Alain Resnais
Encyclopedia
Alain Resnais is a French film director whose career has 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 Nuit et Brouillard
(Night and Fog) (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.
He began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour
(1959), L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in 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
or 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 two plays by Alan Ayckbourn
, and two different styles of musical in On connaît la chanson
(Same Old Song) (1997) and Pas sur la bouche
(Not on the Lips) (2003).
His films have frequently explored the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he is noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives. Throughout his career he has won many awards from international film festivals and academies.
in Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist. He was an only child, and throughout his childhood he was often ill with asthma, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home. He was an eager reader, in a range that extended from classics to comic-books, but from the age of 10 he became fascinated by films. For his twelfth birthday his parents gave him a Kodak 8mm camera with which he began to make his own short films, including a three-minute version of Fantômas
. Around the age of 14 he discovered surrealism
and through that an interest in the works of André Breton
.
Visits to the theatre in Paris gave Resnais the desire to be an actor, and in 1939 he moved to Paris to become an assistant in Georges Pitoëff's company at the Théâtre des Mathurins. From 1940 to 1942 he studied acting in the Cours René-Simon
(and one of his small jobs at this time was as an extra in the film Les Visiteurs du soir
), but he then decided in 1943 to apply to the newly-formed film school IDHEC
to study film editing. The film-maker Jean Grémillon
was one of the teachers who had most influence on him at that period.
He left in 1945 to do his military service which took him to Germany and Austria with the occupying forces, as well as making him a temporary member of a travelling theatre company, Les Arlequins. He returned to Paris in 1946 to start his career as a film editor, but also embarked on short films of his own. Finding himself to be a neighbour of the actor Gérard Philipe
, he persuaded him to appear in a 16mm surrealist short, Schéma d'une identification (now lost). A more ambitious feature-length work, Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, has also vanished without trace.
, to coincide with an exhibition that was being mounted in Paris. He filmed it at first in 16mm, but when the producer Pierre Braunberger
saw the results, Resnais was asked to remake it in 35mm. Van Gogh
received a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and also won an Oscar for Best 2-reel Short in 1949. (Braunberger went on to act as producer for several of Resnais's films in the following decade.) Resnais continued to address artistic subjects in Gauguin (1950) and Guernica
(1950), which examined the Picasso
painting based on the 1937 bombing of the town, and presented it to the accompaniment of a text written by Paul Éluard
. A political perspective on art also underpinned his next project, co-directed with Chris Marker
, Les statues meurent aussi
(Statues also Die), a polemic about the destruction of African art by French cultural colonialism.
Nuit et Brouillard
(Night and Fog) (1955) was one of the first documentaries about the Nazi concentration camps, but it deals more with the memory of the camps than with their actual past existence. Realising that standard documentary techniques would be incapable of confronting the enormity of the horror (and even risked humanising it), Resnais chose to use a distancing technique by alternating historical black-and-white images of the camps with contemporary colour footage of the sites in long tracking shots. The accompanying narration (written by Jean Cayrol
, himself a survivor of the camps) was intentionally understated to add to the distancing effect. Although the film encountered censorship problems with the French government, its impact was immense and it remains one of the director's most admired works.
A different kind of collective memory was considered in Toute la mémoire du monde
(1956), in which the seemingly endless spaces and bibliographic riches of the Bibliothèque nationale
were explored in another compendium of long travelling shots. In 1958 Resnais undertook a commission from the Pechiney company to make short film, in colour and wide-screen, extolling the merits of plastics, Le Chant du styrène
. Poetry was brought to the project, literally, by Raymond Queneau
who wrote the narration for the film in rhyming couplets.
In his decade of making documentary short films, Resnais had established his interest in and talent for collaboration with leading figures in other branches of the arts; with the painters who were the subjects of his early works; with writers (Eluard in Guernica, Cayrol in Nuit et Brouillard, Queneau in Le Chant du styrène); with musicians (Darius Milhaud
in Gauguin, Hanns Eisler
in Nuit et Brouillard, Pierre Barbaud in Le Chant du styrène); and with other film-makers (Resnais was the editor of Agnès Varda
's first film, La Pointe courte, and co-directed with Chris Marker Les statues meurent aussi). Similar collaborations underpinned his future work in feature films.
in 1959. It had originated as a commission from the producers of Nuit et Brouillard (Anatole Dauman
and Argos Films) to make a documentary about the atomic bomb, but Resnais initially declined, thinking that it would be too similar to the earlier film about the concentration camps; it presented the same problem of how to film incomprehensible suffering. Then however in discussion with the novelist Marguerite Duras
a fusion of fiction and documentary was developed which acknowedged the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima; one could only speak about the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima. The themes of memory and forgetting were explored in a new narrative technique which balanced images with narrated text and ignored conventional notions of plot and story development. The film was shown at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival
, alongside Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups
, and its success became associated with the emerging movement of the New Wave
.
