“From the opening minutes to the last, the aesthetic of Les Statues meurent aussi draws attention self–reflexively to acts of looking. Not just that of spectators who peer into the camera lens just as they peer into the glass cabinets of the British Museum, the Musée du Congo Belge or the Musée de L’Homme, where much of the footage was filmed, but the ‘looking’ of us, as spectators in the broader sense. Even in a more contemporary light, after the Algerian War of Independence; after the Cuban Missile Crisis; after the European political upheavals of 1968; after the myriad political and world events that Marker and Resnais have consistently brought to the public eye, Les Statues meurent aussi subtly implies that because we look we are complicit in the events of the present and the past.”
Jenny Chamarette1
- 1Jenny Chamarette, “Les Statues meurent aussi,” Senses of Cinema, 2009.
