(Muriel, ou le temps d’un retour). Muriel is a bold and beautiful film. Resnais takes a very ordinary incident—the reunion of a provincial woman and her former lover—and out of the trivia of everyday anxieties creates a mosaic of memory and conscience, or what Susan Sontag called “an examination of the form of emotion.” Hélène (Delphine Seyrig) sells antique furniture out of her Boulogne apartment, where she lives hermetically surrounded by her memories and those of her stepson Bernard, who spends his days sorting evidence of French atrocities in Algeria collected on his tour of duty. The memory of Muriel, a young girl tortured by his fellow soldiers, is more real to him than day-to-day life. When Hélène’s old lover shows up unexpectedly, the past comes full circle, only to prove finally the impossibility of remembering, and of forgetting. Resnais presents the drama in a chain of intercut scenes—which is to say, horizontally connected, and always in the present.

—Judy Bloch

• Written by Jean Cayrol. Photographed by Sacha Vierny. With Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kerien, Nita Klein, Jean-Baptiste Thierrée. (115 mins, Color, permission Tamasa Distribution)

Preceded by short:
Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard) (Alain Resnais, France, 1956). Thirty years before Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah, Resnais filmed this extraordinary study of the Nazi death camps, and the human capacity to remember and forget. Night and Fog is a compilation of black-and-white archival material and an exploration of Auschwitz as it is today, measured in slow tracking shots, in full color that glares with truth. Commentary by Jean Cayrol. Photographed by Sacha Vierny, Ghislain Cloquet. (30 mins, B&W/Color, permission Janus Films/Criterion Collection)

Night and Fog is repeated on Thursday, December 10.

• (Total running time: 145 mins, In French with English subtitles, 35mm, From French Ministry of Foreign Affairs)