Excerpt | Seeing Double: Algeria and France in Alain Resnais’s “Muriel”

From Laure Astourian’s The Ethnographic Optic: Jean Rouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, and the Turn Inward in 1960s French Cinema, published by Indiana University Press.

Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963).

Until the end of the Algerian War, the French State insisted that Algeria was part of France. In the aftermath, however, both the state and the French sought to forget Algeria altogether. The minority who simply could not forget included the young soldiers who had been sent to Algeria to defend France’s interests. Their stories would remain shrouded in silence for decades, often unknown even to their immediate families.¹ The protagonist of Alain Resnais’s Muriel (1963), Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée), is one such soldier. Presumably well-adjusted before the war, he now hovers at the margins of society, an outsider with a piercing gaze. Throughout Muriel, Bernard films his surroundings and the inhabitants of Boulogne with an 8mm camera. He claims he is “gathering evidence.” At the midpoint of the film, Bernard screens some of his footage, but it is not of Boulogne. Instead, mundane images of Algeria appear on the screen, overlaid with his graphic, real-time confession of violence, the most explicit example of the dialectic that defines the film: visual occultation and oral revelation.²

The practice of amateur filmmaking by French soldiers during the Algerian War is well documented. However, no known trend exists of French soldiers like Bernard intently filming their everyday surroundings after they return to metropolitan France.³ Muriel’s incorporation of amateur filmmaking in Algeria is thus worth examining in relation to Bernard’s filmmaking in Boulogne. This chapter elucidates the film-historical context of Bernard’s filmmaking in Algeria during the war and proposes an argument for how the documentary practice of French soldiers’ amateur filmmaking—and Resnais’s insertion of examples of it—is meaningfully connected with the rest of Muriel. In effect, Resnais stages a protagonist who links France and Algeria through the act of filmmaking and the medium of film itself.

Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963).

Resnais’s choice to reconnect these spaces through media must be understood in relation to his stated objective: to accurately portray contemporary French society in 1962, in the immediate aftermath of the war. As in the films examined throughout this book, Resnais’s ethnographic focus on urban, bourgeois France—its tics, habits, and rituals—is articulated in relation to the end of the colonial empire. This focus manifests through Resnais’s painstakingly realistic depiction of Boulogne, Bernard’s filming of the same city, and the interaction between the two. The third film—Bernard’s amateur footage of Algeria—provides the key to deciphering the dynamic between Resnais’s and Bernard’s filming, specifically their avowed, common desire to capture contemporary, urban, bourgeois French society.

Like the early-1960s France-based films of Jean Rouch and Chris Marker, Muriel stages the foreclosure of the exotic: the film is permeated by a sense of claustrophobia, and even Bernard’s seemingly “exotic” or escapist images are definitively tainted by his searing voice-over. The general mood is somber, as in Rouch’s and Marker’s films. Like Marker in Le joli mai and La jetée, Resnais presents urban space as a reflection of the zeitgeist and of his characters’ mental landscape. He, too, privileges the perspective of an outsider—the alienated Bernard. Most importantly, Muriel’s critique of French society is driven by its subversive staging of the French soldier. His unconventional depiction of their “time of return” to metropolitan France underscores the corruption of a significant segment of French youth as a result of the war: the conscripts. Muriel thus definitively shatters the ideals of national rejuvenation and hope embodied by French youth after World War II.

Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963).

