El cuerpo y la memoria

Body and memory: Muriel by Alain Resnais

Muriel, a film by Alain Resnais, came out in cinemas more than forty years ago but the questions it raised still affect our present. The film concerns the "time of a return": that of Alphonse who visits his ancient lover Hélène, but also Bernard's return, coming back from his military service in Algeria. In both cases we face what Paul Ricoeur calls "wounded memory": the past events cannot gain the distance guaranteed by remembrance, but are still active and constantly clutched to the present. How can an aesthetic text show the traumatic past active in the present maintaining, at the same time, its overwhelming status? Muriel – hence its efficacy – builds up a proper "exercise of intra-textual memory" inviting the viewer to catch - 'under' a series of apparently incongruous figures - a net of figuratively deeper relationships. Through this 'exercise' Muriel autonomously "thinks" the role of torture in a never declared colonial war, whose repressive apparatus was founded on the "state of exception" allowing the transgression of constitutional guarantees in the colony. The film gives concrete figurative form to this complex ideological discourse, showing that the apparently far and separate dimensions of violence and abuse and the apparently 'innocent' dimension of everyday life are deeply embedded in one another on the base of a figural common root.