Untimely Resnais: <italic>Muriel</italic>'s Disarticulations of Justice


Untimely Resnais: Muriel’s Disarticulations
of Justice

Laura McMahon, Gonville and Caius College,
University of Cambridge

(lcm31@cam.ac.uk)

Abstract:

Alain Resnais’s 1963 film Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel, or the Time of

Return) has been read in terms of a failure to engage with the historical and political

issues surrounding the Algerian War – a failure viewed by Susan Sontag as a

consequence of Resnais’s favouring of aesthetics over politics. This essay reconsiders

Muriel beyond the terms of this perceived privileging of aesthetic abstraction over

political engagement, and looks at ways in which the spatio-temporal organization

of the film is bound to forms of political critique. Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s

thinking of justice and Gilles Deleuze’s emphasis on the topological dimensions of

Resnais’s cinema, I argue that Muriel’s differential, interruptive configurations of

history and place carve out a time and space for justice that refuses ontologization,

reanimating encrypted traces of Algeria’s traumatic history of decolonization and

resisting the mournful memory-work of the French nationalist account.

Keywords: Resnais; Derrida; Deleuze; deconstruction; justice; mourning

In a current global political context haunted by the spectre of the
‘ non-person ’ – a context which includes illegal yet state-sanctioned acts
of war, imprisonment, torture and rendition flights – revisiting Alain
Resnais’s 1963 Muriel ou le temps d’un retour (Muriel, or the Time of
Return), a film which has at its absent centre a woman tortured by the

Film-Philosophy 20 (2016): 219–234

DOI: 10.3366/film.2016.0012

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219



French during the Algerian War of Independence (1954–62), may appear
timely. Indeed, the timeliness of various acts of revisiting and return is
precisely what is at stake in Muriel, as indicated by the title of the film
itself. Yet, Resnais’s film has often been judged untimely in its failure to
engage directly with the immediate events of the Algerian War (Muriel was
released just a year after the end of the conflict. See, for example,
Boudjedra 1971, p. 27; see also Gauch 2001, pp. 47–57). For some critics,
this failure crystallizes in the film’s refusal to represent Muriel – absent
from image and sound, Muriel is neither seen nor heard; we know nothing
of her life beyond the event of her torture; we never witness events from
Muriel’s point of view. Nor does the film appear to engage with the
military and political realities of the Algerian War itself (in contrast to,
say, Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers [La Bataille d’Alger], released
in 1966, three years after Muriel). Though censorship in France at the time
of Muriel’s release limited representation of the Algerian War (evidenced
most clearly by the ban upon Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Petit Soldat [1960]), it
has also been suggested that such restrictions were perhaps not
obstructive enough to warrant the degree of narrative ellipsis adopted
by Resnais’s film (Stora, 1998, p. 41; quoted in Gauch, 2001, p. 48n4).

Thus while Muriel foregrounds reflections on questions of memory,
testimony and forgetting, Muriel’s absent-present position within the film
becomes indicative of what Suzanne Gauch calls the ‘ disappearing text ’ of
the war (2001, p. 53).

1
On this reading, a failure to give a voice and image

to Muriel is understood as part of the film’s broader failure to engage with
the historical and political issues surrounding the conflict in Algeria
(viewed, as in Susan Sontag’s reading of the film, as a consequence of
Resnais’s favouring of aesthetics over politics [1963, pp. 23–7]). In this
essay, I wish to reconsider Muriel beyond the terms of this perceived
privileging of aesthetic abstraction over political engagement, and to look
at ways in which the spatio-temporal organization of the film is bound to
forms of political critique.

2
Specifically, I argue that the film’s differential,

interruptive configurations of history and place can be read as carving out

1. For an important discussion of French cinema, including Muriel, as ‘ so often fantasized

as empty of Algerians ’, see Austin, 2007 (p. 182).

2. Here my argument is indebted to the recuperation of the political impetus of Muriel

proposed by Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, 1993, pp. 181–208. To their reading I add

in particular a focus on the differential dynamics of justice. Since writing this essay in

2011, I have encountered further very useful discussions of the political dimensions of

Muriel, including Max Silverman’s reading of the film’s ‘ palimpsestic structure ’ of

‘ concentrationary memory ’ (Silverman, 2013), and Maria Flood’s analysis via Butler’s

reflections on ‘ grievability ’ (Flood, forthcoming).

Film-Philosophy 20 (2016)

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a time and space for justice, through a perpetual revisiting and
reanimation of historical and testimonial traces.