Born in Vannes, Brittany, in 1922, Resnais came of age during the optimistic post-Liberation period. Like Marker and Rouch, he enjoyed opportunities thanks to his social and economic privilege. For instance, Resnais began making films as an adolescent because he received a Kodak 8mm camera for his birthday. He even projected his films in his homespun movie theater in the attic.⁴ Additionally, like Marker and Rouch, Resnais was fascinated by the surrealists, and he filmed a three-minute version of Fantômas. As a teenager, Resnais pursued his studies in Paris. He spent two afternoons a week at the movies. During the Occupation, Resnais initially pursued an acting career before enrolling at the brand-new IDHEC (Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques) film school to study editing.⁵

Because of his asthma, Resnais was precluded from fighting in the military. He completed his service in the cultural outreach office in the Rhine and Danube region in 1945–46. Back in Paris, he met André Bazin and Marker, who would become his collaborator. Resnais and Marker notably cowrote and codirected the long-censored anticolonial film essay Les statues meurent aussi in 1950–53. They were part of the Groupe des Trente, a group of film professionals organized the same year to promote the short-subject film through government funding for filmmakers.⁶ Marker wrote the text for Resnais’s short film Le mystère de l’atelier quinze (1957) and made substantial contributions to Nuit et brouillard (1955), Resnais’s film essay on the Nazi concentration camps. Jean Cayrol, a camp survivor and affiliate of the nouveau roman literary movement, wrote the poetic text.⁷ Later, he would write the screenplay of Muriel. Interestingly, Resnais remarked that Nuit et brouillard was also about the Algerian War, which had just begun at the time: “The whole point was Algeria.”⁸ Among Resnais’s other notable films from the 1950s is Toute la mémoire du monde (1957), a documentary commission from the French foreign ministry on the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Taken together, these three films evince Resnais’s “capacity to present the history of colonialism as a problem for modern European subjectivity.”⁹ Even before embarking on a feature film career, then, Resnais established himself as a leftist, politically committed, and self-reflexive filmmaker.

Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959).

Resnais’s first feature film, Hiroshima mon amour (1959), began as a commission on the atomic bomb and its aftereffects. Producer Anatole Dauman (Argos Films) pitched the idea of such a project to Daiei Studio in Japan. Resnais did not want to make another documentary, however. Instead, after a couple of false starts, he invited nouveau roman novelist Marguerite Duras to prepare a screenplay for a fictional project in which the bombing would serve as a backdrop. The resulting work stages a love affair in Hiroshima between a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) and a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) fifteen years afterward. The affair generates myriad flashbacks, specifically to the female character’s taboo relationship with a German soldier in the French city of Nevers during World War II. These are conveyed through highly innovative editing that mirrors her flashes of memory. Hiroshima mon amour was highly successful among critics and audiences. Upon its French theatrical release in June 1959, over 250,000 tickets were sold; an estimated 900,000 spectators saw the film. The film also performed well on the international market and was distributed in multiple countries.¹⁰

Resnais’s second feature film, L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961), was also mainly shot abroad, on location in châteaux near Munich, Germany. The visually stunning, deliberately oblique Marienbad is made up of scenes of aristocrats moving languidly through opulent halls. Novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, the main proponent of the nouveau roman, wrote the screenplay in which a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) attempts to persuade a possibly married woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the year before and were romantically involved. Despite Resnais’s heightened political resolve (in 1960, he signed the Manifeste des 121, defending the refusal to serve in the French army in Algeria), the film makes no overt reference to the war. Resnais’s interest in incorporating Algeria clashed with Robbe-Grillet’s priorities, causing conflicts. Later, Resnais tied Marienbad’s dreamlike yet claustrophobic atmosphere to the war: “Actually, I don’t think that one can make a film in France without speaking about the Algerian War. Moreover, I wonder if the enclosed and suffocating atmosphere of L’année dernière à Marienbad is not the result of these contradictions.”¹¹ Marienbad unleashed a polemic in the French press and won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Biennale. It was both a critical and commercial success, like Hiroshima, selling over 400,000 tickets upon its initial release in Paris.¹²

Resnais’s first three feature films form a “kind of whole,” or a “trilogy” of sorts, as opposed to his subsequent two, which have been characterized as “very much transitional works.”¹³ Hiroshima, Marienbad, and Muriel do share a lot in common. To cite only a couple of examples, all three were written by novelists affiliated with the nouveau roman, and the overlaying of Algiers and Boulogne in Muriel echoes that of Nevers and Hiroshima in Hiroshima mon amour.¹⁴ These continuities are not as striking as the differences, however. In Resnais’s first two features, glamorous women wander the streets of exotic cities and châteaux, and lapidary, mysterious conversation enhances their auras. In Muriel, the frazzled, distinctly unglamorous protagonist (Seyrig, in sharp contrast to her stylized turn in Marienbad) is either gambling at the casino or wandering the halls of her cluttered apartment. Far from rendering them more attractive, the empty chatterings of the characters in Muriel makes them even less appealing.

