In 1953, the 30-minute short Les statues meurent aussi, or Statues Also Die, was banned by the French censor. The film was a documentary collaboration between Alain Resnais, future filmmaker of the antifascist Holocaust documentary Nuit et bruillard, or Night and Fog (1955) as well as antiwar narrative features such as Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and La guerre est finie (The War is Over, 1965), alongside co-director Chris Marker—publisher and contributor to the Petite Planètes photo travelogues, then just dipping his toes into the art of cinema, and now known as one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of the more communist and literary “left bank” of the French New Wave.

The film was finally released in 1961 in a truncated version which cut the most incisive critiques of colonization found in the last 10 minutes of the film. It was only screened in full fifteen years after the film’s completion, and after May 1968. French communist circles united in fervent protest against the film’s banning, and these protests became entangled with movements against the Algerian War. The film’s banning was seen as an example of the contemporary relevance of the question of colonialism, racism, and imperialism. As Marcel Martin wrote in 1961, mere months before the end of the long war with Algeria, in Les lettres françaises, a Communist Party-funded cultural weekly spearheaded by surrealist Louis Aragon: “[the film is] an attempt to rehabilitate and analyze Negro art. Rehabilitation because the authors want to remind us that African art does not find its raison d’être in the pleasure it gives us, but that it is [in the words of the film] “the sign of a lost unity where art was the guarantor of ‘an agreement between man and the world.’”^[1] Art, Martin argues, cannot be innocently apolitical, unconnected to the plunder that made its appreciation in the halls of museums possible in the first place.

That a film, ostensibly, about art, was banned so severely in France, a country, ostensibly, democratic—only a few years after Charles de Gaulle took power as leader of the antifascist Resistance—speaks to the radical potential of ekphrasis. Its banning, as Chris Marker himself admitted in 1957, even aided the film because it kept it in public discourse.^[2] Its story continues, however, as several recent works by directors of the African diaspora have taken the legacy of Marker and Resnais’s film, updating it for the present day while also aligning with the radical politics of the original. Isaac Julien’s Once Again… (Statues Never Die), a site-specific installation for the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia in 2022, and Mati Diop’s sci-fi documentary Dahomey (2024), made independently of one another, work with the legacy of Statues Also Die, updating the 1953 film made by two white directors without throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Their juxtaposition of ekphrasis, documentary, modes of re-enactment and fictionality critique “objectivity” in documentary. The films reveal the constructedness of documentary form, while also viciously interrogating extractive colonial and imperial frameworks that claimed to function in the name of Enlightenment-era science. In the original film as well as its two contemporary experimental homages, ekphrasis becomes a mode of decolonial critique in content and in form.

While ekphrasis is usually portrayed as a literary device in which words are used to describe a work of (visual) art—John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1819) is a paradigmatic example—arguably ekphrasis has been a longtime trope in film, especially in documentary. Documentaries about art history are usually firmly ensconced in the register of “educational films,” highlighting the oeuvre of a particular artist, usually with a “voiceover of God” describing their life or a specific technique. Here, ekphrasis is used to make a certain artwork or artist more palatable or legible to the viewer. In the postwar short films of Alain Resnais, however, including Van Gogh (1948) and Guernica (1950), ekphrasis is used to disorient and estrange. To paraphrase formalist Viktor Shklovsky, the works of Resnais help keep the fear of war alive. In Guernica, for instance, not a single frame exists that presents Pablo Picasso’s 1937 mural masterpiece in its entirety; it is fragmented, the music and editing disturbing and meaningfully erratic.

In the 1960s, the Japanese theorist and filmmaker Matsumoto Toshio saw Guernica as the pinnacle of the avant-garde documentary. He wrote:

The film is always of “the Picasso that Resnais saw” or “Resnais seeing Picasso,” and not simply Picasso himself. That’s why one’s emotional reaction to the film is transformed into “something else” from his emotional reaction to Picasso’s painting… Surely that is because “documentariness” [kirokusei] in the simple sense is being rejected here. While turning its lens on the external world, the film is made to conform to Resnais’s own interior world. Resnais does not intend to “show” Picasso but to “see” him; what he aims to record is his own vision itself.^[3]

Resnais, for Matsumoto, employs ekphrasis to embody his own subjective interpretation of Picasso’s Guernica. It does not “show” but instead shows us, the viewer, how he “sees” Picasso– what Matsumoto describes as “recording…his own vision itself.” Chris Marker, relatedly, would go on to be described as a filmmaker who aims to donner à voir, or “give to sight.” Their collaboration Statues, then, joins the ethos of the two filmmakers, who revolutionize the documentary by rejecting a distanced and expositional style (i.e. “documentariness”), imbuing ekphrasis with a revolutionary potential.

