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Between Republic and Market

subjectivity. Resnais’s work does indeed, as Walker-Morrison suggests, set before us ‘les paradoxes d’un sujet qui, dès que l’on cherche à le cerner, s’éclipse, et qui, dès que l’on cherche à le chasser, revient au galop’ (1). The author opts not for the chronological approach one might have expected from her title, but rather for a— ‘nettement plus resnaisienne’— ‘mosaı̈que’, beginning with On connaı̂t la chanson of 1997, which for her represents ‘en quelque sorte le sommet de l’oeuvre’ (2). She situates Resnais’s work on the cusp of the ‘moderne’ and the ‘post-moderne’, viewing it as seeking to establish between those two poles ‘un équilibre, non pas stable mais dynamique et créateur’ (2). The counterpart to this duality is that between the ‘mise en abyme’ often observed in the director’s films and what she terms a ‘mise en écart’, grounded in displacement and refraction—most strikingly at work for the present writer in L’Année dernière à Marienbad, but here argued to be recurrent in the film-maker’s oeuvre. Walker-Morrison’s development of these often more apparent than real antinomies, thorough as it is, all too often struck me as lengthy and repetitive, turgidly over-egging its conceptual pudding; the deftness and lightness of touch so often evident in the gai savoir of Resnais’s work are nowhere in evidence here. Her view of Resnais as an ‘auteur dialogique’ is however well argued, and the parallel between Alphonse in Muriel and Albert Dehousse in Jacques Audiard’s Un héros très discret is a point well taken. It is, however, unfortunate that despite copious references to Derrida she makes no allusion in her discussion of the oscillation between the impossibility and the necessity of documenting (Chapter 6) to Mal d’archive, so significant an exploration of that contradiction, and indeed that Barthes’s Journal de deuil—in many ways his most ‘Derridean’ text—is nowhere mentioned. The work would also have benefited from a filmography and from name-checking (at least) of actors alongside the characters they portray; where would Resnais be without Delphine Seyrig, Pierre Arditi or Sabine Azéma?