The Topography of La Guerre est finie
(Spaces, Places, Non-Places and Other Spaces) (A version of this essay was originally published as 'Topografia filmu Vojna sa skončila: Priestory, miesta, ne-miesta a iné priestory' in the collective volume Alain Resnais - kinematografia mozgu. I am grateful to Michal Michalovič and the Slovak Film Institute for permission to publish here this English version. I am also grateful to François Thomas for advice and help with the research.)
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1/ Parisian Apartments
A topographical peculiarity of La Guerre est finie arises from its being a Franco-Swedish co-production, requiring that some of the film be shot in Sweden. In an interview with François Thomas (L'Atelier d'Alain Resnais, p.114), the designer Jacques Saulnier describes how complicated it was to produce authentic-looking Parisian interiors 1500 kilometres away in a Stockholm studio. This place, the Europa Films studio in Sundbyberg, is not a part of the topography of the film, which is of course true of any studio in which a constructed space is filmed. Film studios have been identified as a Foucauldian heterotopia, ‘juxtaposing in a single real space several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible’ ('Of Other Spaces'). To Foucault's ‘incompatible’ I would add ‘unmappable’.
The constructed interior itself can only be mapped onto a film’s topography if it is connected by some means to a localisable exterior. La Guerre est finie does this by conventional means, through the continuity of an action, first showing the protagonist, Diego, in a real street going into a real building, then shortly after showing him inside, in the studio-made décor. This procedure is supplemented by views from inside the building looking out on an exterior. This exterior can be real, when shots of the studio décor are combined with shots taken from the actual place the studio décor is supposed to represent. Or the exterior can be false, with views through the windows of invented images representing buildings or skyline. The exterior can also be false but not invented: one of the sets built and filmed in Stockholm represents an apartment in a suburban housing estate, with windows through which can be seen the actual estate where this is supposed to be, represented by photographs taken on site (at Ivry-sur-Seine):
Such interiors are a hybrid, then, mixing views of an entirely artificial space in the studio with variously authentic views of an exterior. A mix of reality and artifice characterises the topography of Resnais’s films in general, and of La Guerre est finie in particular.
The topographical centre of the film is an apartment at 14 quai de Béthune, on the île Saint Louis, in the centre of Paris. Its representation combines the actual location with the most elaborate of the sets constructed in Stockholm:
In this hybrid space, combining elements of a real and an invented place, a discourse on the meaning of place is being elaborated. Marianne, Diego’s partner, is working on a book about the language of cities, on how the cities of the world speak to their inhabitants and how those inhabitants answer back. As Diego looks indifferently at six or seven of the photographs of signage that will illustrate the book, we may conclude that he is not much inclined to join in this conversation. The photographs, mostly or all taken by Resnais himself, are mostly of streets with arrows painted on them, all relatively anonymous:
He has just arrived in Paris from Madrid, but tells his partner’s friends that he has been in Rome, whereas she had told them he was in Geneva: these cities are interchangeable, inconsequential. Earlier, Diego had picked up a copy of Hemingway’s Paris est une fête (A Moveable Feast) and quickly put it back down, uninterested; none of these cities is for him ‘a feast’. |
For the film, on the other hand, Paris and its environs are a rich resource: eight different apartments, four in the centre, four in the suburbs; two railway stations, three metro stations and one journey on the metro, two car rides through the city, two bus rides, two cinemas, at least four cafés, two cemeteries, a school, a centre for university students, a bookshop, one monument (the Panthéon), one bridge over the Seine (the pont de Sully). There is also one map of Paris, on a métro station platform:
This map is one of several that appear as background décor, but there is only one major map scene, towards the end of the film. This scene illustrates well the topographical specificity of La Guerre est finie. Diego is about to go on a mission to Barcelona and is being told the address of his contact there. The address is said aloud, is written out for him, and is indicated on a map of the city. We know exactly where he is to go: '45 carrer Aribau, 3rd floor, on the right':
In a departure from the film’s habit of showing in flashes what the protagonist imagines or anticipates, there is no image of that place in Barcelona, other than its location on the map. The map is a substitute for what cannot be filmed – not just Barcelona but Spain as a whole. Spain, the principal focus and preoccupation of Resnais’s film, has to be represented by other means.
