Mon oncle d'Amerique

Alain Resnais - 1980
What an interesting, interesting film. Even if not every parts work, a bit of a lag for the third quarter, so much to go on here. Essayistic cinema, perhaps.
I almost want to call it a documentary; juxtaposition of factual study, then application; perhaps at its best when they are temporally together, rather than contiguous. We have the theory, then we have a kind of play, to prove it or not. What do we see? This is a fasinating question. At first, I felt the theory was disproved; far too neat, explains little to nothing, Resnais seemed to say. These actions are simpy not categorisable into the four, at best they are all of them combined, and their is a moral problem here.
As I went on, though, the film seemed more and more to confirm the findings, upon consideration. But Resnais proves it the hard way, the complicated way; theories are right, but that doesn't dispel other questions. It is the combining of humanism and the rat-like anti-humanism I felt in 'Coeurs' (by the way, I loved especially the montages of theory voiceover and application, of rats juxtaposed with humans, and the hillarious rat heads dress up- essayistic cinema. And the voiceovers at the beginning, though the amount of information is difficult). Again, we study the people running, and like rats they are, but we feel for them, see their reasons; as is said, just because we understand, it doesn't solve anything (the conclusion of the film addresses many of my moral qualms; just because it's like this doesn't mean it can't be changed, it suggests).
Applied to Resnais' cinema, we have those warm, often orangey colours. We have a willingness to shoot the quotidien, the motorway. Often long shots, sometime with humourous framings. And when he moves in for the SRS, I had a great feeling that what he really expressed was the very strangeness of the idea of SRS, isolating eaach one.
And, unlike the two later works I just watched, we had a few of the kind of tracks I would call 'Resnais'. This for me is desire, and it is something that is different but is mediated through and with- interrogation. As in 'Night and Fog', 'Marienbad', the tracking movement, ruthless, inevitable, sensually gratifying, interrogates (though doesn't invade) what is there, it wants to know more, more. Here we have that sense; Resnais wants to know more, the world. In the later works of his I have seen, he continues this preoccupation, but without tracks (interrogation without desire)? Not a perfect film, but I found some aspects stunning, and as a whole fasinating, perhaps great.