Though my primary focus here is on justice rather than mourning, the
two issues are deeply interlocked, as Jacques Derrida suggests in Specters
of Marx: to render justice is to resist any terminable work of mourning, to
refuse to ontologize death (1994, p. 97). Here an opening to justice might
be understood as what Ranjana Khanna, drawing on Derrida in her
discussion of Algerian history, gender and representation, calls a form of
‘ critical melancholia ’, which brings into focus ‘ the inassimilable, the
barely incorporated, and the melancholic traces that in turn cause damage
to the force field of mournful national history that fails to introject them ’
(2008, p. xvii).

3
In resonance with Khanna’s diagnosis of ‘ barely

incorporated ’ histories, which she herself links to a call for justice,
Muriel is a film in which melancholic traces of the inassimilable surface at
critical moments to fissure the protective epistemological screens of
(imperial) memory. The fictional crises of Muriel – the event of torture
and the failures and fault-lines of memory that the film explores – are
indicative of a wider historical reality – of French atrocities in Algeria and
of collective amnesia surrounding these acts – that is melancholically
resistant to memorialization, in that it perpetually calls into question the
mournful memory-work of the nation-state.

4
As I turn to focus on issues

of justice in Muriel, I seek to bear in mind Khanna’s linking of justice
to the ‘ melancholic remainder[s] ’ of Algeria’s traumatic history of
decolonization (2008, p. 15), to the encrypted traces that a French
nationalist account fails to introject.

What would it mean for Muriel – a film – to render justice? This would
be a notion of justice understood not in a judicial or legal sense but rather
in terms that conjoin the aesthetic to both the political and the ethical. In
considering a mode of justice rendered by Resnais’s film, I follow Derrida’s
thinking of justice as incommensurable, as interruptive of the present,
as always to come. In contrast to the timeliness of a return to Muriel
suggested above, justice for Derrida can only ever be untimely, for justice
operates beyond ontology – it is that which is addressed to those no longer

3. Khanna argues fruitfully for the ways in which Derrida’s Algerian heritage shapes his

thinking of deconstructive justice (2008, pp. 31–67). Derrida’s thought thus intersects

with Muriel via a range of interwoven concerns.

4. As Khanna notes, collective amnesia in the aftermath of the Algerian War was

encouraged and sanctioned by French amnesty laws, first introduced through the Evian

Accords of 1962. This highlights ‘ the very particularity of the Algerian situation […] in

terms of the forms of exception, marginalization, erasure, and amnesia that characterize

it […] ’ (2008, p. 3, p. 8).

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or not yet present (hence the centrality of the spectre and the
‘ hauntological ’ in his reflections on justice [Derrida, 1994, p. 97]).
Justice is thus anachronistic, incalculable, out of joint (a phrase which
Derrida borrows from Hamlet) (Derrida,1994, p. 18). Such a notion of
justice would appear apposite for a consideration of Muriel – not only does
the film circulate around the untimely absence of its eponymous subject,
but, in its irrational cuts and interruptive editing, it also deploys
discontinuous forms of temporality, configuring time itself as out of joint.

5

It is not only time that is out of joint in Muriel but space as well. As the
film cuts erratically between various locations, space becomes dislocated,
disjunctive and incalculable. This spatio-temporal discontinuity appears
to exemplify the association between ‘ non-chronological time ’ and
‘ non-localizable relations ’ proposed by Gilles Deleuze in his reading of
Resnais (2005, p. 119).

6
Yet Deleuze goes on to suggest that space is not

the main concern of Resnais’s cinema: ‘ The image no longer has space
and movement as its primary characteristics but topology and time ’
(2005, p. 121). Though space and movement remain central to my
consideration of Muriel, I aim to take up Deleuze’s focus on topology
in connection with my discussion of time. Topology emphasises both
the shifting dimensions of objects under conversion and underlying
properties of interconnectedness, offering a fertile framework for
considering the spatialization of processes of memory, encryption and
association (Colman, 2011, pp. 163–178). In what follows, I thus focus
on the event of Muriel’s torture – and, by extension, questions of ethical
and political responsibility – as configured both hauntologically and
topologically by the film. In this sense, the topological emphasis of
Deleuze’s account of Resnais’s cinema adds to the hauntological contours
of Derrida’s thinking of justice, and vice versa.

7
Therein may lie the

possibility of viewing Muriel in terms of an incommensurable justice
addressed to a being (or beings) no longer or not yet present – a
justice which, in dialogue with the durational and cartographic dynamics
of cinema, is (dis)articulated here not only temporally but spatially too.

