Nina Fischer’s and Maroan el Sani’s seven-minute film, currently on view in the Arthouse at the Jones Center, is a reinterpretation of Alan Resnais’s 1956 Toute le memoire du monde; a short, newsreel-ish documentary on the ponderous inner workings of Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale. Through a sometimes-whimsical and sometimes-anxious narrative, Resnais’ short revels in the stereotypically French obsession with bureaucracy and the larger human desire to manage the inevitable loss that comes with the passage of time. Resnais’s contrapuntal tongue-in-cheek-bureaucratic delivery provides the implied intellectual distance for viewers to see the collection of human production as both noble and vain.

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, Toute la mémoire du monde - The world’s knowledge, 2006; 35 mm transferred to HD, film still, double-projection, colour, 7 min., stereo; courtesy of AMOA-Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin TX.

Since Resnais’ film, the major collections of the Bibliothèque have moved to a larger high-rise building complex and Fischer and el Sani take advantage of this diminished role (maybe also this shift’s cultural resonance) to film the library space without its original collection. In Resnais’ film, Henri Labrouste’s Beaux-Arts structure teems with activity, yet in Fischer and el Sani’s film the same building is almost empty.

It helped that I saw Resnais’s film before viewing Fischer and el Sani’s reinterpretation, because it made the extent of the collection’s absence from the building more palpable. Though the building’s current use is ambiguous, the film explores the resonant meaning of a building void of the activity it was built to contain. Composed in two projections, the lefthand film pans across aisles of empty library stacks. Architectural details like the fritted glass of elevator doors, small railing spindle embellishments and even shelving hardware seem painfully bereft without the organized chaos of archival materials.

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, Toute la mémoire du monde - The world’s knowledge, 2006; 35 mm transferred to HD, film still, double-projection, colour, 7 min., stereo; courtesy of AMOA-Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin TX.

On the right screen, the film pans through Labrouste’s reading room at sitting eye level. Originally built for eight hundred readers, the room is sparsely populated by an eerie assemblage of well-dressed and capable-looking thirty-somethings fidgeting at empty desks, under generically filmic lighting that is greenish and sharp. Both the humans and the functional details of the stacks appear ineffectual. Agitated and doom-y electronic music accompanies every scene.

The film conveys a sense of absence through the apathy and strange repose of the silent characters who inhabit an architecture thoroughly conceived for a now-suddenly-vacated purpose.  Something like regret and hopelessness rushes in to fill the space left in the absence of knowledge that the viewer is left to intuit.

Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani, Toute la mémoire du monde - The world’s knowledge, 2006; 35 mm transferred to HD, film still, double-projection, colour, 7 min., stereo; courtesy of AMOA-Arthouse at the Jones Center, Austin TX.

But the film isn’t strange enough to push itself into the state of profound meaning it seems to seek. Since so little actually happens, the film leaves too large a space for interpretation. The film asks the viewer to make the film profound of their own accord; it’s a careless way to convey intention. The emptiness of the space and the absurdity of the characters’ actions aren’t enough to steer the film’s lighting and sound atmospherics toward a wholly-conceived experience. Instead, the film relies too heavily on these profound-seeming atmospherics and the narrative arc of the characters’ actions is too subtle and restrained to create a valid statement, especially in seven minutes. The camera doesn’t follow important events or go to specific places but seems to want to meet them by chance at its own coolly intellectual pace. But the apathetic panning doesn’t sustain the film’s self-conscious science-fiction-y awe and it’s never clear why we should care about the building’s less-busy status. The monumentality of Labrouste’s library seems artistically over-used, and this limits the film’s interpretation.