Daily Inspiration Quote by Alain Resnais

Repulsion is doing double duty here: it names both the subject matter and the viewer's likely response, and Resnais treats that recoil as part of the message-delivery system. "It was repugnant" reads like a moral shudder, but the second clause snaps it into something colder and more pragmatic: necessity. The line is a miniature of his cinema, where aesthetic strategy often involves putting the audience in a compromised position - implicated, unsettled, unable to hide behind tasteful distance.

Resnais emerged from a postwar French culture trying to metabolize atrocity and collaboration without turning it into comforting myth. In that atmosphere, "communication" isn't about clarity; it's about transmission across a psychic firewall. The repugnant thing (images of camps, the banality of bureaucratic violence, the invasive probing of memory) resists narration because narration risks smoothing it into plot. So the "only way" becomes an ethical argument for form: montage, fragmentation, temporal slippage, and an almost clinical attention to surfaces are not stylistic flourishes but workarounds for the limits of language and conventional storytelling.

The subtext is a challenge to the audience's demand for palatability. If we insist on being approached gently, we collude in forgetting. Resnais suggests that disgust can be a kind of truth-teller: it bypasses rationalization, hits the body first, and forces an encounter that polite discourse would dodge. The phrase also carries a director's cynicism about mass attention: in a noisy culture, shock may be the last reliable channel.