Resnais's next film was L'Année dernière à Marienbad
(Last Year at Marienbad) (1961), which he made in collaboration with the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet
. The tantalisingly fragmented and shifting narrative presents three principal characters, a woman and two men, in the opulent setting of a grand European hotel or château where the possibility of a previous encounter a year ago is repeatedly asserted and questioned and contradicted. After winning the Golden Lion
at the Venice Film Festival
, the film attracted great attention and provoked many divergent interpretations of how it should be understood, encouraged by interviews in which Robbe-Grillet and Resnais themselves appeared to give conflicting explanations of the film. There was little doubt however that it represented a significant challenge to the traditional concept of narrative construction in cinema.
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 Alain 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.
A contemporary political issue also formed the background for La guerre est finie (The War Is Over) (1966), this time the clandestine activities of left-wing opponents of the Franco régime in Spain. Resnais's scriptwriter on this film was the Spanish author Jorge Semprun
, himself an ex-member of the Spanish Communist Party now in voluntary exile in France. Both men denied that the film was about Spain, but when it was entered for the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966, an objection from the Spanish government caused it to be withdrawn and it was shown out of competition. In 1967 Resnais participated with six other directors, including Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard
, in a collective work about the Vietnam war, Loin du Vietnam
(Far from Vietnam).
(1968) drew upon the traditions of science-fiction for a story of a man sent back into his past, a theme which enabled Resnais again to present a narrative of fragmented time. The film was unlucky in its release (its planned screening at Cannes was cancelled amid the political events of May 1968), and it was almost five years before Resnais was able to direct another film. Resnais spent part of that period in America working on various unfulfilled projects, including one about the Marquis de Sade. He also published Repérages, a volume of his photographs, taken between 1948 and 1971, of locations (many of them for 'possible films') in London, Scotland, Paris, Nevers, Lyon, New York and Hiroshima; Jorge Semprun wrote the introductory text. Some of the photographs relate to a long-cherished but unfulfilled idea for a film based on the Harry Dickson stories by Jean Ray.
After contributing an episode to L'An 01 (The Year 01) (1973), a collective film organised by Jacques Doillon
, Resnais made a second collaboration with Jorge Semprun for Stavisky
(1974), based on the life of the notorious financier and embezzler whose death in 1934 provoked a political scandal. With glamorous costumes and sets, a musical score by Stephen Sondheim
, and Jean-Paul Belmondo
in the title-role, it was seen as Resnais's most commercial film to date, but its complex narrative structure showed clear links with some of the formal preoccupations of his earlier films.
With Providence
(1977), Resnais made his first film in English, with a screenplay written by David Mercer, and a distinguished cast that included John Gielgud
and Dirk Bogarde
. The story shows an ageing, maybe dying, novelist grappling with alternative versions of his own past as he adapts them for his fiction. Resnais was eager that the dark subject should remain humorous, and he described it as "a macabre divertissement". Formal innovation characterised Mon oncle d'Amérique
(My American Uncle) (1980) in which the theories of the neurobiologist Henri Laborit
about animal behaviour are juxtaposed with three interwoven fictional stories; and a further counterpoint to the fictional characters is provided by the inclusion of film extracts of the classic French film actors with whom they identify. The film won several international awards including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and it also proved to be one of Resnais's most successful with the public.
, Pierre Arditi
, and André Dussollier
, sometimes accompanied by Fanny Ardant
or Lambert Wilson
. The first four of these were among the large cast of La vie est un roman
(Life Is a Bed of Roses) (1983), a comic fantasy about utopian dreams in which three stories, from different eras and told in different styles, are interwoven within a shared setting. The action is punctuated by episodes of song which develop towards the end into scenes that are almost operatic; Resnais said that his starting point had been the desire to make a film in which dialogue and song would alternate.
