The collaborative film, banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism (and now available only in shortened form), is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of it contact with Western civilization. Marker’s characteristically witty and thoughtful commentary is combined with images of a stark formal beauty in this passionate outcry against the fate of an art that was once integral to communal life but became debased as it fell victim to the demands of another culture.

Commissioned by a polystyrene manufacturer to depict this "noble material...entirely created by man," Resnais frightened his sponsors with this surrealistic film set to a poem by Raymond Queneau and music by Pierre Barbaud. "Perhaps the freest of Resnais's shorts" (Roy Armes).

Resnais in microcosm: time, space, and memory are the hidden subjects of a documentary on the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The camera follows long walkways, examines dusty corners, rides the elevators. One is reminded of de Chirico, of Cocteau's Orpheus, of Godard's Alphaville; of heaven and of hell.