"I'd even say it's a realistic film because that's the way it happens in our heads; that was the idea"
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Realism, for Resnais, isn’t a documentary camera parked in front of “life.” It’s the jittery, associative editing suite inside the mind. When he calls a film realistic because it mirrors “the way it happens in our heads,” he’s staking out a radical position in postwar cinema: interior experience is the truest terrain, even if it looks fragmented, out of order, or formally “unreal.”
The line reads like a defense against the old charge that stylization equals artifice. Resnais flips that logic. Memory doesn’t arrive as clean scenes with establishing shots; it comes as flashes, echoes, overlaps, and contradictions. So a film that jumps in time, repeats gestures, or lets sound and image drift out of sync isn’t being cute - it’s being honest about cognition. The subtext is almost polemical: conventional realism can be the bigger lie, smoothing over the mental distortions that actually govern desire, grief, guilt, and love.
Context matters because Resnais emerged from a France trying to metabolize catastrophe: war, occupation, colonial trauma, the shaky ethics of “moving on.” His cinema (think the haunted temporal loops of Hiroshima mon amour or the labyrinth of Last Year at Marienbad) turns history into psychology: the past isn’t past; it’s an invasive presence, re-edited by denial and longing. That’s why “that was the idea” lands with a quiet severity. He’s not describing a stylistic preference. He’s describing a moral commitment to depicting how humans really process experience: not as a timeline, but as a troubled, beautiful mess of recall.
The line reads like a defense against the old charge that stylization equals artifice. Resnais flips that logic. Memory doesn’t arrive as clean scenes with establishing shots; it comes as flashes, echoes, overlaps, and contradictions. So a film that jumps in time, repeats gestures, or lets sound and image drift out of sync isn’t being cute - it’s being honest about cognition. The subtext is almost polemical: conventional realism can be the bigger lie, smoothing over the mental distortions that actually govern desire, grief, guilt, and love.
Context matters because Resnais emerged from a France trying to metabolize catastrophe: war, occupation, colonial trauma, the shaky ethics of “moving on.” His cinema (think the haunted temporal loops of Hiroshima mon amour or the labyrinth of Last Year at Marienbad) turns history into psychology: the past isn’t past; it’s an invasive presence, re-edited by denial and longing. That’s why “that was the idea” lands with a quiet severity. He’s not describing a stylistic preference. He’s describing a moral commitment to depicting how humans really process experience: not as a timeline, but as a troubled, beautiful mess of recall.
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