2/ France and Spain
The big opposition around which La Guerre est finie turns is between France and Spain. The difference between the two countries becomes the difference between present and past, safety and danger, action and inaction. Fittingly, since Diego claims to be an interpreter for UNESCO, language articulates the opposition: speakers switch from French to Spanish, Frenchmen have Spanish names, French actors speak with Spanish accents. Written forms modulate this motif: posters and graffiti on French walls declare support for Justo Lopez de la Fuente and opposition to Franco; brochures in French cafés advertise holiday homes in La Pineda. The film’s title translates into French the phrase with which Franco declared the end of the Spanish Civil War: ‘La guerra ha terminado’. (The big linguistic difference is nuanced by views of political brochures written in Catalan or with titles in Basque.)
A topographical motif such as crossing a border does the same kind of work: in the opening sequence the border at Behobie is a river, the Bidassoa, spanned by a bridge on which Diego waits and contemplates the landscape of France laid out before him. He remembers earlier passages through the mountains, and the rest of the film is preoccupied by the idea of crossing back into Spain. Behobie, at the western extremity of the frontier, is matched at the end of the film when Diego heads for Le Perthus, at the eastern extremity:
Within each country in turn smaller topographical oppositions signify. In Spain, the chief of these is movement between Barcelona and Madrid, because it is central to the story, but other cities and towns are mentioned in picturing the country as a whole (Burgos, Miranda, Bilbao, Sestao, Erandio, Guernica). Within cities a more localised topography is foregrounded. The event that prompts the film’s first action –Diego leaving Madrid to warn Juan not to leave Paris for Spain – is a friend’s failure to come to a rendez-vous at the botanical gardens in Madrid, which is interpreted as the consequence of police round-ups across the city. In the film’s first sequence Diego’s driver imagines where he would have gone in Madrid had there been time: to dine at Botin’s (the oldest restaurant in the world), to the Prado, to a bullfight, then on to Toledo and Aranjuez.
This verbal construction of Spain occurs as the two men cross the ‘international bridge’ and approach the French customs post in Behobie. We see Spain behind them, a view from the bridge, but that is all of Spain that we actually see in the film. When Spain is shown again it is through Diego’s brief mental glimpses, but these are reconstructions staged in French streets. One of them, showing Juan’s arrest, is marked as being in Spain simply by the sight of two Spanish policemen walking past. In another, when Diego imagines that he has been the object of surveillance, we see someone filming from inside a car and, to show that this is meant to be Spain, those two Spanish policemen walk past again:
We can read this furtive filming as a figure of the filming Resnais wasn’t permitted to do within Spain itself. French productions at the time were free to use Spanish locations, but not if the film had overtly political content. Even if Resnais had been given permission to film in Spain, that would have involved operating under restrictions analogous to those experienced by the anti-Franco militants of the film’s story. Not filming in Spain is a constraint that allows the film’s topographical form to match its political content.
The freedom to film in France is fully exercised, as demonstrated by the use of the actual customs building in Behobie and then by the car journey from the frontier to Hendaye, tracked in detail by the camera from inside the car. Two later views of car journeys towards the frontier near Perpignan are situated exactly by road signs reading ‘Le Perthus’ and ‘Le Perthus, frontier at 3km’. There are two car journeys within Paris that are harder to track because they are at night, but both are readable: from the rue de l’Estrapade to the boulevard Edgar Quinet, and a round trip from the quai de Béthune to the Gare de Lyon, a café on the avenue Daumesnil, a cinema on the rue de Lyon and then back to the quai de Béthune. Traceable itineraries of this kind become a figure of the film’s topographical freedom. This is true even if the journey is not shown. The itinerary mapped out by a train official for Diego from Hendaye to Perpignan via Bayonne, Toulouse and Narbonne proves unfeasible only because it would take too long, not because it couldn’t be filmed. It had been illustrated a minute earlier by an imagined glimpse of Diego at Narbonne boarding the train for Perpignan, an image that characterises the film’s freedom as a function both of mise-en-scène and montage.
