Tag: John Schlesinger

Toute la mémoire du monde, a film by Alain Resnais

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Before he directed his first feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Alain Resnais had distinguished himself with a succession of short documentary films. His half-hour history of the Holocaust, Nuit et brouillard (1955), has always been the most prominent of these, although as a history it’s since been superseded by Claude Lanzmann’s exhaustive Shoah (1985). Toute la mémoire du monde, a study of the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, was made in 1956, and includes a certain Chris Marker (listed as “Chris and Magic Marker”) among its credits. The combination of drifting camera movements, and an interest in architectural space seems like such a precursor of Last Year at Marienbad that the film has found a new life as an extra on Marienbad DVDs. The Criterion people have very generously made it available in HD here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Marienbad hauntings
• Terminus by John Schlesinger

Terminus by John Schlesinger

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Before John Schlesinger made his debut feature, A Kind of Loving (1962), he directed a number of short documentary films. Terminus (1961), a day in the life of the Waterloo railway station in London, is the most notable of these, an award-winning snapshot of a period when Britain’s railways were still nationalised and steam trains were about to vanish from regular service. The film has that crisp, black-and-white photography so typical of the early 1960s, a look which renders close-ups with uncanny fidelity and makes the outmoded fashions—the bowler-hatted men and gloved women—seem all the more curious. A year later Orson Welles was deploying a similar style when photographing the dishevelled splendour of the Gare d’Orsay in Paris for his film of The Trial.

For a different take on London’s railway stations there’s Terminus by analogue electronic outfit Node, a track inspired by concerts they played live at Paddington station in 1995.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Screening Kafka