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Introductory lecture by Mark Bould, UWE

Screening starts at 7.00pm

A suicidal publishing executive, through a malfunctioning time-travel experiment, is thrown into a fragmentary revisiting of his past life. As it slowly pieces together the amorous reasons for his despair, Je t’aime, je t’aime, one of Resnais’s very best, powerfully and surprisingly humorously explores his recurring themes of time and memory, echoing the concerns of La Jetée.

Arguably, 1895 saw the birth of both cinema and sf. And, like the eponymous device of HG Wells’ debut novel, cinema is a time machine. What do time-travel narratives – such as G.I. Samurai, Back to the Future, The Terminator, Primer and Timecrimes – tell us about cinema, and about the times in which they were made? And why did French New Wave directors turn to sf filmmaking, including the time-travel classics La Jetée and Je t’aime, je t’aime? Mark Bould

 

Dir. Alain Resnais France 1968 91mins Subtitled