.
Silviano Santiago escreve a respeito de Nós os mortos: “A melancolia foi tomada no belo trabalho de Denilson não como tema objetivo extraído de textos teóricos e de obras artísticas, mas como matéria para um narrador em primeira pessoa escrever uma prosa ficcional erudita. Para evitar o suicídio da estirpe dos melancólicos, exige-se a autocontemplação estilizada dos pares. A pulsão de morte do narrador neutraliza a pulsão de vida do leitor. Nós os mortos. “O que somos sem essa pedagogia da morte?” – o narrador pergunta

aqui começa a viagem de pensar uma genealogia da melancolia a partir do Barroco e pensar um outro neobarroco em romances brasielrios em diálogos com filmes europeus que se distinguem da tradição hispano-americana, propondo uma caminho diferente de Carpentier/Lezama Lima/Sarduy/Perlongher

Doing the same thing over and over again yet expecting different results was Einstein’s definition of madness. But there are films that affect us in a completely different way every time we watch them, and those discussed here, ironically, depict men who are doomed to repeat themselves. In the article “On Repeat: The Poetics of Eternal Recurrence in Vertigo, Last Year at Marienbad and 2046” we dwell on numerous links that connect these films to other works by the same director (Alfred Hitchcock, Alain Resnais and Wong Kar-wai) and to each other – from obsessive reconstruction of the past at the core of each story to the music score reminiscent of opera – and make a special emphasis on their most striking common feature, circularity on the narrative and visual levels. We subsequently compare this recurrence, established by means of repetition, quotation and imagery, to Nietzsche’s philosophy of eternal return. Best described in The Gay Science and Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s concept of eternal return opposes Christian linear temporality to the millennia-old notion of cyclical time. Proposing that history repeats itself, Nietzsche oscillates between the fear and the lure of repetition, just like the characters Scottie, X and Chow, who seem to be unwittingly acting out traumatic experiences over and over again. Instead of following a linear development, the plots of Vertigo, Last Year at Marienbad and 2046 form a circuit where past conditions the present and future. Though not only their narratives, but also cinematography and soundtrack are ruled by repetition and variation. We argue that recurring patterns, although they may not be registered consciously upon the first viewing, ultimately reinforce the idea of eternal recurrence and prompt the audiences to engage ever more closely with these films over successive viewings.

Article published in Cineforum, Volume 25, December 2016.

From the back cover:

"‘Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' represents an advanced, sophisticated, extremely well informed and challenging contribution to the rapidly growing area of film-philosophy scholarship. It will become an important moment in (re)establishing the philosophical significance of cinema (and film studies’ efforts in addressing this) well before the current trend in Anglo-American Philosophy’s 'discovering' of film emerged. . . . Ford draws on a wide range of research across film, modernist cultural and aesthetic theory and continental philosophical terrains. The work engages both with more recent film-philosophy scholarship and the disciplinary resources of film studies work on the movements and individual filmmakers in question. A successful and important contribution to scholarship on these films, their historical and aesthetic significance and their capacity to 'do' philosophy."
— Patrick Crogan, University of the West of England, UK

"Often, work in this area is far too devoted to a particular theoretical corpus and tends to lose originality; alternatively it falls into being a merely impressionistic mention of philosophy to make otherwise unremarkable claims. Hamish Ford’s book is remarkable for its engagement with the deepest problems of modernist aesthetics and the presentation of time. He works closely with cinema, philosophy and criticism while always maintaining his own argumentative position."
— Claire Colebrook, Penn State University, USA
                                                     
"Hamish Ford’s energetic and erudite work is both theoretically and historically engaged and highly accessible to a broad readership. He is ideally positioned to contribute significantly to the discussion of post-war European cinema through this important book."
— Adrian Danks, RMIT University, Australia, co-editor of Senses of Cinema

'Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' is a unique study of four feature films chosen as emblematic works of 1960s modernist cinema. 'Persona' (Ingmar Bergman, 1966) and 'Two or Three Things I Know About Her' (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) are explored through the theme of negativity, while 'L’eclisse' (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962) and 'Last Year in Marienbad' (Alain Resnais, 1961) are examined for their violent rendering of time. The book argues that these films exemplify film modernism at its peak of philosophical interest, substance and significance. Its focused analysis of four emblematic works selectively draws on the work of German philosopher and aesthetic theorist Theodor Adorno, in particular his account of negativity, and French poststructuralist philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of temporality in post-war cinema, amongst other theoretical and critical sources. Grounding this study is a close consideration of the critical and aesthetically remarkable gaze these particular films cast upon their immediate social real and modernities as presented on screen. But rather than a strictly historical analysis, the book suggests that such complex and profoundly ambivalent renderings of the modern world have much to say to us today via what amounts to a genuinely challenging return in digital form, the films' remarkable aesthetic surfaces and layers looking even more properly science fiction-like than ever. 'Post-War Modernist Cinema and Philosophy: Confronting Negativity and Time' will appeal both to an academic audience, from upper-level undergraduate through to career researcher level, and a wider readership attracted by the book’s extensive analysis and appreciation of films that have countless and increasing admirers the world over."