Though the Algerian War figures as a latent presence in earlier films
by Resnais, such as Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955), Hiroshima
mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à

5. On untimely cinema in general, see Jodi Brooks and Therese Davis (Eds.), 2012. This

edited issue includes a discussion of untimeliness in Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad,

which draws principally on Badiou’s thinking of the event (Ling, 2012).

6. For a Deleuzian reading of time and untimeliness in Resnais, see Boljkovac, 2013.

7. On broader connections between Deleuze and Derrida, see Patton and Protevi (Eds.),

2003.

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Marienbad, 1961), Muriel constitutes his most explicit (albeit indirect)
engagement with the conflict (Wilson, 2006, pp. 88–89). The film is set
in Boulogne-sur-mer in France, focusing on the lives of Bernard
( Jean-Baptiste Thierrée), who has recently returned from fighting in the
Algerian War, and his stepmother Hélène (Delphine Seyrig). Hélène has
invited her former lover Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien) to visit; he has
brought with him his current lover Françoise (Nita Klein), under the
pretence that she is his niece. Alphonse’s visit allows for an exchange of
conflicting memories with Hélène relating to a love affair that they had
just before the outbreak of World War II. As Alphonse reminisces about
the past, he pretends that he has spent time living and working in Algeria.
The space of Hélène’s apartment thus provides the locus for a reanimation
of memories of Algeria and of World War II, both imagined and real. The
film situates these domestic dramas of recollection in relation to shots of
the city either in ruins or rebuilt, recalling the large-scale destruction and
reconstruction that took place in Boulogne during and after World War II.
The city thus bears the traces of its own traumatic history, the background
against which the memories of the various characters will be revisited and
recast, as the film explores le temps d’un retour of its title.

‘ Muriel ’ is the name given to an Algerian woman whom Bernard
apparently witnessed being tortured to death by French soldiers during
the Algerian war – an event that he claims not only to have seen but to
have taken part in. While pretending to Hélène that Muriel is the name of
his fiancée, Bernard spends his time attempting to document the event
of Muriel’s torture, assembling old journal entries and photographs,
filming around Boulogne and viewing home movie footage from Algeria.
Yet Bernard’s efforts to archive the event reveal only the failure of
such an undertaking: as he throws his camera into the sea, the film
gestures self-reflexively to the unbridgeable gap between truth and
representation. As Robert – a fellow ex-soldier and now a member of the
OAS (Organisation de l’armée secrète) – who was also complicit in the
torture of Muriel, remarks to Bernard: ‘ You want to tell the story of
Muriel? Muriel is something which can’t be told. ’ This resistance to
retelling is foregrounded in the scene in which Bernard’s tape is switched
on by Françoise, playing back a cacophony of male laughter which we may
infer to be the sounds of Muriel’s torture. But Bernard rushes to rip the
tape out of the machine, silencing the disturbing sounds. He goes on to
shoot Robert dead – an act that hovers problematically between a form of
retribution for Muriel, a disavowal of his own responsibility, and a further
violent silencing of the past.

In its disjointed narrative arc, the film arguably risks allowing Bernard’s
failed documentation of the torture of Muriel to figure as symptomatic of a

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psychological (rather than political) crisis of guilt and memory, thus
relegating Muriel, and the Algerian War, to a symbolic function divorced
from historical referentiality. As Gauch puts it: ‘ Bernard’s co-option and
erasure of Muriel’s battered body in the tale of his personal torment
repeats a violence that the film just begins to acknowledge ’ (2001, p. 51).
Muriel’s aesthetics of fragmentation and ellipsis further threatens to
obscure the truth of Muriel’s suffering, and, by extension, the historical
real of atrocities committed by the French during the Algerian War.
Indeed, Gauch suggests that it is the very ambiguity of Muriel’s
place – and of Algeria – in the film that facilitates this stylized aesthetics
of disjunction (2001, p. 51). The criticism here is that by enabling a
particular aesthetics, Muriel disables a certain politics. Yet what I wish to
suggest, through further examination of the film’s hesitations over forms
of historical remembrance, is that Muriel’s aesthetics of discontinuity plays
a key role in its politics and ethics of engagement.

