Cinema: The Brain Game

MON ONCLE D'AMERIQUE Directed by Alain Resnais Screenplay by Jean Gruault

All right, class, settle down. Today, for our course on human behavior, we are pleased to have three distinguished guests who will present a lecture and demonstration on the way man's brain determines man's actions. The seminar will be led by Dr. Henri Laborit, the Paris physician and biologist who has documented the source of aggression in all mammals—from white rats up through the most sophisticated human beings. To illustrate his thesis with scenes from the lives of three ordinary people, we have engaged the services of Jean Gruault, who has written some of the finest and most provocative French films of the past 20 years: Truffaut's Jules and Jim and The Wild Child; Godard's Les Carabiniers; and Rossellini's The Rise of Louis XIV. The slide show has been assembled by Alain Resnais, director of such films as Hiroshima Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad and La Guerre Est Finie. Today's class will be a bit longer than usual, but I believe you will find the experience entertaining as well as instructive.

If every classroom lecture were as lucid and entertaining as Mon Oncle d'Amerique—and if every film were as witty and well crafted—our colleges would be filled with scholars and our movie theaters with works of art. What may look at first like a film experiment as dry as the dust on a neglected library shelf turns out to be a spectacular juggling act: of documentary and fiction, analysis and creativity, determinism and free will, comedy and tragedy, the past and the present. The three jugglers—Gruault, Resnais and Laborit—work in perfect sync, perhaps because their own pasts have prepared them for this challenge. Gruault's scripts have often described characters dominated by their emotions or by the whim of the historical moment. And nothing could be more natural than that Resnais, whose films have played with the real and imagined past in a medium that lives in the eternal present, should make a movie based on the work of a biologist who declares that "a living creature is a memory that acts."

Imbedded in the memory of every living thing, and reinforced from the earliest years by parental instruction and example, are the codes that determine how that creature will act. At birth, as a gift from the most primitive part of his brain, a child knows the elements of survival: he must eat, drink and reproduce. His early life is filled with the imposition of rituals: toilet training, religious instruction, social communication and compromise. By the time he is an adult, he knows most of the games people play: how to dress and cook, shake hands, argue with a colleague, plead with a lover, break things, break up, make up, attack, escape or withdraw. In each "free" action, he is replaying the history of the race as stage-managed by an eons-old brain that wants simply to survive and conquer.