Situated between Night and Fog and The Song of Styrene, this film commissioned by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (for "touristic" purposes) nevertheless foreshadows Resnais's outstanding feature films. In fact, everything contributes to making this short film, which could have been of an atrocious institutional banality, a great work. 

First, Ghislain Cloquet’s photography (one of the filmmaker's two faithful collaborators, along with Sacha Vierny) is masterful in its beauty and ingenuity in a number of dark and cramped places. Woven with traveling shots and crane movements, it gives a glimpse of Hiroshima mon amour and, a fortiori, of Last Year at Marienbad with its string of corridors and galleries - and the mute veneer of its statues. Then, the exceptional music of Maurice Jarre, for percussions, winds, and ondes Martenot. Following in the footsteps of the Group of Six (Auric, Milhaud, etc.), it permeates the film through and through, infusing it with its very essence. Finally, the screenplay by Remo Forlani, who pens one of the great texts of the glorious era of documentary narration.

It is also worth mentioning that the work is visited by the genius of Chris (Magic) Marker. Already borrowing a kind of sci-fi aesthetic, the film invites us to follow, through several sequences, the whole journey in the BNF of a book about planet Mars. However, this book was entirely made up by Marker for the purposes of the production (with the iconography of Markerian cats and all the Saint-Fruschino). Incidentally, this strange element of the film inspired a recent short film by Justine Haelters, titled, Mars, like the fictional book.

All the memory in the world insists a lot on the quantity of books and documents that the BNF had to deal with every day, in 1956. However, this was long before Ignacio Ramonet mentioned in an editorial of Le Monde diplomatique in 1997 (thus in the early days of the Internet) "that in thirty years, the world has produced more information than in the previous five thousand years…". So, the question that haunts us today arises: where are we, in 2023?

Richard Brouillette
Filmmaker, producer, chicken farmer, and accountant