Published review: Michael Godard, Senses of Cinema, July 2016, Issue 79, online: http://sensesofcinema.com/2016/book-reviews/post-war-modernist-cinema-and-philosophy/

La littérature française contemporaine porte un vif intérêt au déchiffrement
de la guerre sous la paix, à l’histoire des con its sanglants du XXe siècle
et de leurs séquelles pour la vie civile. Elle dépasse la vue partielle de
l’histoire nationale et rétablit le lien rompu avec celle de la période coloniale.
Les protagonistes des textes de Maurice Attia, de Mathias Énard,
de Jérôme Ferrari, de Laurent Gaudé, d’Alexis Jenni, de Laurent Mauvignier
et de Wajdi Mouawad sont bien souvent des vétérans, des revenants
qui tardent à vraiment ‘revenir’ de la guerre. La monographie cherche à
explorer les modalités narratives qui permettent aux auteurs d’adresser les
traumatismes et d’entamer le travail de mémoire.

Henri Bergson, in Matter and memory, theorizes a universe of images that exist before subject; after almost ninety years, Gilles Deleuze, following Bergson, defines cinema as a non-centered set of movement-images. Through the study of Dziga Vertov’s kinoglaz,  Michelangelo Antonioni’s desolate shots and Alain Resnais’ sheets of memory, this paper aims to highlight the main points of a cinema-thing, where ontology and aesthetics, creation and construction coincide in the end with a virtual plan of immanence, conceived as the impersonal genesis of every reality.

(E): Along with people like Césaire, Sartre and Howlett, Chris Marker cherished in 1953 the hope that African artefacts would be removed from the museum. In the film Les Statues meurent aussi (‗Statues Also Die‘ 1950-53) Marker as director and writer, accompanied by Resnais as co-director, Ghislain Cloquet as cameraman and Guy Bernard as composer, took up the mission to challenge the prevailing gaze on African artefacts. How does Marker‘s Les Statues meurent aussi look upon African art?

(F): À l‘instar de personnes comme Césaire, Sartre et Howlett, Chris Marker cultiva l‘espoir en 1953 que les artefacts africains puissent sortir du strict cadre des musées. Dans le film Les Statues meurent aussi (1950-53), Marker, en tant que réalisateur et scénariste, secondé par Resnais, comme co-réalisateur, Ghislain Cloquet comme directeur de la photographie et Guy Bernard comme compositeur, se donna pour mission de contester le regard figé prédominant sur les artefacts africains. Quel regard porte sur l‘art africain Les statues meurent aussi de Marker ?

50 years after the birth of the Nouvelle Vague, the inheritance that the contemporary cinema receives from it is inevitable. Figures and visual motifs; stories, themes, faces or common places; aesthetic and language devices. The echoes appear in various ways, each affiliation involves a different relationship and therefore a dissimilar approximation to its analysis. And yet, both the academy and the film critics maintain their will to think the Nouvelle Vague as a whole, a universe, a stream or an aesthetic trend. However, does a Nouvelle Vague's aesthetic exist? And if so: why and how to address their historical revision? Taking Deleuze's thesis on the time-image and Serge Daney's assertion according to which the Nouvelle Vague contributed to the passage of the cinema of the ideal to the cinema of otherness, the following article places its protagonists filmmakers in front of the conviction that their cinema did not create a style, but it established a method. This method came through a particular gesture: when the filmmakers saw in cinema a movement of desire that fails to reach the desired object and the failure of which allows to think about the nature of the image. From this discussion emerges a logic of images halfway between representation and figuration. To address this, the article revisits the early works of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, and the cinema of Philippe Garrel as a representative of the first French generation after the Nouvelle Vague.

