Toute la mémoire du monde
1956 · 21m · France
Directed by Alain Resnais
Genres: documentary, essay film
Tones: contemplative, dark
A poetic documentary exploring the labyrinthine depths of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, following the journey of a book through its registration and archival process while meditating on humanity's compulsion to preserve all knowledge against forgetting.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Tracking through the Bibliothèque nationale like it's an alien organism — the building becomes the haunting. Resnais doing science fiction with a library.
Resnais's tracking shots through the BNF render an archive as living organism, and the meditation on preservation against forgetting is among cinema's most haunting. Foundational to the essay-film tradition.
Resnais's tracking shots and crane moves turn the Bibliothèque nationale into a sci-fi organism — the camera language is what makes a library feel like a totalitarian memory machine. YouTube version private, but the technique is documented.
Reviews
Everything contributes to making this short film, which could have been of an atrocious institutional banality, a great work — Ghislain Cloquet's photography is masterful in its beauty and ingenuity in a number of dark and cramped places.
Resnais surgically, methodically analyzes the national library of France within 20 minutes, setting the basis of his cinematographic project about places of memory.
Festivals
- Cannes Film Festival 1957