The space of a return. A topographic study of alain resnais’ providence

The prevalent interpretation of Providence (Resnais, 1977) reads the first, nocturnal part of the film as a Freudian dream, and the second, diurnal section as the awakening and the return to logical thought – and as an almost unnecessary appendix. I argue instead that the last sequences are as much part of the dream as the rest of the film, as evidenced by the finale, a scene whose baffling character has escaped all critics. My new reading leads to a reassessment of the importance of space in Resnais’s film, and to a shift in the focus from the protagonist Clive to his property ‘Providence’. This house, a small Victorian castle with beautiful gardens, is the space that contains all of the film’s locations, an orderly and respectable cosmos behind whose facade the chaos of the settings produced by the primary process is barely hidden. Despite its deceiving journeys in space, the film never leaves the house and constructs instead the circular trajectory of a return.