The run time of Statues Also Die is largely filled with images of African artifacts in the British Museum in London, the Museum of the Belgian Congo (now the Royal Museum for Central Africa outside of Brussels in Belgium), and especially Musée de l’Homme in Paris. Marker and Resnais’s film is about African art, but uses unsettling editing to disturb and elicit awe and anger (against the French colonizers) rather than enlightenment. It avoids the usual descriptors of individual artifacts—country, date, purpose—instead favoring a poetic and stream-of-consciousness voiceover read by Jean Négroni (best known as the narrator in Marker’s 1962 La jetée) that speaks to the evils of colonialism. Meanwhile, still images of African artifacts, spotlit and with a dark background, are followed by documents of African life: drumming, weaving, dancing. The death of the museum is juxtaposed with life.

The film begins with Négroni’s voice intoning over a black screen: “When men die, they enter history; when statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.”

This understanding of culture as inherently ideological evokes Walter Benjamin, who writes, in “Theses on the Philosophy of History”: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”^[4] Resnais and Marker take it as their task, then, to document barbarism rather than beauty. The result is a darkly surrealist ekphrastic film (unsurprising, as Surrealist Manifesto signatory Tristan Tzara is thanked in the opening credits). The film ping-pongs disorientingly from a film embodying the fetishistic gaze of the French onto its colonial African subjects, to a fierce criticism of this selfsame gaze. It acknowledges itself as complicit just as it digs into its horror. Can there be, in the year 1953, a truly decolonial film made by two communist white men in France? To its great credit, and to our understandable discomfort with its less-than-savory elements (the painting of all “African” art with the same broad brush, the rejection of African Christian art, the use of moving imagery of African “culture” that aligns with a problematic ethnographic art of documentary), this is what the film valiantly attempts.

Statues Also Die won the Jean Vigo prize in its year of (non) release, given annually to a French film showing “inventiveness, originality and intellectual independence”—another way of saying, leftist-inclined, counter-hegemonic, and formally experimental. Other winners in future years would include Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge in 1959 (one of the first “official” films of the French new wave), Jean-Luc Godard’s A bout de souffle (Breathless) in 1960, Senegalese, Moscow-trained Ousmane Sembène’s La noire de… (Black Girl) in 1966, and Resnais’s aforementioned Night and Fog. Released two years later to its own tremendous censorship controversy, Night and Fog placed images of the rectangular shape of the French gendarme skepi (cap with visor) in the corner of the frame as Jews and other minorities were taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau,^[5] and therefore explicitly documented French collaboration with the Nazi death camps.

Yet Statues Also Die was a film about African art, not about the Holocaust. Resnais was an indisputably communist director, and of all his films about art, Statues Also Die is the most explicitly decolonial, and the most critical of his own homeland. Little surprise, perhaps, that the film was banned, as France was contemporaneously embroiled in several wars in which its imperial knot of territories—first Indochina, then Algeria—was being gradually loosened by revolutionary independence movements. Eight years later, Marker’s film about the Cuban revolution, ¡Cuba Sí! (1961), would also be banned in France for being an alleged “apologia for Cuba” with “ideological propaganda” elements.^[6] Marker and Resnais both became known for films that approached the limits of legal, allowable representability in an oxymoronic postwar France which intended to keep its overseas colonies as well as its brand of “Nazi Resistance.” The fate of Marker and Resnais’s films led communist French film critic Georges Sadoul to denounce censorship as the most important issue of the age in the early 1960s; an entire issue of Les lettres françaises was devoted to censorship in France—a censorship which prevented Resnais, Marker, and Godard from screening several of their films.