Visual representations of France are supplemented by the verbal, the mode to which representations of Spain are largely confined. In Behobie a signpost points to other places in the region (Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne, Bordeaux). When he gets back to Paris, the narration lists different places in the suburbs of Paris where Diego’s comrades live: ‘Ivry, Porte des Lilas, Six Routes, Quatres Chemins, Aubervilliers, La Poterne des Peupliers, Victor Hugo, Jaurès, Paul Vaillant-Couturier.’ The nine-item list is illustrated with nine shots of just one place, a street in Ivry-sur-Seine. Seven of the shots show close-ups of posters on a wall, linked by rapid, jump-like cuts, foregrounding the visuality of montage over the representation of place. One of the posters refers to Justo Lopez’s appearance before a military tribunal in Madrid, a further sign of Spain’s absence from the pro-filmic topography of La Guerre est finie. This void in front of the camera is filled by memory: the street itself is the rue Celestino Alfonso, commemorating a Spanish Republican captain and member of the French Resistance, executed by the Germans in 1944. Alfonso was head of the Young Communists in Ivry-sur-Seine, and it was in 1945 that the town gave his name to the street that Diego walks down to meet with his fellow Communists. The film itself doesn’t bring up this memory, leaving it to those who already know the street to uncover the hidden connection with history.
3/ Paris: Centre and Margins
‘You live in Paris at 4 rue de l’Estrapade – no, at number 7.’ Questioned by a suspicious policeman at the border, Diego corrects the policeman’s deliberate mistake about the address and avoids his trap. (Those who know the street know that number 4 rue de l’Estrapade doesn’t exist, because numbers 2 to 14 are taken up by the back of a school, the Lycée Henri IV.) The address Diego gives is a part of his assumed identity, though he has never actually been to the house. Later, once safely in France, he explains the arrangement and says that he will be going there. We are shown a prospective shot of the street name and then one of the house, centred on the number ‘7’ affixed to the gate. But, like the policeman, Diego gets the address wrong: the building he sees is in fact at number 9 rue de l’Estrapade, separated from number 7 by an adjoining street (the rue Laromiguière). One explanation of Diego’s mistake would be that he only vaguely remembers the street, and number 9 is the more memorable of the buildings opposite the Lycée Henri IV, with a distinctive ironwork gate and the ornate emblem of a coffee producer, the Brûlerie Saint Jacques:
Diego’s misremembering is complicated by what the film remembers. Roy Armes (The Cinema of Alain Resnais, p.142) and Marcel Oms (Alain Resnais, p.109) have both noted that ‘Rue de l’Estrapade’ is the name of a 1953 film by Jacques Becker, suggesting a homage of sorts to a film Resnais appreciated: 'J'aime beaucoupl les films de Becker prétendus mineurs: Falbalas, Rue de l'Esptrapade, Edouard et Caroline...' ('Le Bonheur au quotidien', p.231). The suggestion is all the stronger in that the building used in Becker’s film is actually number 7, though we must conclude that Diego’s erroneous visualisation of the address is not informed by his having seen Becker’s film, that on his part it is not a cine-memory. Diego continues to mistake the place when, in the train, he imagines the young woman who lives there walking out from and into the building and also coming down the stairs inside it. He still confuses number 7 with the building at number 9, and his vision of the building’s interior confirms that he has no memory of Becker’s film, since he imagines a very plain stair rail whereas the actual stair rail is highly ornate, a feature Becker had made great play of through the shadows it casts.
Diego wrongly visualises the building for a third time, just before he actually goes there. We see two last shots of the building he imagines to be the right one, at number 9, before we see him arriving at the correct building, number 7. He goes in, and here in the stairwell we can see that Resnais’s film remembers Becker’s because it quotes the shadows cast by the stair rail in Rue de l’Estrapade:
Diego’s three erroneous visualisations of the address are staged by Resnais through a very simple device: displacing the plate on which is inscribed the number 7. In the first two instances the plate is to the right of the gate into number 9, and each time it is the object of a distinctive axial movement by the camera, firstly away from it and secondly towards it. In the third instance a first shot shows the plate in that same position, fixed to the railings right of the gate, but in the second shot the plate has been moved to the wall just left of the gate at number 9. These two shots repeat the pattern of movement away and then towards the plate, and the comfort of repetition might make us miss the displacement to the other side of the gate. These shots are followed by Diego’s arrival at the correct building. He glances at the street sign reading ‘rue de l’Estrapade’ then, in front of number 7, he looks up and sees the number plate, positioned high and to the right of the doorway. The camera moves rapidly towards it as if to fix it in this position. This is where the number plate was in Becker’s film and, I assume, where it was in reality, at the time. Here is the number plate in two wrong places and then in the right place:
In the last sequence in which we see the exterior of number 7, the number plate is in the last of these three places, the right one,no longer the floating signifier of Diego’s poor memory. Displacing the number plate is a simple but a peculiar, even unique device: usually if a film falsifies a street number it is to avoid any confusion with reality, rather than, as here, to signify a confused reality.
