ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes the esoteric 1960s films of renowned French filmmaker Alain Resnais, exploring how sound and music are used to engage with the films’ overarching themes of memory, trauma, and the past. Throughout the 1960s, from L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961, Last year at Marienbad) and Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour (1963, Muriel, or the time of return) to La Guerre est finie (1966, The war is over) and Je t’aime, je t’aime (1968, I love you, I love you), Resnais consistently turned to modernist composers (Francis Seyrig, Hans Werner Henze, Giovanni Fusco, and Krzysztof Penderecki) to write film scores, which play into themes such as the unreliability of memory, the mapping of individual losses onto collective traumas and the psychological realities of life in post-war Europe. With the help of Gilles Deleuze’s concept of “sheets of past,” this chapter investigates the function of music in Marienbad and Muriel. In both films, Resnais and his composers explore the limits of such techniques as audiovisual counterpoint, dissonance, fragmentation, disruption, repetition, and circularity. Finally, Resnais often breaks on his soundtracks with audiovisual conventions, demonstrating the important role of music, sound effects, and voices in multiplying the possible narratives and interpretations of memory, trauma, repressed memory, obliviousness, and the past in these highly modernist films.
