‘Le cinéma’, notes Jacques Derrida, ‘est un deuil magnifique, un travail du deuil magnifié, […] il est prêt à se laisser impressioner par toutes les mémoires endeuillées’. In this paper, I shall explore the traces of memory ‘in mourning’, memory besieged and beclouded, as those traces are manifested through the work of Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, and specifically, Nuit et brouillard, La Jetée and Muriel ou le temps d’un retour. All three films operate along the fault-lines of temporal difference, or disjuncture. All three films address a past that is at once catastrophically irrecoverable and tragically insurgent: in Nuit et brouillard, the devastated, devastating edifices of the ‘mentalité concentrationnaire’; in La Jetée, the idyll of Parisian life untouched by fall-out from atomic bombs, nuclear warfare; in Muriel, the prelude to an adulthood coterminous with ingress into the torture cell. And all three films, I contend, attest to a peculiarly modern investment in the ‘mobility’ of anguish. For Marker and Resnais, certain losses, certain deaths, ‘exceed existing modes of mourning’; the memories or ghosts of those losses ‘roam the post-traumatic world’ (as Dominick LaCapra has it), without being ‘entirely “owned” as “one’s own” by any individual or group’. Yet even roaming pre-supposes some fixed point of departure. In these films, that point, tenably, is Algeria. Nuit et brouillard, Resnais claimed, was all ‘about’ the war of independence in the then French département. La Jetée invokes colonial oppression obliquely, through visual clues. Muriel invokes it explicitly, in the narrative of one soldier’s endeavour to chronicle and expiate his crimes. The schisms that shape and misshape the cinematic/psychic landscape, here, in other words, are disparities in culture as well as differences in time; the ‘other’ that de-ranges or traumatizes the filmic subject ‘in mourning’ is racial as well as past.