More conventionally, the rue de l’Estrapade address has been read as an element within what N.T. Binh calls the film’s ‘emotional topography’, its ‘sentimental cartography’, contrasting the Latin Quarter home of Diego’s young lover Nadine with that of Marianne, his older partner, on the quai de Bethune (Paris au cinéma, p.153). Binh heavily overstates this case, firstly by misreading Marianne’s address as rive droite, on the right bank of the Seine, in order to contrast it with the Left Bank student milieu that is associated with Nadine. Marianne actually lives on the île Saint Louis, an island in the Seine better figured as outside of or above the rive droite/rive gauche opposition. Secondly, Binh misses the over-riding similarity between these two apartments, the homes of wealthy professionals (Marianne works in publishing; Nadine’s father is a civil engineer). When Nadine take Diego to meet her fellow Leninists, we visit a third such apartment: all three exemplify bourgeois comfort, whether or not they are occupied by radicals, and whether or not those radicals are young or middle-aged.
The address in the rue de l’Estrapade is displaced by Resnais from the conventional opposition in which it had figured in Becker’s film. There, the female protagonist leaves her comfortable rive droite home in the 16th arrondissement (quai Louis Blériot) to live in Left Bank squalor among students, musicians and working-class people. In Resnais’s film an analogous opposition might be found between the old Paris of the centre and the new Paris of the surrounding banlieues. In contrast with the house at 7 rue de l’Estrapade, built in 1725, the buildings we see at Ivry-sur-Seine and Aubervilliers date from the late 1950s and early 1960s:
It would be easy to position La Guerre est finie as another of those films that contrast old inner Paris and new outer Paris, from Rue des Prairies and Archimède le clochard (both 1959) through La Proie pour l’ombre (1961) and La Belle Vie (1963), and culminating in Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (1966). But La Guerre est finie also shows us newness in inner Paris, in the form of the c.1960 Centre Bullier at Port-Royal:
Architectural forms are contrasted, but the film is not the vehicle of nostalgic anti-modernism. Its nostalgia is reserved entirely for an absent place, not a lost past, and the modernity it resists is that of political repression, not urbanist reconstruction.
4/ Wrong Places and Non-Places
One of the modern housing estates visited by Diego is the Cité Pierre et Marie Curie at Ivry-sur-Seine. In fact he visits twice, once in an anticipatory flashforward experienced on the train to Paris, and then in reality when his train has arrived. From both visits we get a detailed representation of the locale, its residential buildings, shops and landscaped grounds, and also information about the people who live there (there are many who have returned to France from Algeria after the end of that war). This is where Diego thinks Juan lives, but when he gets to the address he thought he remembered, he discovers it is the wrong place: ‘You had come to see Juan, a year ago, Building G, 10th floor, no. 107, chez Madame Lopez, you think you remember. But there is no more Juan, no more Madame Lopez. It was perhaps somewhere else, another Building G, another tenth floor.’
This confusion with a place visited a year before makes La Guerre est finie sound, for a moment, like a memory of L’Année dernière à Marienbad. As with no. 7 rue de l’Estrapade, there is a distinction between what a character remembers and what the film remembers.
All commentators on La Guerre est finie have noted Resnais’s continued preoccupation with time, even if, unlike L’Année dernière à Marienbad, this film is turned more towards the future than the past. ‘For the first time in Resnais, the future is not only a consideration but a pressing, imminent truth’, writes James Monaco (Alain Resnais, p.99). The ‘fruitful stylistic experiment’ in the use of ‘anticipatory flashes’ (Roy Armes, op.cit., p.145) is what David Bordwell calls this film’s ‘unique intrinsic norm’, as we share ‘the character’s anticipation of events’ (David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, pp. 218 and 224). For Robert Benayoun this is Resnais’s only ‘entirely chronological film, without a single flashback’ (Alain Resnais, arpenteur de l’imaginaire, p.126), but Bordwell has pointed out that there are several instances where the insert might be a flashback, and one at least that definitely is. In more general terms, Marcel Oms emphasises the ‘disorientation in space and time’ staged by the film (op.cit., p.105). Disorientation in space is my concern in this essay, and I share Stanley Cavell’s view that the flashes ‘mean specifically the outsideness and insideness not of one time to another but of one place to another’ (The World Viewed, p.136). For the protagonist this means being in one place and thinking about another: the imagined or remembered place is simultaneously outside and inside the place where he is. For the viewer, however, any sense of such simultaneity is an illusion created by quick cross-cutting. The other place is always outside, and it is only the brevity of the shot that prevents us from dwelling on its outsideness.