Spectral Returns

In probing the limits of filmic representation, Muriel raises fundamental
issues of memory, testimony and knowledge, asking questions about
what it is possible to see, hear, remember and know, in ways that recall
Jacques Rancière’s notion of the ‘ distribution of the sensible ’ (Rancière,
2006). Through Bernard’s attempts to accumulate what he refers to at one
point as ‘ preuves ’ – the term resonates in its double meaning in French as
both ‘ proof ’ and ‘ film rushes ’ – Muriel self-reflexively explores specific
links between evidence, testimony and film. In so doing, the film raises
doubts, as Emma Wilson suggests, about ‘ the possibilities of testifying, of
bringing grief and guilt into the open ’ (2006, p. 91). Muriel gestures to
cinema’s impotence in the face of any such efforts of recuperation.
The fragility of audio and visual forms of evidence is emphasized – both
in Bernard’s discarding of the tape and in a filmic image (possibly
of Algeria) that we see melting when projected in Bernard’s studio.
The vulnerability and ephemerality of these testimonial media – of tape
and of celluloid – furnish a form of self-referential comment on the limits
of representation, the mutability of ‘ proof ’ and the instability of acts of
memorialization. As such, the film moves from an avowed emphasis
on the stabilizing certainties of ‘ evidence ’ towards the differential
dimensions of the trace. In an early scene, Hélène chastises Bernard
for leaving a coffee pot on one of her antique tables, asking how she will
sell it if it has a scratch; a close-up shows Bernard’s hand brushing the
surface of the table, but a slight residue remains. As a concern with
physical marks on objects anticipates an engagement with the psychical
traces of culpable acts, Muriel redistributes the sensible, signalling a

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surfeit of testimonial remainders that will surface to unsettle the film’s
epistemological frames.

Such an engagement with the uncertainties of memorialization points to
Muriel’s hauntological reconfiguring of time. This is exemplified not only
by the film’s interruptive, non-linear editing (for example, as Celia Britton
notes, the abrupt insert of daytime shots of Boulogne within a scene set at
night [Britton 1990, 37]) but also by particular moments in which the link
between image and sound becomes disjointed; as Britton observes: ‘ the
dialogue from one shot is carried over to the next, where it acts as a jarring
background to an entirely different image ’ (Britton 1990, 37). This
desynchronized structure also occurs in reverse, for example, when we
hear a conversation between Hélène and Alphonse over images of Bernard
and Françoise in the street outside the flat, before the film shows Hélène
and Alphonse in conversation. Image and sound seem further at odds
when apparently banal moments are punctuated by a strident musical
score (Gauch, 2001, p. 50), as though the film itself were out of synch.
Such formal disarticulations and deferrals appear to give cinematic body
to Derrida’s configuration of the spectral as ‘ outside of any synchrony ’
(1994, p. 7). Here image and sound are rendered out of joint, as the
film enacts a perpetual interruption of the present moment, elaborating
a non-synchronic structure that ushers in a surfacing of ‘ melancholic
remainders ’. The mise-en-scène further emphasises this anachronistic
dimension through the eclectic mixture of antiques in Hélène’s apartment.
As the film shifts from a register of ontology to hauntology, the present is
held in suspension, opening to a perpetual revisiting and reshaping of
certain memories (Derrida, 1994, p. 7).

8

This hauntological reconfiguring of time comes to the fore in the scene
in which Bernard recounts the torture of Muriel while watching what
appears to be an extract of his own home movie footage of Algeria.
Through the conceit of the film-within-the-film, Muriel reminds us once
more of the instability of ‘ proof ’, as images here are not what they seem.
The grainy footage of French soldiers in Algeria – relaxed, laughing and
apparently at ease with the locals – is undercut by the visceral violence of
Bernard’s commentary. At stake here is not so much an aesthetics of
juxtaposition as one of interrelatedness – as Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit
suggest, the sequence invites us to draw (delayed) connections between
image and sound, for example, between the soldier diving and Bernard’s
description of Muriel looking ‘ as if she had been left under water ’ (1993,

8. On amnesia, repetition and deferral in Muriel, see Croombs 2010.

Muriel’s Disarticulations of Justice

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p. 196).
9

What the sequence brings into focus is a logic of inextricability
that binds the visible scenes of military life on-screen to the invisible scene
of torture off-screen.

Bernard claims to have been unaffected by the torture of Muriel at the
time: after viewing her corpse, he slept well. Yet the apparent indifference
of his account is undermined not only by the distress in his voice but by
one detail in particular: ‘ Muriel’s eyes were not closed. ’ Echoing the same
words in Bernard’s diary (glimpsed when Alphonse rifles through his
papers), this phrase recalls an earlier detail of Bernard’s description of
Muriel during her torture: ‘ She stared straight at me. Why me? ’ This
memory also resonates, by inversion, through Bernard’s anxious
commands to his girlfriend Marie-Do not to close her eyes – a form of
ghostly, differential repetition that is exacerbated by Bernard’s references
to Muriel as his girlfriend.

