Thursday, October 11 | 8PM Muriel, ou le Temps d’un retour aka Muriel, or the Time of Return France 1963 d. Alain Resnais with Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kérien, Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée and Nita Klein. In French with English subtitles. Colour. 115 m
“Resnais achieves what his characters cannot do: he transcends time, as though he were freeing himself by coming to terms with his own cinematic past. Muriel‘s style represents such a positive development in the way that it differs from his previous films. There is no stream-of-consciousness filtered through one particular character, such as the subjective viewpoint of the heartbroken French girl in Hiroshima or the nameless protagonist in Marienbad, who continuously restructures the past to suit his tastes. There is nothing in Muriel‘s narrative that reflects a single character’s perceptions. Resnais has made his own associations by choosing which scenes and seemingly trivial details to place together. This is what makes Muriel seem so complex. Without a main character’s consciousness to serve as the viewer’s co-explorer in the story (as we experience in a realist novel), we must rely on objects (as we experience in a work by a New Novelist, such as Robbe-Grillet) to grasp the film.” Chrissa Jean Chappell
See also: Le Coup de grâce (Cayrol/Durand, 1964), Le Petit soldat (Godard, 1960), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Resnais, 1961)