824 Muriel, or The Time of Return

[swo17]

Muriel, or The Time of Return



Alain Resnais's Muriel, or The Time of Return, the director's follow-up to Last Year at Marienbad, is as radical a reflection on the nature of time and memory as its predecessor. The always luminous Delphine Seyrig stars as an antique shop owner and widow in Boulogne-sur-Mer, whose past comes back to haunt her when a former lover reenters her life. Meanwhile, her stepson is tormented by his own ghosts, related to his service in France's recently ended war in Algeria. Featuring a multilayered script by Jean Cayrol, and inventively edited to evoke its middle-class characters' political and personal realities, the fragmented, emotionally powerful Muriel reminds viewers that the past is always present.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• Excerpt from the 1980 documentary Une approche d'Alain Resnais, révolutionnaire discret
• Excerpt from a 1969 interview with actor Delphine Seyrig
• Interview with composer Hans Werner Henze from 1963
• New interview with film scholar François Thomas, author of L'atelier d'Alain Resnais
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by film scholar James Quandt

[domino harvey]

A rare triple dip for me on this one-- though hopefully it will be the last copy I'll ever need of it!

[nick]

dvdbeaver

[domino harvey]

Picture quality looks great, but here comes yet another round of color timing arguments!

[tenia]

It seems a bit dark, but otherwise, it doesn't look so suspicious.

[hearthesilence]

Nice! I had a feeling it could look significantly better - the old transfer just looked crummy.

[domino harvey]

Should've seen in the original American DVD release (can't even remember who put that out... Wellspring? Fox Lorber?), this is a revelation

[feihong]

Picture quality looks great, but here comes yet another round of color timing arguments!

Are you saying it looks suspiciously yellow?

It's nice to be immune to at least one of the multifarious picture quality problems evident in the blu ray format. I feel like this is my special immunity. The disc looks only gorgeous to me.

[criterion10]

Definitely has that yellow-ish tint that occasionally plagues newer restorations, but the color palette overall looks pretty consistent with the older MoC release, and it wouldn't surprise me if the film was always intended to look this way. I certainly have no complaints.

[jsteffe]

The remastered color timing is rubbish. Original release Eastman prints were immaculately stable with pitch blacks, clean whites and wide dynamic range. DP Sacha Vierny and Resnais relied on shading and texture to emphasise mood not cheap effects with color biasing. Whoever did this inhabits the spirit of Eclair's "let's reinvent 60s to 90s French color films" syndrome. Everything coming out of Gaumont/Eclair has been like this for years now. Meanwhile TFI, Canal, M6, Pathe and other companies using post houses other than Eclair are turning out beautiful work.This can only be another fuckup from Eclair.

I have no doubt that you're right about this. I'm out of the country and thus don't have the Blu-ray in hand, but the screen caps that I have seen look very suspicious.

Here is what Resnais said about the color in Muriel in James Monaco's book (p.91):

No filters, nothing. Just complete simplicity. But it was in a way too because we had the feeling that in real life there are a lot of colors that we don't perceive, and that in Muriel because of the editing (there are a lot of shots, nearly 1000) we would get some kind of effect. I wasn't sure what, but I had the feeling that the color would become sometimes very aggressive, and so we just shot it.

Monaco adds:

The effect is especially surprising to professionals because the walls in Helene's apartment where much of the action takes place are pure white and it is very difficult indeed to shoot white on color stock.

What I find especially annoying is the lack of tonal range. No pure blacks and whites, as David Hare notes. Everything is washed in gray. At least with the Masters of Cinema DVD, Resnais had some say in the color timing if I am not mistaken. (Even if the DVD does not look ideal today.)

I'm sick to death of the way that Eclair absolutely ruins so many great French films, and I am forever mystified as to why anyone allows them to continue doing this.

[tenia]

Meanwhile TFI, Canal, M6, Pathe and other companies using post houses other than Eclair are turning out beautiful work.This can only be another fuckup from Eclair.

