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Je t’aime, je t’aime

Screening on Film
Directed by Alain Resnais.
With With Claude Rich, Olga Georges-Picot, Anouk Ferjac.
France, 1968, 35mm, color, 91 min.
French with English subtitles.

A poetic work of science fiction akin to Chris Marker’s La Jetée, Resnais’s film is a tightly wrought, mesmerizing exploration of memory and time. A man (Rich) is rescued from suicide by scientists and sent traveling in time, accompanied by a charming mouse who has been previously used in such experiments. The man becomes lost as fragmentary episodes from his past take over in a chaotic series of unordered events. Beautiful, tranquil, but increasingly menacing moments point to a love affair with a girl the man may or may not have killed.

PRECEDED BY

  • Statues Also Die (Les Statues meurent aussi)

    Directed by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker.
    France, 1950-53, 35mm, black & white, 22 min.
    French with English subtitles.

This 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 its 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.

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