'It was possible during our twenty-four hour days at Hornsey to have films every evening when there was not some other activity going on. [...] Another effective way for providing variation of an evening's entertainment was to run the lesser films through backwards, sideways, hold the frame at appropriate or inappropriate moments, and one very fine evening was even spent screening the film onto trees, houses and inflatable structures.
Anyone who had little to say except that we were sitting in the College doing nothing might have had even less to say if he had seen us one night, or early morning, rolling around on the floor in helpless laughter at a film of vacuum forming plastics technology in glorious technicolour being shown backwards. At that particularly inspired time of the night this film summed up for us all the most bizarre aspects of institutions and industrial concerns where people spend their lives obeying unexplained orders and doing things that are senseless.'
A.R. and P.B.-D., The Hornsey Affair, 1969
Le Chant du Styrene (1958)
'Alain Resnais's last documentary was made for the Pechiney organisation, which asked him "not to explain the manufacture of polystyrene but simply to show that it was a noble material since its manufacture was very complex, demanding a great deal of knowledge, because it was entirely created by man." Resnais's handling of this commission was startlingly unorthodox, frightening his sponsors at first and illustrating his taste for "mixing sugar and salt", in the manner of Lautreamont's classic definition of Surrealism as the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella. On the one hand, there are the images making full use of the formal possibilities of the wide screen and the opportunities for using colour unrealistically: "In Nuit et Brouillard I sought only a realistic colour, as faithful a reproduction of the place as possible. In Le Chant du Styrene, on the contrary, there are transpositions, there are dominants which are used quite consciously."'
Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, 1968
Anyone who had little to say except that we were sitting in the College doing nothing might have had even less to say if he had seen us one night, or early morning, rolling around on the floor in helpless laughter at a film of vacuum forming plastics technology in glorious technicolour being shown backwards. At that particularly inspired time of the night this film summed up for us all the most bizarre aspects of institutions and industrial concerns where people spend their lives obeying unexplained orders and doing things that are senseless.'
A.R. and P.B.-D., The Hornsey Affair, 1969
Le Chant du Styrene (1958)
'Alain Resnais's last documentary was made for the Pechiney organisation, which asked him "not to explain the manufacture of polystyrene but simply to show that it was a noble material since its manufacture was very complex, demanding a great deal of knowledge, because it was entirely created by man." Resnais's handling of this commission was startlingly unorthodox, frightening his sponsors at first and illustrating his taste for "mixing sugar and salt", in the manner of Lautreamont's classic definition of Surrealism as the unexpected meeting, on a dissection table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella. On the one hand, there are the images making full use of the formal possibilities of the wide screen and the opportunities for using colour unrealistically: "In Nuit et Brouillard I sought only a realistic colour, as faithful a reproduction of the place as possible. In Le Chant du Styrene, on the contrary, there are transpositions, there are dominants which are used quite consciously."'
Roy Armes, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, 1968
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