Canal relied on Eclair for Ran. They also used them for Le jour se lève. And I just found an old 2010 interview from them stating that they did L'armée des ombres in 2005 and that, actually, Criterion used their master that they tweaked internally. They also use Mikros.

Almost every single Pathé restorations are made at Eclair (and their color movies such as Trois hommes à abattre or Deux hommes dans la ville also have debatable color-timing, though in this case it's blue rather than yellow). Some of their older restorations were done at Digimages (Le désert des tartares) and some 4K ones are done at Bologna.

TF1 also works with Eclair (L'homme de Rio, Les tribulations d'un Chinois en Chine), but not always (David Golder and Le carosse d'Or are Digimages, La tulipe noire is Arane, a lab which closed at the end of 2014). We'll see what happens with their upcoming Almodovar restorations.

M6 / SND didn't commission many restorations except Les visiteurs du soir (which was Scanlab) and Beauty and the Beast (which was Eclair).

Other movies restored by Eclair : Duelle, Merry-Go Round, Noroit, Jane B by Agnes V and Kung Fu Master, the Lelouch movies recently released in France, La gueule ouverte, Mouchette, Parade, Paris nous appartient, Sans soleil, Tout feu tout flamme, Trafic.

So no, these companies also use Eclair. On the other, don't forget what Bologna often yield restorations with a debatable color-grading. And both Les parapluies de Cherbourg and Les demoiselles de Rochefort, both restored by Digimages, have quite yellowish whites.

[hearthesilence]

The remastered color timing is rubbish. Original release Eastman prints were immaculately stable with pitch blacks, clean whites and wide dynamic range. DP Sacha Vierny and Resnais relied on shading and texture to emphasise mood not cheap effects with color biasing. Whoever did this inhabits the spirit of Eclair's "let's reinvent 60s to 90s French color films" syndrome. Everything coming out of Gaumont/Eclair has been like this for years now. Meanwhile TFI, Canal, M6, Pathe and other companies using post houses other than Eclair are turning out beautiful work.This can only be another fuckup from Eclair.

Ugh, I'll have to take back what I said - the detail is wonderful, but it's maddening all of that has been undermined by the wrong color.

Canal relied on Eclair for Ran.

Agh, figures.

[jsteffe]

So no, these companies also use Eclair. On the other, don't forget what Bologna often yield restorations with a debatable color-grading. And both Les parapluies de Cherbourg and Les demoiselles de Rochefort, both restored by Digimages, have quite yellowish whites.

To be fair, you are correct. And in the US we have seen some older Technicolor films with the teal-and-orange treatment. Still, it's hard to ignore the inexcusably bad work that Eclair has done with films like Ran. Large portions of that film were shot outdoors in bright sunlight, I've seen the film multiple times in the theater, and the color timing on the restoration is way off.

I wonder if part of the problem is simply haste - these facilities are cranking out so many restorations that they end up rushing through the process, or they are assigning inexperienced people to do the color timing.

[fritz78]

I'm afraid they simply like the look of it. After all, it's the latest fashion for new films to have the teal and orange tint. Some people have no respect for what a film actually should looked like and just follow their personal preference. Sure, it's also faster to color correct a picture according to the setup you used many times before instead of spending time analyzing what the correct color scheme for an old classic was, but in the case of eclair I think this is some kind of vanity thing. They just love it. Just like the guys in Bologna love their yellow tint that makes a new transfer look like a faded print. Which is equally horrible.

[tenia]

Oh, I'm not trying to defend Eclair or anything like that at all. It's just that David, probably in its sadness and frustration over the current situation, thought there was some of patterns surrounding a given label and/or a given laboratory. Sadly, it's not that easy and is much more spread than this.

On the other end, I watched La boum 2 (recent Gaumont Eclair restoration) and was happy to finally observe numerous shots with pure whites.

I wouldn't be surprised it's a question of material maintenance because, like you wrote, laboratories might just be spreading their thinner and thinner resources. And, well, you can very well start doing monitor calibration every 3 years instead of every year, for instance.

