Faire entrer le réel en collision avec le romanesque: l’art du montage dans Retour à Kotelnitch et Un Roman russe d’Emmanuel Carrère

This article explores occurrences of juxtaposition and collision between lived experience and fiction in the film Retour à Kotelnitch (2003) and the book Un roman russe (2007, trans. My Life as a Russian Novel) by Emmanuel Carrère. Following on Eisenstein’s conception of montage, I posit that the construction and fictionalisation of experience act as a step towards (self-) understanding and knowledge in Carrère’s search for his, and his family’s, origins. In a diptych which may be viewed as a manifestation of postmemory, the grey zone which Carrère explores – in which fiction is a mode of living and “real” doesn’t mean “reality” but “unbelievable” – corresponds to the creative potential of autofiction.