For the writing of this essay I have had the luxury of freeze-framing, fixing on the inserted image to discover its relation to the topography of the film. In an early sequence Diego imagines what Nadine is like and we are shown in ten seconds eight different shots of different young women. Without every transition being an exact match-cut, the sequence represents the continuous action of a woman going into a café and making a phone call.
Close examination reveals that the café she goes into is the La Chope on the place de la Contrescarpe, the one where, seventy minutes later in the film, Diego makes a phone call (to Nadine). By having him imagine Nadine in this café, the film represents Diego’s good knowledge of the area where he is supposed to live, since the café is near the rue de l’Estrapade. In this instance we discover the film’s topographical coherence, whereas the two shots that immediately follow those of the correctly imagined café are those that wrongly locate the number of the building in which he is supposed to live, whereby we discover the film’s readiness to distort the topography of the places it represents.
The film tends to show us the right place, when it can. If we are in the wrong place, as when Diego goes to the wrong housing estate in search of Juan, the error is usually due to the character’s poor memory. Occasionally, however, the film shows us the wrong place without it being a lapse of this kind. Diego describes to Nadine the tailing in the métro of her friend by a policeman, from Maubert Mutualité station to Raspail, a journey involving a change at Odéon. The illustration of this journey is given twenty seconds before, in a single shot of a métro train leaving a station. The shot is complex because it separates views of each of the three voyagers – Diego, the militant and the policeman – with whip-pans that look like they are disguising cuts, though they are not. The illusion of montage overrides the reality of the mise-en-scène: we see the whip-pans but we don’t quite see the place. What is hidden is a liberty taken with topography, since the station in the shot is Porte des Lilas, which is not on the way from Maubert-Mutualité to Raspail:
Porte des Lilas happens to be one of the suburbs mentioned earlier by the narrator when listing where Diego’s fellow exiles live, as if that glimpse of the métro station were the film itself remembering its own topography.
Another liberty taken becomes apparent when we compare two shots of Diego boarding a train. In the first, which is part of a sequence where Diego anticipates his journey to Paris from Hendaye, we see him board a train marked ‘Irun – Paris’. In the second, which is part of a sequence where Diego imagines travelling to Perpignan, we see him board a train marked ‘Bordeaux Toulouse Narbonne Perpignan’. These two shots are identical in composition, with Diego and the train moving in exactly the same way in each case. In fact in each case it is exactly the same train – the carriages have the same identifying number - and it is simply the destination markers that have been changed:
These manipulations of the mise-en-scène go by so quickly that they pass unnoticed until we stop the film, read the signs and see that they don’t match the purported place. A different kind of topographical manipulation occurs towards the end of the film, presented more slowly and more legibly. Diego learns that Ramon has died of a heart attack and he imagines Ramon’s funeral. His imaginings are presented through ten shots, variously grouped, which seven times interrupt the action of the meeting to plan Diego’s trip to Barcelona (i.e. the map scene).
Firstly Diego imagines Ramon alive in his garden, through a rapid reverse zoom. Next he sees the coffin being taken from a hearse into a cemetery, and then sees himself with other mourners, looking at the grave into which the coffin has been placed. The third imagining jumps back in time to show the coffin being taken from Ramon’s house and placed in the hearse, and the next shows a group of mourners walking in the cemetery. |
The fifth interruption breaks the pattern by beginning with a flashback to an earlier scene between Diego and the young militants in an apartment overlooking the Montparnasse cemetery. That scene had begun with one of the militants remarking that Diego didn’t appear to like cemeteries:
Every imagined view of a cemetery so far has been of the cemetery at Montparnasse, and the flashback acts as an explanation for why Diego imagines the burial in this place. If we are thinking of the story’s coherence, a burial in the Montparnasse cemetery might not be realistic, since Ramon lived in a suburb outside of Paris, Issy-les-Moulineaux, and would normally be buried there. In fact, Ramon’s house is at 32 rue Ferdinand Buisson, overlooking the Issy-les Moulineaux cemetery – logically, Diego should be imagining that Ramon’s funeral takes place there. (Though, logically, he couldn’t have been, since that cemetery was closed between 1961 and 1972. Probably Ramon would have been buried in the cemetery at Clamart.)
