Time and Memory

This essay considers the work of two French New Wave auteurs, Chris Marker and Alain Resnais. It focuses on a discussion of Markers film La Jetée (1962) and Resnais LAnnée Dernière à Marienbad (1961) and makes a comparative analysis of the ways in which these films take the theme of Time and the processes of memory as the subject of the films themselves. Both films reject established découpage classique model of Hollywood film construction in favour of an understanding of time which is free to skip parts, loop and repeat sections, to make jump cuts and transcend time. Time is understood, in Bergsons terms, as "multidirectional, in which past, present and future time are fused and continuous." As Resnais has said: "If cinema is not a method of juggling specifically with time, [it is] in any event the method of which it is best adapted to..."