Sunday 2 March 2014

Mise en scène of Memory, Aesthetics of Silence


Ten Photographs by Alain Resnais


If a film director couldn’t make the film she or he wants to make, there are some other ways to retain the memory of the unmade film. The unrealized projects are often memorialized by writing detailed scripts, or sketches and drawings scenes, as with some of Eisenstein’s unfulfilled projects which came to life through his paper designs.

But if the art of photography, compared to written words and freehand drawing, is closer to cinema, then for some filmmakers it can more accurately capture moments of their desired projects than any other medium, mostly because of photography’s association with the realist mode of representation.

Alain Resnais belongs to the latter group, but his deep fascination with elements of time and space within a still photograph goes beyond a mere desire to document a project in progress—in his case, it becomes the very project itself.

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