The shot of the apartment overlooking Montparnasse cemetery is followed by another imagining, again of mourners in a cemetery, but this time they in a small, suburban cemetery overlooked by high-rise social housing:
The shot of the apartment overlooking Montparnasse cemetery is followed by another imagining, again of mourners in a cemetery, but this time they in a small, suburban cemetery overlooked by high-rise social housing:
This is a more likely type of burial place for Ramon, though it is actually in Aubervilliers, on the other side of Paris from Issy-les-Moulineaux. Diego includes himself in this scene, throwing a flower into the grave. The last imagining begins in this cemetery, and shows one of the mourners unfurling the Spanish flag. Diego is there again, along with his fellow exiles and Ramon’s widow. The next shot, however, the last in which the funeral of Ramon is imagined, cuts to a third cemetery. It is possible that we might not have noticed the transition from the first to the second cemetery, from Montparnasse to Aubervilliers, especially if we are more interested in people than places. But this second transition is very difficult to miss. This overhead shot shows a group of forty or so mourners walking behind a man holding a Spanish flag, but not one of these mourners is recognisable from earlier in the sequence. This is a different funeral in a different cemetery, something we see very clearly as the camera tilts slowly upwards to reveal, beyond the cemetery wall, the sea:
There are several approaches we could take to this elaborate staging of an imaginary funeral. One would be to emphasise once again the work done by montage to undermine the topographical coherence of the thing staged. Another might be to connect the sequence to the numerous other cemeteries in Resnais’s films, amounting to something like an obsession. Questioned by François Thomas in an interview about On connaît la chanson, Resnais replied: ‘You’ll tell me that there are always cemeteries in my films, but each time it is for a different reason’ ('D’un coquillage l’autre’, p.479). We could connect the cemetery, as Giuliana Bruno does, to the cinema itself: ‘Film and the cemetery […] are sites without a geography, or rather without a fixed, univocal, geometric notion of geography. They inhabit multiple points in time and collapse multiple places into a single place’ (Atlas of Emotions, p.147). Bruno’s argument, developed out of Foucault’s notion of the cemetery as heterotopia, works for the idea of film and for the idea of cemeteries, but to read this specific film nonetheless requires a fixed geography. This climactic scene of La Guerre est finie seems to collapse multiple cemeteries into a single cemetery, but it is through the specific geography of the sequence that we see the film inhabiting ‘multiple points in time’. The view of a cemetery by the sea is the last of Diego’s imaginings, and unlike most of the others it is not an image of what might happen – no one is to be buried in such place – nor is it an image of the past. The narration speaks of Diego’s imminent future – going to Barcelona to find Juan, going with Juan to Madrid – but that is not the point in time inhabited by the image. The scene is unreal, but the place is part of the film’s fixed topography: the cemetery by the sea is at Ciboure, just outside Hendaye, bringing him back to where the film began three days before, when Diego crossed the frontier at Behobie.
With this return we come full circle, allowing us to read the film’s topography as geometric. The film doesn’t end here, however: this is only the end as far as it is centred on Diego’s consciousness. The last six of the film’s ninety-six inserted images are no longer prompted by a character’s imagination or memory but are simply the result of old-fashioned cross-cutting between the action in Paris, where Nadine discovers that the Spanish police are waiting for Diego, and Diego in a car on his way to Spain. As the film approaches a conclusion, its geometric topography is not circular but triangular, formed by points at Paris in the north, the frontier near Hendaye in the west, where Diego crossed at the beginning of the film, and the frontier near Perpignan in the east, where Diego crosses back.