In the concluding few minutes of the film, Négroni states: “Death is always a country where one proceeds at the cost of one’s memories.” Marker and Resnais argue that the statues represented in the film are dead, impotent, mere shells of their original use; instead of being actively engaged with as objects of prayer, the art and artifacts are stowed away in museums for passive consumption. For Resnais, film, too, should serve an active engagement. A documentary must not just unveil a society’s past misdeeds, but prevent future horror. When questioned in the Soviet journal Isskustvo Kino on Guernica, Resnais replied: “This film should have been made not ten years after the destruction of the city, but ten years before.” For this reason, for Jean Wagner in Cahiers, Resnais is a filmmaker who strives “to make films not after the disaster, but before, to prevent it…”^[7]

Preventing horror entails not jailing potential malefactors (carceral capitalism being truly the opposite of abolition and antifascism), but fundamentally shifting the way people think and feel: liberating the mind and creating an engaged spectator. Today his films might read as overly expositional, the voiceover distracting; but at the time, for those who had access to his filmmaking, it was the pinnacle of revolution. For Miroir du cinéma, Resnais was the ultimate representative of a filmmaking that inculcates a spectateur actif, enjoined to act politically. Miroir du cinéma was a unique film journal in its near-exclusive focus on antifascist filmmaking—the theme of the first issue is fascisme ne passera pas, or Fascism Will Not Pass—yet it was independent of the PCF (Parti communiste français), while still maintaining ties to other journals, especially Positif. The second issue of Miroir du cinéma centers on Marker and filmmaker and resistance fighter Armand Gatti, and presents Resnais as a philosophical figurehead for their filmmaking.

Anticipating much post-1968 discourse in a 1962 article, Albert Cervoni, who would later become one of the editors of the PCF-funded La Nouvelle Critique in 1967,^[8] praises Resnais for making the viewer complicit in the act of viewing:

Too many directors show constant commercial caution—an eternal flight from audacity—for Resnais’ courage not to be, from the outset, regarded as the most commendable. For this courage to be rewarded, it is probably enough for the spectator to be attentive, to be an active spectator, that he is not content to just see but that he admits to watching, to be in some way responsible for the film which is proposed and not to passively undergo an intrigue struck according to the classic recipes. The only ambiguity lies in this sector; we are all, one and the other, subjected to the drug of a cinema of ease which, by dint of putting the things shown in “dramatic” order, never again finds the fluidity of concrete reality, its apparent disorder, its absence of categories inventoried in the catalog of the good little screenwriter on duty.^[9]

In this complex and literary encomium, we can see that the filmmaking of Resnais is useful, and “commendable,” for its ability to inculcate a feeling of responsibility in the viewer. He is courageous for rejecting “constant commercial caution”—perhaps leading him, inevitably, to complete films that are banned by censors (i.e. both Night and Fog and Statues Also Die). Thus Resnais’s films activate the viewer, preventing the “passive” experience of the “classic recipes” associated with Hollywood-derived filmmaking, “the good little screenwriter on duty.” This is cinema as a “drug,” “a cinema of ease.” Here we might imagine the mollifying-albeit-ADHD-friendly aesthetics of a Marvel film, or maybe the conventional and formulaic HBO or Netflix documentary, replete with voiceover, B-roll, talking head interviews, and perhaps animated intertitles or charts thrown in for good measure. For Cervoni there is an ambiguity in Resnais: his films are still beautiful, formal, placed in “dramatic” order; yet after watching them, the viewer still does not find “the fluidity of concrete reality.” The viewers are thrown into disorder and the films evade easy categorization.

So, too, does Isaac Julien’s five-screen video installation Once Again… (Statues Never Die), commissioned by the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia and exhibited in Summer 2022. Here, Julien provides a “quasi-sequel” to the Resnais film; as Julien stated: “I’m calling this the poetics of restitution . . . The debates that we’re having today that seem contemporaneous were happening 50 years ago, if not before.”

Julien’s film likewise critiques colonialist acquisition but centers on its Philadelphia setting: the prized African art collection of white millionaire Albert Barnes, founder of the museum in which Julien’s work was exhibited. In contrast to Resnais and Marker’s film, where a “voice of god” narrator provides the skeletal structure but otherwise lacks a central figure, Julien’s five-screen installation has a protagonist: Black writer Alain Locke, intellectual father of the Harlem Renaissance who courted Langston Hughes—the subject of Isaac Julien’s 1989 film Looking for Langston. The films of Julien—a Black, gay, British artist—frequently delve into questions of queerness alongside race and colonialism. They can be described as avant-garde documentaries or semi-documentaries that utilize actors, re-enactments, and poetic commentary—elements of poetic fictionality that interweave through archival footage, upending any concept of objective “truth” and instead imbuing the historical archive with his unique voice and positionality.