10
Singling him out during the event and

perpetually returning to call him to account in its aftermath, Muriel’s gaze
haunts Bernard, ceaselessly reminding him of his complicity in the crime
of her torture (Gauch, 2001, p. 51, p. 55). This spectral gaze, the gaze of
another who is no longer present, places Bernard’s time – and the time of
the film itself – out of joint, holding Bernard to account. Yet such a gaze is
one which cannot be returned; it is ‘ without any possible symmetry,
without reciprocity ’, signalling an infinite demand (Derrida and Stiegler,
2002, pp. 120–1). An incalculable responsibility is thus posed here in
excess of Bernard’s capacity to respond. And Muriel’s gaze figures a calling
to account not only of Bernard, but also, by extension, of France, a nation
haunted by the unsettled spectre of Algeria and by a demand for justice
resisting ontologization, restlessly refusing to be attached to any one time
or place.

11

Yet the risk of abstraction remains: consigning Muriel’s experience –
and Algeria, by extension – to the realm of the spectral may still be viewed
as politically disabling. In an analysis of Muriel alongside films such
as Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Claude Chabrol’s Le Boucher
(The Butcher, 1970), Emily Tomlinson draws on Derrida’s thinking
of spectrality in order to address French cinema’s ‘ hauntological ’
engagement with Algeria. Critical of a tendency in these films to
decontextualize the events of the Algerian War, Tomlinson contends
that, through a series of metaphorical operations, such films ‘ appropriate

9. Bersani and Dutoit argue that this sequence circumscribes a call to responsibility that

extends to the viewer, implicating us in this uneasy proximity between the ordinary and

the unimaginable (1993, p. 196).

10. On differential repetition in Muriel, see Bersani and Dutoit 1993, p. 199.

11. On Muriel’s dynamic of ‘ ghostly return ’, see Hill 1992, p. 797.

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the pain of torture ’ via a ‘ generalized ‘ hauntology ’ ’ whereby ‘ the spectre of
colonial brutality is no longer perceptible as such ’ (2002, pp. 46–7).
Tomlinson argues persuasively that Muriel’s spectral operations abstract
from historical specificity. Yet I wish to suggest here that while the film
invokes this hauntological register, it remains attentive to traces of the
historical real; indeed, this very attentiveness takes place through a
hauntological engagement with the disjointedness of testimonial
recognition and historical remembrance.

As Gauch suggests, Resnais’s choice of the story of an Algerian woman
tortured by the French displays an awareness of contemporaneous
journalistic and testimonial accounts of the Algerian War (2001,
pp. 54–5). Gauch cites the cases of Djamila Bouhired and Djamila
Boupacha, who were both tortured and raped by French soldiers. Such
cases gained considerable public attention in France at the time: Simone
de Beauvoir was instrumental in seeking justice for Boupacha; she then
co-authored a book about Boupacha’s experience, which appeared in
1962, the same year as the making of Muriel (Halimi and de Beauvoir,
1962). The film engages with the details of torture in ways that suggest
familiarity (on the part of both Resnais and the scriptwriter, Jean Cayrol)
with such testimonies. Bernard’s disturbing account of the state of Muriel’s
corpse (‘ it was as if she had been left under water ’; ‘ With blood all over
her body and in her hair … burns on her chest ’) implies torture by water
and possibly electricity too – methods that were commonly used during
the Algerian War. The film also suggests a conscious engagement with the
particular gendered dimension of such atrocities. Marnia Lazreg’s study of
practices of torture deployed by the French during the Algerian War has
emphasized that Algerian women were routinely raped by French soldiers,
to the extent that ‘ [a]lthough rape could take place without torture,
torture seldom took place without rape ’ (2008, p. 160). Though Bernard’s
account makes no explicit reference to rape, it notes at one point that
Muriel’s clothes were torn off. Elsewhere in the film, Bernard’s perverse
references to Muriel as his fiancée suggest ways in which she is configured
erotically in his memory and imagination, intimating again the sexual
dimension of her torture.

