At the beginning of the 1960s France remained deeply divided by the Algerian War, and in 1960 the Manifesto of the 121, which protested against French military policy in Algeria, was signed by a group of leading intellectuals and artists who included Resnais. The war, and the difficulty of coming to terms with its horrors, was a central theme of his next film "Muriel" (1963), which used a fractured narrative to explore the mental states of its characters. It was among the first French films to comment, even indirectly, on the Algerian experience.