All the Memory in the World (1956)

[Dave Monroe]

Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKvhp6kL4N4 (1/2)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6XLjcfGwDfo (2/2)

All the Memory in the World is a kind of creepy and morbid sequel to
Night and Fog in which sequestered books in the Bibliothèque Nationale
are perceived as if they were prisoners, squirreled away in a
Borgesian labyrinth.

http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/the-unknown-statue-20091106

Between this and his first feature length movie, Resnais actually
directed two lesser-known documentaries that were in their own ways
nearly as groundbreaking. The first of these is “Toute la mémoire du
monde,” which roughly translates in to "All the World’s Memory." It
takes “Night and Fog”’s concerns about memory and leads them to a
surprising twist with its oddly foreboding voiceover. The film is a
documentary about France’s Bibliotheque Nationale and was commissioned
in order to give a romantic image of the library. It does so, but it
also questions the gain of collecting all the memory in the world,
despite ultimately valorizing the pursuit of knowledge.

The short begins with a tour of the library, visiting departments
until a specific book is requested, at which point it follows this
book back out and into the hands of a waiting reader.  This sounds
pretty dull. In fact, it’s hard to think of any documentary about a
library being anything but dull. Regardless, it’s a surprisingly
memorable and in fact striking film. Although the quality of Resnsais’
works is frequently debated, his level of craft is generally beyond
reproach, featuring mise-en-scene and camera movements as controlled
as Welles or Kubrick (and in fact, Kubrick’s The Shining clearly owes
a large debt to Last Year At Marienbad).  “Tout la memoire du monde”
first developed Resnais’ love for long zooms and stunning tracking
shots. This creates that rarity: a documentary with spectacle, which
keeps things interesting despite the subject.

As impressive as the rest of the film is, with its
heavy-handed-yet-effective metaphor of a library for the human brain,
the most striking part of the work is its strange introduction. Like a
lost scene from Alphaville, its unexplained microphone and cavernous
setting creates a creepy and claustrophobic feeling. Since Resnais is
actually emphasizing the importance of the library, this is a subtly
ironic joke, but only one of many. An avid comic reader, Resnais was
forced to smuggle in copies from his own collection in order to film
them as valuable works of art in the future, regardless of their
contemporary reputation.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/06/salute-your-shorts-resnais-documentaries.html