Julien has also long been interested in the overlap between power, white supremacy, and the museum: his first video installation, Vagabondia (2000), is an extremely disorienting split-screen film about Sir John Soane’s museum in London, a film in which the ghosts of African slaves appear to roam through the museum’s red-carpeted, labyrinthine halls. Once Again visits themes from Vagabondia but the tone is suffused with a sense of luxury and queer desire—echoing the themes of gay love in Looking for Langston more than the rich jewel tones of the often-disturbing Vagabondia. Once Again, like Looking for Langston and also like Resnais and Marker’s film, is shot in sumptuous black and white, the camerawork using tracking shots to roam the halls of the Barnes Foundation. Julien diegetically portrays the love affair between Locke and Black sculptor Richmond Barthé, whose sculptures are also featured in the room beside the videos. Julien’s camera engages the haptic mode (described by Laura Marks in The Skin of the Film, 1999) by roaming around Barthé’s sculptures, the museum’s art holdings, and the two lovers, while the camera lens almost appears, literally, to touch them—echoing the camerawork of a famous scene in Roberto Rossellini’s 1954 Viaggio in Italia (Voyage to Italy) in which the roving camera sensuously tracks Ingrid Bergman’s gaze by seeming to caress the nude bodies of the Greek and Roman sculptures in a Naples museum. Here, as in Resnais’s Guernica, the film is not “about” classical sculpture but the act of looking at classical sculpture. It is ekphrasis as utterly subjective, affective and sensorial.

Pleasure, desire, and a feeling of luxurious calm are mobilized within the context of anti-racist and decolonial critique. Once Again appears to correct Resnais and Marker’s film in two ways: first, in emphasizing that Blackness was not absent from museum spaces (therefore upending the us-them, Europe-Africa dichotomy of Statues Also Die), and, second, in unveiling the affective and sensorial aspects of the museum. As in Vagabondia, the museum is not a locus of imposing rationalism but always already sensual, and even sexual. It rejects, then, the space of the museum as inherently tied to Enlightenment rationalism. The museum is always a place of playful ambivalence. Julien’s nod to pleasure is also emphasized by the casting: André Holland, known for starring in explicitly queer films Moonlight and Passing, plays Alain Locke, and singer/songwriter Alice Smith makes a special appearance. Pleasure becomes especially important as an antidote to rationalism when, as a museum custodian character in Once Again describes in the voiceover: “anything that has ever been mutilated, has been mutilated in me.” Racism and colonialism are not theoretical but literally embodied in the film’s characters. Once Again molds Resnais and Marker’s film into one that addresses the personal and embodied experience of slavery and white supremacy. It suffuses what could otherwise serve as a cold critique of imperialist art acquisition into a parable about longing—for others, for restitution, as well as for a better world.

Arguably, though, Julien’s film is not as critical of the museum space as Marker and Resnais’s film—not least because it was commissioned by the Barnes itself, and its portrait of the museum’s famed founder is evocative rather than biting. Its ekphrasis is less an artwork-about-another-artwork than a meditation on museum spaces and artworks, and the human interpersonal (and even romantic) entanglements that become entwined with the appreciation and making of art objects. The installation did include several selections from the African art collection at the Barnes, and the museum-goer is meant to reflect on the prehistories and afterlives of these objects—how they appeared at the Barnes (through Barnes himself), how they inspired Locke, and Julien’s sensorial and poetic response to these histories. Here we might think of Julien’s work as ekphrasis from an angle, in its more diaristic and auto-ethnographic form—one in which the hand gently caressing the statue is made visible, and more central, than the statue itself. When Julien describes statues as living forever, then, it is always through the mediation of the cultural worker, and through the strange magic of its effects.