In addition, whereas Resnais’s first features satisfy their audience’s escapist yearnings, Muriel takes place in a provincial city undergoing an identity crisis: 85 percent of Boulogne was demolished by Allied bombing (specifically, by the Royal Air Force) during World War II. Like much of France, which it symbolizes, the city is undergoing a frenzied yet haphazard modernization. Hélène’s apartment is meant to be in one of the high-rises shown at the start of the film. Built in 1955, these buildings symbolize the reconstruction of Boulogne and of France itself.¹⁵ Finally, while Hiroshima and Marienbad are known for their lyrical use of tracking shots, Muriel is characterized by series of rapid, fleeting shots. As Richard Neupert notes, “The most consistent mobile shots [in Muriel] are found in Bernard’s handheld, grainy home movies from Algeria”; they are a thing of the past.¹⁶ While Muriel bears continuities with Hiroshima and Marienbad, it takes things in a different direction. The film is emphatically concerned with metropolitan, urban France and eschews romanticization altogether.¹⁷

Muriel (Alain Resnais, 1963).

Resnais first sought to make a film related to the Algerian War after the success of Hiroshima. Instead, he made Marienbad, after which he returned to his suspended Algerian project. He was not interested in a film about the war as such; rather, he wanted to make one about how it shaped the everyday behavior of the metropolitan French.¹⁸ He considered working with a few texts in which this theme was explicit. The first was an original project entrusted to Anne-Marie de Vilaine, À suivre à n’en plus finir, of which several screenplay versions were prepared and to which a producer (Raymond Froment of Marienbad) was attached. Resnais was not satisfied with the development of the screenplay and backed away. According to Antoine de Baecque, he never managed to obtain the necessary funding.¹⁹ The second was an adaptation of Daniel Anselme’s novel La permission (1957), which was never developed.²⁰ In the end, Resnais and Cayrol decided to develop a wholly original project. According to Cayrol, Resnais was acutely aware of the limitations posed by the censors and knew that he should adapt his project to them: “Alain was not considering making a political film; we could not have done so. But he wanted the adventure to be dated. After Marienbad, he needed to make a current film.”²¹ From the outset, then, the director intended to document a precise moment in French history.

In an interview with critic Claude Edelman in Arts, Resnais bluntly divulged his ambition when making the film: “We are trying to capture the sensibility of the time. After that, we must wait two, three years before a film is released. We risk being behind the times. This time, by the way, in Muriel, the camera never enters the characters’ minds. It will be a story for everyone.”²² When Edelman asked, “Do you want to reach everyone?” Resnais answered, “Indeed. Forcing [the] public to ask themselves the same questions as I do. In westerns, we agree and identify with the hero. But I would like the public to agree with the character. Then detach himself from it, and criticize it. That he says, ‘Ah no! This girl is crazy, I don’t agree.’ Then, that he remembers having behaved the same way two days before. To wake up the spectators, even if it’s unpleasant.” Resnais puts Boulogne and its inhabitants on display, turning them into a viewable spectacle.

