|
Alain Resnais lowers the microphone into the frame à la Welles, a searchlight comes to life—the Paris Bibliothèque Nationale, out of Borges and Kafka, the camera glides through it for twenty hypnotic minutes. The dome outside is surrounded by arches and pointed rafters, inside is every book printed in France, stacked in piles, guarded by statues, and wheeled around by "paper-crunching insects." Volumes are followed from the bulging bags brought in daily to the sorting assembly line where they're identified, indexed, stored with millions of others in the catalog and imprinted on microfilm. Manuscripts by Pascal and Zola receive privileged close-ups, a canvas by De Chirico and vintage medals are also part of the treasure trove, the great leaning tower of periodicals reveals a Mandrake comic-book at the very top (cf. Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451). "Who knows what will be the most reliable testament of our civilization?" Ghislain Cloquet camera, Maurice Jarre score, a continuous flow from basement to cupola. The library is "un musée," a fortress, "Captain Nemo's control chamber," a labyrinth, a penitentiary (words are "imprisoned" for the sake of humanity's short memory, "once labeled, the book cannot escape"). For Resnais, it is also an island of recorded stillness in a shifting world. People may be dwarfed by the information, yet the information comes alive only once it passes "through the looking glass" and into the hands and minds of readers. The elaborate style of Last Year at Marienbad is already formed, echoes are felt in All the President's Men, Zardoz, Brazil... In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |