Parentheses in time

As is well known, any consideration of Alain Resnais's cinema inevitably arrives at the question of time. Indeed, the relation of the former to the latter is now such a commonplace that ‘Resnais’ and ‘time’ have effectively come to function (at least in the discourse of film studies) as synonyms. As such, any invocation of the pair today carries with it the danger of sounding tired and clichéd. On top of this, the films that I will be examining in this chapter – Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year in Marienbad (1961) – suffer from an interpretive malaise similar to that of The Matrix, namely, that practically every theoretical orientation recognises itself in them. Nevertheless, I hope in what follows to provide something at least approximating a novel approach to the questions of time and love as they are thought in the cinema of Alain Resnais.

Clearly Resnais's cinema is as entwined with the question of time as are the lovers with each other in Hiroshima mon amour's beautiful opening scene. Moreover, in both cases the embrace appears so all-consuming, so complete – even in its paradoxical incompletion (the lovers’ bodies are fragmented to the point of indiscernibility; Resnais’ great films as a rule eschew classical closure) – that it gives the impression of standing at a remove from both time and space: while Hiroshima’s lovers are here disembodied and depersonalised in an anonymous embrace, an amorous any-space-whatever (which is equally an any- time- whatever), so too Resnais’s cinema can be seen to create its own anonymous time, a time which is properly topological, constituting the set of relations of heterogeneous times, which, like Deleuze’s Relation (or Whole or Duration …), is finally nothing other than the timelessness of time, time outside of time.