Guernica

In the aftermath of his death, which occurred in Paris on March 1st last year, the Ca’ Foscari Short Film Festival remembers Alain Resnais with Guernica, one of his most famous art documentaries. In the contemporary caotic atmosphere, throughout this rigorous movie research on Picasso’s canvas, the movie stands out as a sort of warning to avoid the same mistakes which had caused the death of thousands of people in the past. His choice to show Guernica is a way to reflect on the inevitable “intermittences” of history, a “life mentor” by quoting Proust’s words, an author Resnais loved so much; history is often ignored by men, sometimes it breaks apparently obscure grounds, but it is also a sublime issue in the French filmmaker’s poetry, who is a specialist in short and long cinematographic forms, similar to essays, short and long novels. Therefore, on balance: a glance to the historical events, an attention to the work’s intellectual suggestions, an inflexible dialogue with literature, taking the characters’ psychologies to the extreme, a synthesis with the other arts and a rigorous and critic gaze at the technical evolution of the film instruments. At Berlin Film Festival, barely one month ago, his last film Aimer, chanter et boire was awarded the prize for innovation in cinema. He leaves to the world of cinema an endowment of movies such as Night and Fog, Hiroshima my love, Last year at Marienbad.

Fabio Francione

Related Works.