12
It may be that considerations of censorship

influenced Resnais’s decision to allow the suggestion of Muriel’s rape to
remain ambiguous. It may be that this indirect approach indicates a
potential failure of the film’s responsibility. Yet, it is also possible to read
the film’s resistance to the ontologization of the event as opening a time
and space in which ‘ melancholic remainders ’ may be called forth,

12. See Britton 1990, p. 46, and O’Brien 2000, p. 60.

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227



allowing that which has been historically encrypted to surface through
the deferrals and dislocations within Bernard’s testimony and within the
film itself. In evocation of the slippages and displacements of testimonial
detail, Muriel operates not only critically but also hauntologically,
in attentiveness to a historical real that ghosts the frame – implicitly
invoked yet never fully present. In this sense, the film’s spectral
operations, though resistant to ontology, may be seen to elaborate a
form of (anachronistic) justice to the historical real.

What Muriel gives us to understand is that the encryption of the events
of the Algerian War in France’s collective memory exhibits a deep-rooted
structure of spectrality that is played out here. Through images of
Boulogne, suspended between ruins and reconstruction, the film
implicitly positions the collective guilt attached to Algeria as haunted by
other painful memories – explicitly of World War II, implicitly of Vichy.

13

Through Hélène’s and Alphonse’s conflicting reconstructions of their love
affair, the film articulates, as Naomi Greene suggests, ‘ the climate of
self-serving half-truths, of deliberate amnesia, that, in the early 1960s,
characterized French memories of the Vichy era ’ (1999, p. 46). By
bringing into focus a chain of amnesiac operations, Muriel ensures that its
indirect engagement with French atrocities in Algeria is inseparable from
its implicit invocation of a collaborationist past. And although the film
foregrounds recent events in Algeria, it intimates the ways in which these
events are necessarily haunted by a history of colonial violence. When
Françoise tells Bernard that she has been acting in a film about a war in
1830 in which ‘ everyone died ’, this is followed by a shot of the deserted
dining table; no further elaboration is given, but the date references the
French invasion of Algiers and the beginning of imperial expansion into
Algeria. The scene appears to bear out Tomlinson’s suggestion that the
Algerian War was always already ‘ a spectral conflict ’, inextricably bound
to past atrocities, to the irrepressible logic of the revenant (Tomlinson,
2002). Links between French collaboration and colonialism are
emphasized further during the dinner at the restaurant, in which
anecdotes and gastronomical reflections sit alongside fleeting references
to deportation, Indochina and Algeria (including Alphonse’s racist
comment about Arabs). Françoise’s tale of live lobsters cooked in
boiling water is preceded by Roland de Smoke’s story of a subsiding
house (‘ It’s new, it’s empty, and we’re waiting for it to fall down ’).
Together, these seemingly disparate remarks gesture to histories of

13. Cayrol’s own experience of betrayal as a member of the Resistance and internment in a

camp during World War II arguably informs such connections here.

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violence enshrouded by a modernized France. In its summoning of so
many revenants of a colonialist and collaborationist past, Muriel
foregrounds an inescapable logic of differential repetition that gestures
beyond the fictions of its amnesiac crises towards the traumatic real of
historical recurrence.

Thus Muriel resists any restoratively mournful reconstruction of
the past – in Deleuzian terms, it refuses to actualize the past in a
‘ recollection-image ’ (Deleuze, 2005, p. 119). Rather it elaborates what
Deleuze describes, with reference to Resnais, as ‘ paradoxical hypnotic and
hallucinatory sheets [of time] whose property is to be at once a past and
always to come ’ (2005, p. 119). This ‘ always to come ’ is as important to
Deleuze’s reading of Resnais as it is to Derrida’s conception of justice.

14

For Deleuze, Resnais’s cinema ‘ prevents the past from being debased into
recollection ’ (2005, p. 120); similarly, for Derrida, justice takes place
through a resistance to any petrification of the past, by way of a perpetual
opening to that which is ‘ to come ’ (1994, p. 65). This opening to a
justice-to-come is akin to what Derrida has called midmourning (1987,
p. 355), a hauntological suspension of the introjective and incorporative
dimensions of mourning – what Alessia Ricciardi describes as an ‘ ethically
and politically energized space ’, ‘ a domain of remembrance in which the
subject is perpetually re-exposed to history rather than removed from it ’
(2003, p. 34). The dislocated rhythm of midmourning and differential
repetition that Muriel elaborates ensures a ceaseless reanimation of the
subject’s relation to historical time. In configuring temporally immediate
events as saturated by untimely correspondences, Muriel proposes a
hauntological model of eventhood, whereby the present is always already
haunted by the past and by so many possible future returns.