Mati Diop’s Dahomey, released in 2024, mirrors Julien’s invocation of the eternal life of statues. Instead of a re-enactment-infused quasi-documentary biopic, however, Diop’s film, about statues returned from Paris to their home in Benin/the Kingdom of Dahomey, infuses what seems like conventional modes of observational documentary with highly imaginative science fiction. In Dahomey, statues do not just live forever because of their continued relevance to our lives; they are, in fact, literally alive. Diop, niece of Djibril Diop Mambéty, director of the 1973 surrealistic road movie Touki Bouki and star of 2008 35 Shots of Rum by Claire Denis, directed the magic realist, decolonial, anti-imperialist, and feminist Atlantics (2019), and Dahomey shares aspects of her debut’s magic realism. The film uses the prosopopoetic register by bringing to life a single statue: King Gezo, who ruled Dahomey in the mid-1800s. His deep, electronically-infused and metallic voice speaks Fon, an Indigenous language of Dahomey, rather than French, and rejects the reification of Dahomean artifacts:

As far back as I can go there has never been a night so deep and opaque. Here, it is the only possible reality. The beginning and the end. I journeyed so long in my mind but it was so dark in this foreign place that I lost myself in my dreams, becoming one with these walls. Cut off from the land of my birth, as if I were dead. There are thousands of us in this night. We all bear the same scars. Uprooted. Ripped out. The spoils of massive plundering. Today, it’s me they have chosen like their finest and most legitimate victim! They have named me 26.

Diop’s film does not include a mediating critic; she does not include any voiceover in her film aside from the King’s, and the bulk of documentary film is from “his” perspective. In a fiercely experimental move, the camera was placed in the cargo box with the 220 kg statue; we, as he does, see darkness, and hear the drilling of screws into the corners of the box. Later in the film, we, too, emerge from darkness into the sound of released screws, and harsh shafts of light emerge from the middle of the screen as the lid is lifted. Although Marker and Resnais’s film includes moments of prosopopoeia in which the artifacts are personified through the camera lens—museum patrons of all ethnicities peer questioningly into it in a shot-reverse-shot that briefly joins our gaze with that of African art—Diop’s film is founded on the camera’s complete identification with the statue’s gaze. Like Julien’s film, it is a tender yet fierce correction to the (perhaps inevitable) distanced ethnography of Marker and Resnais’s original film.

Despite personifying the Dahomean King, the film remains relatively ambivalent about restitution as such. Halfway through the film, after the statue makes its way from France to Benin, the film turns to a debate about the much-applauded return of 26 royal “treasures” delivered by local youths. While some of the students portrayed in the debate are ecstatic about the return of statues—one even describes crying, feeling a mystical relationship to the statues, and another feels tied to a long line of ancestors—most are ambivalent or explicitly critical, seeing the restitution as a Public Relations stunt by French president Emmanuel Macron. As one notes: “The aim is not to make people in Benin happy. The aim is, in fact, to gratify France… [Macron] did it to boost his brand.” Or rather: “I don’t think… it’s historic. It’s a purely political event,” noting that the president of Benin, Patrice Talon, was related to one of the interpreters who facilitated the original plunder of the Dahomey artifacts.

The skepticism of these youths is even shared by King Gezo, who questions that the present-day Benin to which he returns is really “home” as such:

26. Why didn’t they call me by my real name? Don’t they know it? ‘You can leave now! 26, go back home!’ Return to the surface of time… leave behind my brothers, prone, ignored deep in the unnameable. Go back home? What awaits me elsewhere?

The film intercuts images of present-day Benin into the second half of the film, showing footage of the postmodern museum, landscapes bereft of people, and janitors and art handlers in the museum itself, gazing quizzically at the statues with more perplexed distance than awe-struck wonder. As Diop shows the museum slowly turning off the lights of the exhibit space, saving King Gezo for last until he, too, disappears into the darkness of the museum, she seems to ask: where is home, really? Is restitution truly the first step to justice? Perhaps, the film implies, another strategy is needed—perhaps one that employs the creative phantasm of Diop’s sci-fi reimagining rather than a return to another box, another museum, another stream of confused, skeptical gazes. Diop demonstrates a mode of ekphrasis that embraces play and embodiment, opening up (literal) spaces for debate, rather than the cold, ambivalent space of the ethnographic museum.

