Reperagés

Paris: Éditions du Chêne, 1974. Oblong 8vo (20x30cm), original laminated photographic boards. Unpaginated 168pp. Text in French. Some minor rubbing and scuffing to board edges. Lamination slightly peels of at front cover joint and bottom rear cover joint. One page with moderate crumpling at the top corner and a 1cm closed tear at margin. Overall very good and better.

After working together on La guerre est finie and Stavisky (both screenplays written by Jorge Semprun), Reperagés was the third and last collaboartion between Alain Resnais and Jorge Semprun, published in 1974. This time, Jorge Semprun not only contributed a wonderful essay to Alain Resnais images, but also edited and selected all the images included in the book. The photographs were taken between 1948 and 1971 by Alain Resnais with an old Rollei-Camera he had burrowed from Agnés Varda to make photographic notes of places he found interesting for his upcoming film projects.

Some of them, unfortunately, never made it the screen (but at least in this book), like the pulp fiction adventure The Adventures of Harry Dickson, which Resnais planned to shoot in London. The images of garbage fields on Rat Island, a small island in the East River where a lot of trash from New York ended up, were also intended as a location for a film with the legendary comic author Stan Lee, which was also not realized. Alain Resnais was interested in making a film about pollution and persuaded Stan Lee to write a screenplay for it. The title of the film was The Monster Maker with the idea that all the garbage on Rat Island would gather and form a monster that the hero of the film would have to fight.

A rare and beautiful atmospheric photo book, that shows Alain Resnais’ aesthetic eye and skills as a photographer.