But this is not where the film ends either. A final sequence shows Marianne at Orly airport buying a ticket for Barcelona, where she is going to tell Diego and Juan that they should return to Paris. Just as the film studio and the cemetery are in general terms Foucauldian ‘other spaces’, heterotopias, so the airport is what Marc Augé has called a ‘non-place’: ‘non-places are the contemporary spaces where supermodernity can be found, in conflict with identity, relationship and history’ (in Michael Sheringham (ed.), Parisian Fields, p.178). But just as our topographical reading of Resnais’s film has to consider the specific cemeteries filmed as well as the generic spaces they represent, so the airport that supplies the last component of the film’s topography has to be considered in its specificity. That includes its place in the development of urban modernity. Paul Andreu has described how, in this period, the architecture of Orly became a tourist attraction, serving as ‘a revelation of modernity in France’ (Paul Andreu and Marc Augé, ‘Aéroports: entre lieu et non-lieu’, p.69). I would place the airport, then, alongside the differently modern housing estates visited by Diego earlier in the film and the student centre at Port-Royal, in opposition to the pre-modernity of the film’s central Paris locations.
Orly also has its place in the history of time-centred cinema, and when a time-centred film like La Guerre est finie goes to Orly it must be remembering Chris Marker’s La Jetée – we remember that the death in La Jetée is a memory of Spain (re-staging Robert Capa’s 1936 photograph of a shot soldier). Memory is thematised here, as one of Diego’s colleagues rehearses with Marianne what she is to do: ‘Everything is clear? You remember? – I remember very well.’ He has her repeat the address to which she must go, the same address that Diego had memorised in the map scene six minutes earlier. The film also remembers how it began, since this too will be the crossing of a frontier, but Marianne’s crossing is very different from Diego’s. At Behobie Diego’s identity was questioned, tested and verified; at Orly Marianne’s identity goes unexamined. The film plays with the audience on this point by beginning the sequence with a shot of a customs officer looking down as he stamps a passport, followed by a shot of an airline official looking up to speak to Marianne. Because the customs officer in the first shot is barely visible as the camera whip-tilts downwards, it is easy for the viewer to think that the passport is being stamped by the airline official, that it is Marianne’s passport, when in fact it is Diego’s, who has reached the frontier at Le Perthus. The speed of a camera movement has disguised the difference between the two types of frontier to be crossed:
If we remember the frontier at the beginning of the film, we see that the frontier to be crossed by Marianne at the end is a very different one. There is no river, no bridge, no customs house, no Café de la Frontière – no place at all. In a flight from one country to another, nothing marks the moment of passage between them. The film’s last shot is of Marianne walking hurriedly along an airport corridor. The shot began as a superimposition over a close-up of Diego in a moving car, in Spain, but his image fades to leave just Marianne. The film ends on this topographical paradox: Diego has apparently crossed a real and physical frontier, from Le Perthus in France to Els Límits in Spain, but that is a fiction, because the film itself cannot cross into Spain; Marianne in France is in a real place, the airport at Orly, even as she walks towards an invisible frontier:
References
- Paul Andreu and Marc Augé, ‘Aéroports: entre lieu et non-lieu’, Artpress 216 (1996)
- Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais (London: A. Zwemmer, 1968)
- Marc Augé, ‘Paris and the Enthnography of the Contemporary World’, in Michael Sheringham (ed.), Parisian Fields (London: Reaktion Books, 1996)
- Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais, arpenteur de l’imaginaire (Paris: Ramsay, 1986)
- N.T. Binh, Paris au cinéma (Paris: Parigramme, 2005)
- David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (London: Methuen, 1985)
- Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotions (London: Verso, 2002)
- Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1979)
- Michel Foucault, ‘Of Other Spaces’, Jay Miskoviec’s translation of ‘Des espaces autres’ [1967], first published in Architecture Mouvement Continuité (October 1984)
- James Monaco, Alain Resnais (London: Secker and Warburg, 1978)
- Marcel Oms, Alain Resnais (Paris: Rivages, 1988)
- Alain Resnais, 'Le Bonheur au quotidien', in Claude Beylie, Freddy Buache (eds), Jacques Becker (Locarno 1991)
- Alain Resnais and François Thomas, ‘D’un coquillage l’autre’, in Stéphane Goudet (ed.), Alain Resnais (Paris: Gallimard, 2002)
- François Thomas, L’Atelier d’Alain Resnais (Paris: Flammarion, 1989), p.114.