Cincuenta años después del nacimiento de la Nouvelle Vague, sus herencias recibidas en el cine contem-poráneo son inevitables. Figuras y motivos visuales; relatos, temas, rostros o lugares comunes; recursos estéticos y de lenguaje. Los ecos se manifiestan de diversos modos, cada filiación implica una relación distinta y por tanto una aproximación dispar para su análisis. Y sin embargo, tanto la academia como la crítica de cine siguen pensando en la Nouvelle Vague como un conjunto, un universo, una corriente o una tendencia estética. Pero, ¿existe una estética nouvellevaguesca? Y, si es así, ¿por qué abordar de nuevo su revisión histórica? A partir de las tesis de Deleuze sobre la imagen-tiempo y de la aseveración de Serge Daney según la cual la Nouvelle Vague contribuyó al paso de un cine del ideal a un cine de la alteridad, el artículo siguiente da respuesta a estas preguntas partiendo de la convicción que los cineastas franceses no crearon un estilo, sino que asentaron un método. Este método consistiría en poner en crisis una relación propia de la narración para hallar una nueva relación en términos de montaje y puesta en escena. En particular, el artículo sostiene que la Nouvelle Vague aboga por esta aproximación haciendo del filme el espacio que permite pensar la visibilidad de la imagen y su figurabilidad a partir de la búsqueda y la pérdida del objeto de deseo en el relato, de lo que resulta una lógica de las imágenes a medio camino entre la representación y la figuración. Para abordar el análisis, el artículo propone una revisión de las primeras obras de François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard y Alain Resnais, y el cine de Philippe Garrel como representante de la primera generación francesa después de la Nouvelle Vague.

Complete presentation of the 1996 Oxford University Conference on the relationship between writing and film-making in the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Collated and edited by author and film-maker Edouard d’Araille, the colloquium brought together the world’s key authorities on Robbe-Grillet, as well as the master of fiction himself. This edition is partly in French (Robbe-Grillet & Pierre Van Den Heuvel) and partly in English. It comprises all the talks and question-times in the conference as well as supplementary materials, including film stills, Editor’s Introduction and select Bibliographies and Filmographies of the works of Alain Robbe-Grillet. This file included the complete text of that publication for a period of over twelve months - courtesy of the publishers, Living Time Global. The text extract hosted here now includes a complete talk by Alain Robbe-Grillet, translated from French into English by Edouard d'Araille.

Monografia apresentada à Universidade
Federal Fluminense como requisito parcial
para obtenção do grau em bacharel em
Comunicação Social, habilitação Cinema.
Orientação: Profa. Dra. Elianne Ivo Barroso

RESUMO
Analisa-se a representação da lembrança em Hiroshima Mon Amour a partir dos
conceitos de história, memória e esquecimento, pensando-os no âmbito individual e
coletivo. Aborda-se, primeiramente, o contexto em que foi realizado a obra, sua
recepção e a importância da coautoria entre Resnais e Duras para a poética do filme. A
seguir, trata-se do conceito de flashback na história do cinema, realçando o seu uso
não convencional em Hiroshima Mon Amour. A representação da lembrança em
Hiroshima Mon Amour é investigada em dois retrocessos (Hiroshima e Nevers)
separadamente. Realça-se o efeito que as escolhas narrativas de Resnais e Duras têm
para a apreensão do espectador, levando-o a um mergulho no fluxo do pensamento dos
personagens.

In the years 1947 and 1948, Paris, France, experienced a contemporaneous interest in Vincent Van Gogh’s art and the relationship of art and madness. Two major figures of the avant-garde theatrical, written, and filmic arts – Antonin Artaud and Alain Resnais – each produced works within these two years that centered on Van Gogh and intervened in the debate on art and madness. After spending his own time in psychiatric institutions, Artaud penned a short book Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society in which he argued against Van Gogh’s madness as related to his artistic genius, the conformity of institutions, and the nature of suicide (among other things). His theories are quite different from other cultural thinking of the era, as evidenced through art historical scholarship, popular commentary, and works of art, such as Alain Resnais’s film Van Gogh. In his first film, Resnais produced a biopic-cum-art film about Van Gogh’s biography, constructed entirely of Van Gogh’s paintings. Influenced by both art historians and
film theorists, his ambitious film sought to tell the history of Van Gogh, including his madness, through his art works. However, through specific filmic choices Resnais made (such as the editing) his film re-inscribed Van Gogh’s art with madness, presenting it in a way that mirrored contemporary notions of artistic genius and madness. Ultimately what can be learned from studying these two artists and their works in depth is that the framing of madness is essential to consider when discussing its relationship with art. It requires a nuanced reflection, one that does not necessarily result in definitive statements.

Ce chapitre propose une analyse de Muriel. Le temps d'un retour (Resnais, Cayrol, 1963) centrée sur le discours du film sur la Guerre d'Algérie aux moyens de l'analyse rhétorique du film. Cette méthode permet de souligner que le discours du film, bien qu'en creux, est parfaitement lisible, pour peu qu'on s'appuie sur l'analyse du contexte politique de l'époque. Les formes du film prennent sens à travers une lecture rhétorique où le spectateur remplit les espaces vides laissés par le film.