[domino harvey]

Rewatched this masterpiece again this afternoon and went through the extras-- the vintage interviews are nice in theory but are all a bit empty. And the host who apparently ran out of questions and started asking Seyrig about her wig in a completely different film to fill the silence was some Jiminy Glick-level interviewing prowess! The scholarly interview reminded me I've been meaning to read more on the Algerian war, can anyone recommend a good English-language book on the subject?

[Morgan Creek]

Alistair Horne's A Savage War of Peace is pretty much the standard work on the Algerian War.

[jsteffe]

I finally had the opportunity to look at the Criterion Blu-ray of Muriel. I can't speak to the authenticity of the color timing, not having seen any 35mm prints, but many of the shots look very nice on their own terms. The dynamic range also seems OK if you look at it on its own terms. It's not as heavily dominated by grayish midtones as I was afraid when I looked at DVD Beaver's screen caps. Some shots do look a touch over-processed, as if too much grain removal has been applied.

It's possible that the Blu-ray could have been better (or more authentic?), but it is still a very clear advancement over the DVD editions. In fact, the film had a stronger impact for me than ever before - the editing, color and musical score worked together to create a subtle, but viscerally disturbing experience. The film is indeed a masterpiece.

[Never Cursed]

Rewatched this masterpiece again this afternoon and went through the extras-- the vintage interviews are nice in theory but are all a bit empty. And the host who apparently ran out of questions and started asking Seyrig about her wig in a completely different film to fill the silence was some Jiminy Glick-level interviewing prowess! The scholarly interview reminded me I've been meaning to read more on the Algerian war, can anyone recommend a good English-language book on the subject?

It's translated (very well) from the French, but Frantz Fanon's The Wretched Of The Earth is fantastic.

[goblinfootballs]

Rewatched this masterpiece again this afternoon and went through the extras-- the vintage interviews are nice in theory but are all a bit empty. And the host who apparently ran out of questions and started asking Seyrig about her wig in a completely different film to fill the silence was some Jiminy Glick-level interviewing prowess! The scholarly interview reminded me I've been meaning to read more on the Algerian war, can anyone recommend a good English-language book on the subject?

It's translated (very well) from the French, but Frantz Fanon's The Wretched Of The Earth is fantastic.

The Wretched of the Earth is more about the struggle against colonialism in Africa in general. A Dying Colonialism is specifically about Algeria, and includes a chapter on gender which nicely complements the shift between hijab as a way to hide weapons and European dress as a way to sneak weapons into the European quarter in Battle of Algiers. In any case, Fanon is worth reading regardless of which work.

As a supplement to A Savage War of Peace, I'd recommend looking not uncritically at Camus' Algerian Chronicles and Mouloud Feraoun's Journal 1955-1962: Reflections on the French Algerian War. Camus' complicated position on Algeria is also covered in James D. Le Sueur's Uncivil War: Intellectuals and Identity Politics During the Decolonization of Algeria, which primarily focuses on the different takes on Algeria among different French intellectual strains.

Finally, a shout out to Genet's play The Screens, which also focuses on the Algerian Revolution, and, not un-self-servingly, was the subject of my master's thesis a depressing nine years ago.

[black&huge]

I successfully completed this film just now after 3 or 4 times over the past decade of trying and turning it off a little further in each time. I think the most I got was a half hour in.

Well Resnais works very oddly for me. I hated Marienbad when I first saw it and did not touch it again til the past year (9 years after that first viewing and only the second time watching) and lordy did something click in the first 5 minutes and I was hooked. Marienbad in that second viewing actually breezed by for me. I absolutely love it.

So that brings me here and i am very glad I was able to finish Muriel but I cannot decide upon it. I certainly do not dislike it that is for sure but I have no idea how to place what I like about it. So I am asking you folks here to either suggest/link some scholarly articles or analyses and/or give me your own thoughts about the film specifically regarding the editing. That being said the one string of edits that I just cannot interpet in fact are the very first ones right when the film starts. I can easily think about the rest of the film in the coming days and the many interesting cuts but those first 10 or so seconds? Cannot even think about where to start.

