One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie. Alain Resnais's Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) is showing May 12 - June 11, 2020 in many countries in the series The Unconventional Narratives of Alain Resnais.
A recurring image in Alain Resnais’s Mon oncle d'Amerique (1980) is an island, the childhood home of the film’s characters. Its first appearance is followed by a monologue, based on the writings of philosopher Henri Laborit, on the chemical processes taking place in the brain and nervous system that constitute pleasure and memory. A hallmark of Resnais’s most celebrated films is the notion of physical place as an analog, mnemonic, or repository of past experience—such as the unseen Czechoslovak spa town at Last Year at Marienbad (1961), the curiously empty streets of Boulogne in Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963), or in Mon oncle d’Amerique, an island. Resnais’s cinema is ultimately about one’s longing for a figurative return to that island, and the figurative tide surrounding one’s island having a “ripple” effect throughout one’s life. One could view Paris’s Bibliothèque Nationale in Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) or a decimated Japanese city prior to the war in Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) in the same manner. Resnais had the benefit of source material in some of the most innovative authors from mid-century France—among them Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, and Alain Robbe-Grillet—all concerned not merely with how one’s past perpetually haunts of one’s present but with the linguistic and narrative structures that predicate the experience. It is in Resnais’s cinema that one sees how language and narrative is often at odds with the associative processes of the mind, and by extension, memory.