Alain Resnais’s Enthropic Archive

Abstract

The aim of this chapter is to show that Alain Resnais’s documentary Toute la Mémoire du Monde establishes a parallel, a symbiosis, between order and disorder, between classification and entropy. The bureaucratic procedures, the “Fordist model”, the shadowy figures in the documentary, all of which imbue the Bibliothèque Nationale with an air of science fiction, have a sombre counterpart: the badly lit basements, the chaotic boxes filled with books and papers awaiting retrieval. By comparing Resnais’s documentary, Borges’s Library of Babel and Kafka’s work, this chapter reveals a secret desire for the senseless chaos of unread books.