Reading room in France’s old Bibliothèque Nationale

One of the extras included in the British Film Institute’s recent two-DVD edition of Jacque Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating is Toute la mémoire du monde, a short 1956 documentary by new wave pioneer Alain Resnais, on the French Bibliothèque Nationale as it was in those (pre-computer) days. I may be a child of my era, but it is nonetheless startling to see a library on that scale functioning without the assistance of computers; the old manual practices then in effect do not scale well.

The film opens with an extended dolly shot traversing the length of some shadowy room (evidently somewhere underground), a room crowded with dusty volumes stacked in irregular and unsteady towers, and more books crammed onto overburdened shelves. In a sombre voice, the narrator intones:

Confronted with these bulging repositories, man is assailed by a fear of being engulfed by this mass of words. To ensure his liberty, he builds fortresses. In Paris, words are imprisoned in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Everything printed in France can be found here.

It is a vivid conceit: libraries as fortresses built to protect us from the words inside. We see a vision from Jorge Luis Borges, his infinite library made manifest, as the camera takes us deep within a maze of corridors and shelves, catwalks and stairways connecting unseen rooms, elevators descending into distant sub-basements, ascending into imagined attics. Here man is insignificant in comparison to the avalanche of written language which surrounds him on every side. We move relentlessly through this labyrinth and into the magnificent reading room, whose domed ceilings tower high above us, their hyperboloid surfaces pierced by circular skylights and supported by a forest of delicate iron columns that seem to defy the laws of engineering. It seems to have been built from a blueprint by Escher, a painting by de Chirico; the surreal has here been made real.

Resnais then considers the implications of retrieving a book from the depths of this biblio-fortress:

And now the book marches on towards a notional line, a boundary more significant for it than going through the looking glass. It is no longer the same book. It used to be part of an abstract, universal, indifferent memory. There, all books were equal, all enjoyed affection as tender as that shown by God towards man. Here it is, selected, preferred, indispensable to its reader, torn from its world to feed these paper-crunching pseudo-insects, irremediably different from true insects in that each is bound to its own distinct business. Astrophysics, physiology, cosmology, mechanics, logic, poetics, technology…

Here we catch a glimpse of a future in which all mysteries are resolved. A time when we are handed the keys to this and other universes. And this will come about because these readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will lay the fragments of a single secret end to end, a secret with a beautiful name, a secret called happiness.

This is all so Enlightenment-era French, the notion that happiness lies in the imposition of order upon chaos, a world in which librarians are the benevolent (yet simultaneously both divine and democratic) custodians of all the sacred texts. Capped with this wonderful image of the book transformed through the action of its reader, an unthinking Kafkaesque “paper-crunching pseudo-insect” who knows not to what end he reads.

It’s almost enough to make me give up my library card.