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Muriel (1963)

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From Time Out Film Guide

Not the easiest of Resnais films, but certainly his wittiest exploration of the vagaries of memory (teasingly set in Boulogne, a city largely lost under post-war urban developments). A spellbinding mosaic of images preserving, destroying, falsifying or testifying to the past, it sets two attitudes in opposition. A woman (Seyrig) attempts to ward off present tedium by conjuring the memory of her first love. Her stepson (Thierrée), treasuring some film of an atrocity he witnessed in Algeria in which a girl called Muriel was tortured to death, is determined to allow no escape from actuality. What both forget is that things change, that memory must feed on reality and vice versa. If her remembered love proves disappointingly remote from actuality, so his celluloid actuality turns out to need memory to bring it alive again. Impasse.

Author: TM

Time Out Film Guide

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Technoguy said...

Posted on Jan 23 2008 16:19 This film situates the more complex,.absract strains Of Resnais in a more urban post-war environment.Through the use of jarring jump cuts and frenetic montage sequences he renders what is banal,ordinary in these character's lives as extraordinary through visual cubism.We are dealing with memory,its vagaries, its changes in the lives of the 2 main characters,Helene and Bernard,her step-son.The trauma of the 2nd World War and the Algerian War in terms of their experiences intrude in and distort their present existence.they with a 3rd character,Alphonse one of her old loves whom she invites to stay,try to relive or alter that past.Helene and Bernard are living in the past,she through fantasy and he very much through demons,an atrocity he helped commit in the Algerian War against Muriel,the Algerian woman of the title.Boulogne is a perfect location for rebuilding a dislocated past.This film has an amazing pace as Resnais explores time to examine past experiences and their effect on the present.

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