Taken together, the two films by Diop and Julien speak to the resistance inherent in African art, as if echoing Edward Said’s claim in Culture and Imperialism of a history of resistance struggles largely absent in the Western canon (and absent, even, in the communist, antifascist gaze of Marker and Resnais): “Never was it the case that the imperial encounter pitted an active Western intruder against a supine or inert non-Western native; there was always some form of active resistance, and in the overwhelming majority of cases, the resistance finally won out.”^[10] Diop and Julien both demonstrate resistance against the one-sided (albeit strongly decolonial and anti-imperialist) viewpoint of Statues Also Die, yet theirs is a critique that eschews explanatory voiceover and allows a more abstract and porous gaze. Theirs is an ekphrasis that is visceral and embodied, using techniques and possibilities unique in the filmic medium rather than a literary description.

This stranger, uneasier ekphrastic technique also rejects the form of the classic ethnography; Diop and Julien do not employ looking as such (and looking, likewise, is too often joined with a scientific rationalism that assumes objectivity and masks power and domination). Even with the many gazes in Diop’s film, the gaze is a subjective one, always someone gazing, always questioning and ambivalent. Ekphrasis, then, can provide the documentary genre with a much-needed reminder of its inherently subjective dimensions, a threading of personal experience alongside geopolitical forces. These films also make the gaze visible, and unveil the hierarchies of power implicit in ekphrastic technique.

Ekphrasis also provides the possibility of alchemical, almost magical transformations: the metallic voice of Gezo in Dahomey, and the soft dusting of snow on the shoulders of Locke in Once Again. Marker and Resnais’s film, too, did not reject the mysterious and the magical; in their hands, patterns from African fabrics dance across the screen in frenetic fast-motion, anticipating the experimental animated tapestry film The Grand Bizarre by Jodie Mack (2018). Editing, as with other films by both Resnais and Marker, becomes a surrealist strategy to unnerve, estrange, and re-enchant. In Statues Also Die, the voiceover notes: “Science, as magic, both admit the necessity of the sacrifice of the animal.” Perhaps Diop and Julien were similarly intrigued by this dimension of the Marker and Resnais film, which rejects claims to objectivity and, instead, finds a surprising common thread between warring kingdoms and empires. Perhaps it is this aspect of re-enchantment that provides ekphrasis in documentary with a formidable potential for wonder as well as ethical and political import.

As theorist of enchantment Jane Bennett writes, “under fortuitous conditions, the good humor of enchantment spills over into critical consciousness and tempers it, thus rendering its judgments more generous and its claims less dogmatic . . . Such moments can be cultivated and intensified by artful means. Enchantment, as I use the term, is an uneasy combination of artifice and spontaneity.”^[11] Marker, Resnais, Diop, and Julien all lean heavily into documentary not as pedagogical tool, but as one that enhances dis-ease, that lays bare the dialectic of artifice and spontaneity—perhaps another way of saying the unresolved jostling of fiction and nonfiction, internal and external, the gravitas of the geopolitical and the gentle enchantments of the everyday.

 
[1] Marcel Martin, « Les Statues Meurent Aussi : Un chef’d’oevre mutilé (fr.) » in Les Lettres françaises (893 : Sept 20-27 1961), 6.

[2] Chris Marker, interviewed by Simone Dubreuilh, in Les lettres françaises (664: March 28-April 3 1957), 6.

[3] Matsumoto Toshio, trans. Michael Raine, “A Theory of Avant-Garde Documentary,” Cinema Journal (Vol. 14:4, Summer 2012, pp.148-154), 149.

[4] Walter Benjamin, Thesis VIII from “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” see https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html.

[5] See Charles Krantz, “Teaching Night and Fog: History and Historiography,” in Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies (Vol 15:1, pp. 1-11, February 1985), 8.

[6] Anne Philipe, “Cuba Si ou les racines d’une Révolution” in Les Lettres françaises (910: Jan 18-24 1962), 7.

[7] Both quotes from Jean Wagner, « Le Cahier des Autres », in Cahiers du cinéma (165 : April 1965), 78.

[8] Daniel Fairfax, The Red Years of Cahiers, Vol 1: ideology and politics (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2022), 239.

[9] Albert Cervoni, « Resnais : Pour un spectateur actif, » Miroir du cinéma (2 : May 1962), 15.

[10] Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), xii.

[11] Jane Bennett, The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001) , 10.