Topological conversions

Muriel gestures to the traces of atrocity in terms that are not only
hauntological but topological too. As Marie-Do’s view through a
kaleidoscope fills the screen, multiplying images of Bernard, the film
reflexively signals its aesthetics of topological transformation – a pattern
of morphing and redistribution visualized in space. As we have seen,
Deleuze points to the topological aspects of Resnais’s cinema – a
cartographical tracing of realms of being, which might be read in Muriel
as an implicit mapping of the shifting psychical and political co-ordinates
of torture. In The Body in Pain, Elaine Scarry argues that torture itself is a

14. In his broader reflections on the time-image, Deleuze, like Derrida, invokes Hamlet:

‘ Time is out of joint ’ (2005, p. 39).

Muriel’s Disarticulations of Justice

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process of conversion: transforming suffering into the spectacle of power,
it maximizes the perceptual world of the torturer, while aggressively
reducing that of the prisoner (1985, pp. 27–38). Scarry elaborates the
interrogative encounter between torturer and prisoner in topological
terms: ‘ It is only the prisoner’s steadily shrinking ground that wins for
the torturer his swelling sense of territory. The question and the answer
are a prolonged comparative display, an unfurling of world maps ’ (1985,
p. 36). Torture enacts a topology of contraction and expansion, a violent
recasting of territories of being, which can be linked, I suggest, to the
‘ contracting/expanding tendencies ’ of Muriel’s organisation of space (Kite,
2009, p. 12). Drawing on Scarry in her reading of Muriel, Wilson suggests
persuasively that the connection between the psychological effects of
torture and the rest of the film may be viewed as one of ‘ inflection and
contamination ’, rather than one of direct representation (2006, p. 100).
Deleuze’s cartographical framing of Resnais allows for the dynamic of
‘ inflection and contamination ’ identified by Wilson here to be considered
further via a particular emphasis on the political dimensions of Muriel’s
territorial redistributions of the event of torture. Through a relational
mapping of perceptual space, Muriel elaborates a topology of contraction
and expansion that brings the continuously shifting contours of
remembrance, amnesia and the historical real into view.

Topological effects in Muriel signal a connection between ‘ the steadily
shrinking ground ’ of the torture victim and the expansive ground of
colonial, sovereign space. Through the disjunctive mapping of zones of
Boulogne, enhanced by rapid, disconnective editing, the film is regularly
set free from legible co-ordinates of location, with the effect that on-screen
space appears to expand. For Claude Ollier, the film elaborates ‘ a kind of
spiral or circle opening further and further out so that the whole film
seems to be basically centrifugal with everything projected to the outside ’
(quoted in Britton, 1990, pp. 39–40);

15
similarly, Bersani and Dutoit

suggest, ‘ Muriel is a wholly centrifugal film ’ that is ‘ constantly rushing
away from a narrative centre never firmly established in the first place ’
(1993, p. 191). Bersani and Dutoit cite the scene in which a stranger asks a
local woman for directions, having failed to recognize that he is in the city
centre. (It is presumably with this scene in mind that Deleuze suggests
that in Muriel, ‘ the new Boulogne has no centre ’ [2005, p. 112]). As the
stranger’s confusion becomes indicative of the way in which legible space
is disrupted in Muriel, a sense of place becomes dispersed through

15. Britton also addresses the centrifugal force of the film, linking this to the motif of the

kaleidoscope (Britton 1990, 40).

Film-Philosophy 20 (2016)

230



an apparently increasing extension of urban territory. This is the
ever-expanding ground of the sovereign – the centrifugal unfurling of
French metropolitan space, invoked by the film in order to map the
perceptual and political co-ordinates of colonial power and its inverse. In
contrast to the ‘ steadily shrinking ground ’ of Muriel, ever to remain
hidden from view, the main characters (particularly Robert and Bernard,
the perpetrators of Muriel’s torture) freely negotiate their way around the
space of the city.

16

These topological effects of contrast and morphing are compounded
by the mapping of space in Hélène’s apartment. Though at times the
apartment appears to be configured in claustrophobic terms, it is a
space which allows for what Scarry calls ‘ outward unfolding ’ (1985,
p. 39) – Hélène moves sometimes frenetically to and fro inside the
apartment yet she also moves freely out of the apartment (for example, on
her multiple trips to the casino). The apartment is a place of experiential
extension, bearing out what Scarry describes as ‘ the central, overwhelming
characteristic of the domestic ’: that ‘ its protective, narrowing act is the
location of the human being’s most expansive potential ’ (1985, p. 40).
In the context of torture, however, ‘ the world is reduced to a single
room or set of rooms ’ (Scarry 1985, 40). The topology of torture is such
that the physical and perceptual space of the prisoner contracts.
In Bernard’s account of Muriel’s torture, she is placed in the centre of
the room, under the beam of Robert’s torch, so that the officers can ‘ get a
better look ’; surrounded, she falls from a chair, her arm twisted. Such is
the centripetally deforming force of torture – what Scarry calls the
‘ unmaking ’ of the world – a collapse of the world, a vertiginous folding
inwards.