Drawing on Raymond Bellour, Roland Barthes and Gilles Deleuze, amongst others, this essay assesses how experiences of home, abandonment, illness and mourning are sensorially inscribed within Chantal Akerman’s No Home Movie (2015), Michael Haneke’s Amour (2012) and Hoffman’s What These Ashes Wanted. By embodying portraits of both the deceased and the ‘living’ (the late filmmaker/motherless daughter, grieving partner, beleaguered widower), these films materialise, fragment and liberate the already dead and endlessly dying women. http://www.screeningthepast.com/2018/02/in-no-home-movie-style-her-death-and-rebirth/

Complete Translation of Pierre Van Den Heuvel's conference talk 'Texte, Film et Code: Dysnarration et Cohérence' by Edouard d'Araille. A trenchant analysis of ambiguity and play in storytelling through a consideration of literary and film techniques used by modern novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. Van Den Heuvel analyses aspects of form and content within Robbe-Grillet's fiction and film and looks at linguistic and cinematic devices used by him in order to create an environment of ambiguity within his fiction. With Robbe-Grillet, nothing is always quite as it seems - or only as it seems, and Van Den Heuvel exposes this endlessly playful author in the methods that he uses to toy with the reader and the viewer. It is a relevant essay for anyone interested in literary analysis, especially in post-modern, structuralist and deconstructionist views on literature and film. Pierre Van Den Heuvel was a leading academic researcher in language and literature studies who shed new light on the complex techniques used within Robbe-Grillet's fiction works. First presented at the 1996 Oxford University Alain Robbe-Grillet Conference (entitled 'In the Temple of Dreams'). This translation has been extracted from the publication of the same name, (fully English version released in 2006) - ISBN 978-1-906904-56-2 (Digital Version).

Resumo: A discussão acerca da moral no cinema vai muito além do simples questionamento da trama de um filme, uma vez que a forma do filme também pode estar suscetível a esse debate. A conscientização de que a forma do filme também interfere no modo de ver o seu conteúdo dita a construção deste artigo. Partimos, assim, do princípio desse questionamento com a sentença: "travelling é uma questão moral". Dessa moral encontrada num movimento de câmera, discutimos a representação encontrada em dois filmes sempre lembrados quando desta discussão: Noite e neblina e Kapò. Abstract: the discussion concerning moral in cinema goes far beyond the simple questions about the plot of a movie. The form of the movie is also susceptible to this debate. The consciousness that the form of the film also interfere in the way of watching it's content, moves the debate of this article. We will start from the beginning of this question in the history of film with the sentence: "travelling is a moral matter". This moral found in a camera movement, we discuss the representation of two films about the same matter: Noite e neblina e Kapò.

UNTIMELY AFFECTS examines the role of affect in works by Marker and Resnais whose film and multimedia works respond to events of violence and war, including the Holocaust, Hiroshima, postcolonialism and 9/11. The book contemplates a reflexive relation between perceiver-perceived – film, screen, camera, viewer, filmmaker. Through close readings, consciousnesses of various reflective screens and surfaces are interrogated so that the faces of television sets, billboards, the eyes of all the worlds a traveller confronts, engender a movement and consciousness of pure duration itself.
REVIEWS
"Boljkovac makes saliently clear the powerful force of attraction that brings Marker, Resnais and Deleuze into each other's orbits. Readers will welcome close, sustained, and ever-rewarding readings of cinema, history, and philosophy on each and every page."
--Tom Conley, Harvard University

"The philosophical ideas that inspire Boljkovac are extreme: happiness, love and madness at one end; pain, suffering and misery at the other. Cinema is her vehicle into a hope-filled future. Through its encounters with key films and texts by Marker, Resnais and others, Untimely Affects is important and inspiring."
--Adrian Martin, Monash University

"In a sensitive reading of Deleuze and through a moving appreciation of the works of Resnais and Marker, Nadine Boljkovac opens an urgent path for film and philosophy, where they answer the demand to respond ethically to the terrible events that continue to haunt our worlds."
--James Williams, University of Dundee

About the Author
Nadine Boljkovac (PhD, University of Cambridge) is the 2012-13 Carol G. Lederer Postdoctoral Fellow at the Pembroke Center for Teaching & Research on Women, Brown University.

Le pari de ce livre est de former le regard au montage aussi bien pour l'analyse que pour la création, d'explorer les pratiques et les théories du montage, enfin d'en expérimenter quelques formes. À partir de nombreuses analyses de films choisis dans tous les cinémas (de toutes les nationalités, de tous les styles, de toutes les époques) et de quelques ouvres vidéographiques (clips ou installations d'artistes contemporains), on aborde les principales questions que se posent celui qui analyse comme celui qui monte : la coupe, l'ellipse, les modes de raccordements, le récit, la fiction, le rythme, le rapport image/son. Comment le montage invente-t-il l'espace filmique, comment manipule-t-il la matière-temps ? Retraçant également l'histoire du montage, cet ouvrage en rappelle les repères essentiels, tissant des filiations, pointant l'évolution de ses figures : montages alterné, parallèle, des attractions ; champ-contrechamp, raccord de regard, répétition...