1.      Several works explore this topic, including documentaries, such as La guerre sans nom by Bertrand Tavernier (1992); novels, including Des hommes by Laurent Mauvignier (2009); and historical texts, such as Papa, qu’as-tu fait en Algérie? by Raphaëlle Branche (2020). ↩
2.      Michel Marie, Muriel d’Alain Resnais (Neuilly-sur-Seine: Atlande, 2005), 31. ↩
3.      Marie, Muriel d’Alain Resnais, 24. ↩
4.      Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: Arpenteur de l’imaginaire (Paris: Ramsay, 2008), 25–26. ↩
5.      James Monaco, Alain Resnais: The Role of Imagination (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 17. ↩
6.      For more on the Groupe des Trente, see Steven Ungar, “Quality Wars: The Groupe des Trente and the Renewal of the Short Subject in France, 1953–1963,” South Central Review 33, no. 2 (2016): 30–43. ↩
7.      Upon his return to Paris in 1946, Resnais continued editing films and began making his own short films. He assisted filmmaker Nicole Védrès on Paris mil neuf cent in 1946–47 and completed Van Gogh, a 16mm film about the artist’s paintings, in 1947. Pierre Braunberger convinced him to remake the film in 35mm. As with Rouch’s films, Braunberger would go on to produce several of Resnais’s shorts in the following decade. Rouch and Resnais became active as filmmakers during the same time—and in overlapping networks. ↩
8.      “When, almost three decades after its release, Charles Krantz asked Resnais about the film’s political intent, the director replied, ‘The whole point was Algeria’ where French forces had already committed, and were continuing to commit, their own racially motivated atroci-ties.” Cited in Alan Williams, Republic of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 369. ↩
9.      Matthew Croombs, “French Algeria and the Police: Horror as Political Affect in Three Short Documentaries by Alain Resnais,” Screen 55, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 38.   ↩
10.      Marie, Muriel d’Alain Resnais, 19. ↩
11.      Gaston Bounoure, Alain Resnais (Paris: Seghers, 1962), 52; Lynn Higgins examines the ways in which the film refers to Algeria. Lynn Higgins, New Novel, New Wave, New Politics: Fiction and the Representation of History in Postwar France (Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). ↩
12.      Marie, Muriel d’Alain Resnais, 19.  ↩
13.      Richard Roud. “Alain Resnais.” In Kinugasa to Zanussi, ed. Richard Roud, vol. 2 of Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (London: Secker and Warburg, 1980), 857; Lynn Higgins, ed. Alain Resnais: Interviews (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021), xi. ↩
14.      Celia Britton, “Broken Images in Resnais’s Muriel,” 37–46; Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 100–101. Moreover, as in Hiroshima, the historical event serves as a backdrop for the “love” meeting, that of Hélène and Alphonse. ↩
15.      François Thomas, “François Thomas on Muriel, or The Time of Return,” Criterion Collection, July 19, 2016, DVD, 27:00. ↩
16.      Richard Neupert, A History of the French New Wave Cinema (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002), 328–29. Most of the quick shots are not the result of editing, as they were preplanned in the screenplay.  ↩
17.      In this regard, too, a connection can be drawn to Rouch, specifically the continuities and shifts between his 1950s experimental ethnographies and 1960s Parisian period. ↩
18.      Marie, Muriel d’Alain Resnais, 19. ↩
19.      Antoine De Baecque, Camera Historica, trans. Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 142.  ↩
20.      A lesser-known false start was filmmaker Nico Papatakis’s project: he wanted to adapt communist journalist Henri Alleg’s La question (1958), a bestseller in which the author de-scribed his own torture at the hands of the French army. Papatakis asked Jean-Paul Sartre to write the screenplay and Resnais to direct it. According to Papatakis, both agreed, but he was not able to finance the film as “no one wanted to invest in such a project.” Papatakis, quoted in Nicolas Azalbert, “Des roses pour Papatakis,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 664 (February 2011): 61. I thank François Thomas for bringing this source to my attention. ↩
21.      Marie, Muriel d’Alain Resnais, 20. ↩
22.      Claude Edelman, “Muriel, c’est encore du temps et de là?” Review of Muriel, directed by Alain Resnais. Arts, March 20, 1963.     ↩