Toute la mémoire du monde

Human memory is short, so we create physical aides-mémoires—such as books, objects, films, maps, and artworks. Alain Resnais’s tour of the National Library of France presents one of the world’s greatest collections of this externalized human memory.

We move from the row upon row of bookshelves to the map room, and from art treasures gathered across the globe to the Periodicals Department, where about 450 pounds of newspapers, magazines, yearbooks, and almanacs arrive each day. The pièce de résistance is the catalog room, an immense hall where all this knowledge is linked together by a physical precursor to the internet: an array of cabinets, each filled with cards sorted by keyword.

The factual tone of the voiceover, co-written by Chris Marker, is offset by a touch of irony—libraries, for instance, are described as “fortresses” in which words are “locked up” to “protect” people from them. Maurice Jarre’s cinematic score accentuates this ironic tone further. But the film remains deeply serious in its awe for this ever-expanding collection of human knowledge.