Thus through a system of subterranean correspondences, Muriel weaves
connections between what we see and what is excluded from view.
A recurrent focus on goods in shop windows gestures to the accelerated
rise of consumerism in France during the period of the Algerian War – a
culture of mass commodification further signalled in the film by snippets
of speech that parody advertising slogans (such as Alphonse’s claim that
‘ [s]ome people cope with stains better than others – I’m one of them ’,
followed by a grin). In the apparent disconnection between these motifs of
consumerism and the event of Muriel’s torture, the film appears to bear
out what Kristin Ross has shown to be an ideological delineation of

16. Having watched Bernard’s film, Vieux Jean asks where Robert is now. Bernard says:

‘ He walks around Boulogne, like everyone else. ’ To which Vieux Jean replies: ‘ But so

do you! ’

Muriel’s Disarticulations of Justice

231



narratives of Algeria’s ‘ dirty war ’ and decolonization from discourses of
sanitized modernization in France in the 1950s and 1960s (Ross, 1995).

17

Yet the over-determined meanings at stake in Alphonse’s claim about stain
removal – in particular the invocation of culpability and disavowal – are
indicative of a topology insisting on links between the realms of
metropolitan consumerism and colonialist subjugation. As B. Kite
suggests of Bernard’s investigations around Boulogne: ‘ perhaps he films
café patrons, shop windows, the sliding building that recurs throughout
Muriel as a minor motif to indicate that these signs of consumer comfort
are historically predicated on the ‘ not-here ’ of a colonial economy,
on blood and exploitation ’ (2009, p. 19). As Muriel’s cartographical
disjunctions and consumerist visions become indicative of the relation of
metropolitan space to its largely unacknowledged outside, the film enacts
a series of topological conversions, revealing the fatal interdependence
of the realms of the torturer and the prisoner, and of the coloniser and
the colonised. Here the spectral contours of Muriel’s topology become
apparent. For, as Gauch contends, ‘ the film refuses to localize the crime ’
(2001, p. 55); it refuses to limit the event of Muriel’s death to any one
particular place, thereby resisting what Derrida calls ‘ ontopology ’ (1994,
p. 82). As such, Muriel elaborates what Derrida refers to as a ‘ topology of
mourning ’, whereby mourning is understood as ‘ without reliable limit ’,
that is, without ontologization in terms of either time or space (1994,
p. 97).

Thus, read hauntologically and topologically, a different picture of
Muriel emerges. As the film gestures perpetually to a moment beyond the
present and to a place beyond that which is on-screen – ‘ not now ’ and
‘ not here ’ – both time and space are rendered out of joint. Tracing events
which refuse to be brought fully to representation, suspended as they are
in an ethically and politically animated realm of ‘ midmourning ’, the film
engenders a series of melancholic remainders that, as Khanna suggests,
rupture the ‘ force field ’ of an officially mournful history. What Khanna
calls ‘ critical melancholia ’ emerges in Muriel through a hauntological
configuration of time and a topological shaping of space. Here the time
and space of colonial sovereignty is revealed as intimately and fatally
bound to the ‘ not now ’ and ‘ not here ’ of the history and location of
subjugated others. By intimating such interrelatedness in spectral and

17. Revealing one particularly disturbing bleed between the realms of decolonisation and

modernisation, Ross notes that the new electrical appliances featuring in French

kitchens during that period doubled up as instruments of torture used by the French

during the Algerian War (1995, p. 113). Croombs draws on Ross’s study in one of his

readings of Muriel (Croombs 2010b).

Film-Philosophy 20 (2016)

232



topological terms, le temps du retour of Resnais’s film disarticulates
an untimely, incalculable form of justice. Through this hauntopological
reading, Muriel can be retrieved, to a certain extent, from criticisms of its
lack of political engagement. Yet the film’s politics remains framed from
the position of metropolitan France, both as a work by a French filmmaker
and in the bias of its setting. The reverberations of a colonial history
can be deconstructed from within, as Muriel intimates, by opening
dominant imperial epistemologies to a surfeit of melancholic traces; yet
for justice to be rendered – disjunctively, incommensurably – beyond
these epistemologies, it remains vital to revisit and envisage further times
and spaces through which the voices and images of Algeria might resonate
(see Austin 2012).

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