Alain Resnais
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Alain Resnais (3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014) was a French film director whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Night and Fog (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.
Resnais began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. These films were contemporary with, and associated with, the French New Wave (nouvelle vague), though Resnais did not regard himself as being fully part of that movement. He had closer links to the "Left Bank" group of authors and filmmakers who shared a commitment to modernism and an interest in left-wing politics. He also established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers usually unconnected with the cinema, such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Semprún.
In later films Resnais moved away from the overtly political topics of some previous works and developed his interests in an interaction between cinema and other cultural forms, including theatre, music, and comic books. This led to imaginative adaptations of plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Henri Bernstein and Jean Anouilh, as well as films featuring various kinds of popular song.
His films frequently explored the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he was noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives. Throughout his career he won many awards from international film festivals and academies.
Filmography
- L'Aventure de Guy (1936) (unfinished)
- Schéma d'une identification (1946) (lost)
- Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (1946) (lost)
- Visite à Oscar Dominguez (1947) (unfinished)
- Visite à Lucien Coutaud (1947)
- Visite à Hans Hartung (1947)
- Visite à Félix Labisse (1947)
- Visite à César Doméla (1947)
- Portrait d'Henri Goetz (1947)
- Van Gogh (16mm) (1947)
- Journée naturelle (Visite à Max Ernst) (1947)
- La Bague (1947)
- L'Alcool tue (1947) (as Alzin Rezarail)
- Le Lait Nestlé (1947)
- Châteaux de France (Versailles) (1948)
- Van Gogh (35mm) (1948)
- Malfray (1948)
- Les Jardins de Paris (1948) (unfinished)
- Gauguin (1950)
- Guernica (1950)
- Pictura: An Adventure in Art (Gauguin segment) (US, 1951)
- Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) (1953)
- Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955)
- Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)
- Le Mystère de l'atelier quinze (1957)
- Le Chant du styrène (1958)
- Hiroshima mon amour (1959)
- L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961)
- Muriel, ou le Temps d'un retour (1963)
- La guerre est finie (The War Is Over) (1966)
- Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam) ("Claude Ridder" segment) (1967)
- Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968)
- Cinétracts (segment, uncredited) (1968)
- L'An 01 (1973) (New York scenes)
- Stavisky (1974)
- Providence (1977)
- Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle) (1980)
- La vie est un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses) (1983)
- L'Amour à mort (Love unto Death) (1984)
- Mélo (1986)
- I Want to Go Home (1989)
- Contre l'oubli (segment "Pour Esteban Gonzalez Gonzalez, Cuba") (1991)
- Gershwin (TV documentary) (1992)
- Smoking/No Smoking (1993)
- On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song) (1997)
- Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips) (2003)
- Cœurs (Private Fears in Public Places) (2006)
- Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass) (2009)
- Vous n'avez encore rien vu (You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!) (2012)
- Aimer, boire et chanter (2013)