[kubelkind]

There's probably something online, but I do recommend James Monaco's superb book on Resnais which has detailed and perceptive, but very readable and jargon-free analysis of all of Resnais films up to Providence.

[therewillbeblus]

I’ve always liked this SensesOfCinema article, which breaks down the beginning (not sure if it’s the first ten seconds).

I love this film partly because, in being about concepts as abstract and intangible as time and memory, it refuses to become clear or tangible itself. Resnais takes an interesting path that feels deliberately uneven in creating some semblance of structure with hints of spacial awareness and intentionally rapid editing, which seems almost desperate to capture people and objects to signify meaning and provide grounding, but in the process shows that these boundaries are futile to capture in traditional objectivity. So regardless of Resnais’ understanding of space, he abandons these parameters (only built in the first place perhaps to illustrate a point, since his prior films have indicated this is no revelation) and surrenders this modernist “attempt” immediately and humbly decides to take the opposite approach, highlighting that even a filmmaker who can issue some sense of mastery over space and time can only go so far; and in the process may be ignoring or manipulating time to degrees that force an inauthentic meaning through solely one subjective angle. The name of the game is assembling multiple subjective perspectives to form a whole that is not as much the sum of its parts, but rather the coexisting of such parts to achieve some kind of fractured objectivity via separatism instead of melting pot collage.

The film seems to function like Sartre’s Nausea without the limitations of only one negative response to objects. The characters are also objects to themselves and each thing, person, or place acts as a signifier for memory and emotion; defying time through collective isolation and self-reflection, eliciting confusion, ennui, serenity, and a deep need to connect externally and internally to forge meaning. This film actually draws on Mahler’s Object Relations Theory in taking psychoanalytic film theories and transferring them to motives of social and personal connection to find such meaning, rather than sexual and aggressive drives. Resnais knows that this meaning is not static but constantly evolving in nonlinear, dynamic dimensions, as his editing style and sacrifice of spacial continuity reflects.

I guess I’m saying that I don’t really have a handle on this film, but I think that’s the idea. This may be his most post-modern film, and while I love his first few features I think this is Resnais’ magnum opus. Too bad he never made a film nearly as good again (I liked Stavisky... but otherwise have strongly disliked pretty much everything post-Muriel that I’ve seen), though what can you expect once he hit that high note.. perhaps he should have taken the Godard route in radically unwinding himself toward wherever his passion lay at the current moment rather than finding comfort in safe pictures, though maybe that’s where his passion was and I just can’t match it.

[black&huge]

twbb tremendous thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts and that link. It really did help me and just as far as those ten seconds go I can kinda reason the point of the rapid cutting between the kettle and the woman at the door was to convey perhaps an overall idea of tying together an object to perhaps trigger a memory or to remember it as it may have been by placing emphasis on anything other than the actual human interaction. I went ahead and just ordered a copy since I very much want to watch it again as it definitely stuck in my mind even after waking up this morning.

[FrauBlucher]

There is nothing easy about Muriel, or The Time of Return. Even though there is no doubt this is the work of an auteur filmmaker, there is something frustrating about the film and its glacial pacing, fast-paced editing, and loose narrative. It is a beautifully composed cinematic experience that feels frustratingly incoherent and inessential. Maddeningly difficult, Muriel, or The Time of Return is a narrative misfire that doesn't work.

I watched this several months back. I just came across this review (2 stars) from bluray.com. No, it's not Svet, but Neil Lumbard. I couldn't disagree more with this take. As someone who is not really a fan of Resnais' two prior films to this, for me Muriel is brilliant. I am not sure where Lumbard falls on those films or some of Godard's work but his use of frustrating, incoherent and inessential are so off base. He says there is nothing easy. I didn't find it difficult in any way. And as it went on I became more and more invested. I can't imagine French New Wave is his cup of tea. This will be something I pick up at the next B&N sale.

For anyone who wants to read the full review