Music, very differently used, was a major component of L'Amour à mort
(Love unto Death) (1984). For this intense chamber work with four principal actors (Azéma, Arditi, Ardant and Dussollier), Resnais asked Hans Werner Henze
to compose musical episodes which would act as a "fifth character", not an accompaniment but a fully integrated element of the drama with which the speech of the actors would interact. In subsequent years, Resnais gave his attention to music of more popular styles. He made Gershwin (1992), an innovative TV documentary in which the American composer's life and works were reviewed through the testimonies of performers and filmmakers, juxtaposed with commissioned paintings by Guy Peellaert
. In On connaît la chanson
(Same Old Song) (1997), his tribute to television works of Dennis Potter
, the characters express their key emotions or private thoughts by bursting into snatches of well-known (recorded) popular songs without interrupting the dramatic situation. A long-neglected operetta from the 1920s was the unexpected basis for Resnais's next film Pas sur la bouche
(Not on the Lips) (2003), in which he sought to reinvigorate an unfashionable form of entertainment by recreating its theatricality for the camera and entrusting most of its musical numbers to actors rather than to trained singers.
References to the theatre are plentiful throughout Resnais's filmmaking (Marienbad, Muriel, Stavisky, Mon oncle d'Amérique), but he first undertook the challenge of taking a complete stage work and giving it new cinematic life in Mélo
(1986), an adaptation of Henry Bernstein's 1929 play of the same name. Resnais remained entirely faithful to the play (apart from shortening it) and he emphasised its theatricality by filming in long takes on large sets of evidently artificial design, as well as by marking off the acts of the play with the fall of a curtain. After an excursion into the world of comic-books and cartoons (another of Resnais's enthusiasms) in I Want to Go Home
(1989), an ambitious theatrical adaptation followed with the diptych of Smoking/No Smoking
(1993): Resnais, having admired the plays of Alan Ayckbourn
for many years, chose to adapt what appeared the most intractable of them, Intimate Exchanges
, a series of eight interlinked plays which follow the consequences of a casual choice to sixteen possible endings. Resnais slightly reduced the number of permuted endings and compressed the plays into two films, each having a common starting point, and to be seen in any order. Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi played all the parts, and the theatricality of the undertaking was again emphasised by the studio set designs for a fictional English village. Resnais returned to Ayckbourn in the following decade for his adaptation of Private Fears in Public Places
to which he gave the film title of Cœurs
(2006). Among the stage/film effects which contribute to its mood of "cheerful desolation" is the artificial snow which is continually seen through set windows until eventually it falls on the studio interior as well.
Speaking in 1986, Resnais said that he did not make a separation between cinema and theatre and refused to make enemies of them. He preferred working with "people of the theatre", and he said that he would never want to film a novel. It was therefore something of a departure when he chose L'Incident, a novel by Christian Gailly, as the basis for Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass) (2009). He explained however that what initially attracted him to the book was the quality of its dialogue, which he retained largely unchanged for the film. When Les Herbes folles was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it was the occasion for a special jury award to Resnais "for his work and exceptional contribution to the history of cinema".
In spring 2011 Resnais completed filming a new work, Vous n'avez encore rien vu, an adaptation of Jean Anouilh
's 1941 play Eurydice
. It is scheduled to be released in 2012.
or nouvelle vague in the late 1950s, but by then he had already established a significant reputation through his ten years of work on documentary short films. He defined his own relationship by saying: "Although I was not fully part of the New Wave because of my age, there was some mutual sympathy and respect between myself and Rivette, Bazin, Demy, Truffaut... So I felt friendly with that team." He nevertheless acknowledged his debt to the New Wave because it created the conditions of production, and particularly the financial conditions, which allowed him to make a film like Hiroshima mon amour, his first feature film.
Resnais is more often associated with a 'Left Bank group' of writers and filmmakers who included Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet (with all of whom he collaborated in the earlier part of his career). They were distinguished by their interests in documentary, left-wing politics, and the literary experiments of the nouveau roman
.
The importance of creative collaboration in Resnais's films has been noted by many commentators. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has always refused to write his own screenplays and has attached great importance to the contribution of his chosen writer, whose status in the shared "authorship" of the film he fully acknowledges. He is also known to treat the completed screenplay with great fidelity, to the extent that some of his screenwriters have remarked on how closely the finished film has realised their intentions.
Time and memory have regularly been identified as two of the principal themes of Resnais's work, at least in his earlier films. He has however consistently tried to modify this view of his concerns: "I prefer to speak of the imaginary, or of consciousness. What interests me in the mind is that faculty we have to imagine what is going to happen in our heads, or to remember what has happened". He has also described his films as an attempt, however imperfect, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism.
Another view of the evolution of Resnais's career has seen him moving progressively away from a realistic treatment of 'big' subjects and overtly political themes towards films that are increasingly personal and playful. Resnais himself has offered an explanation of this shift in terms of challenging what has been the norm in film-making at the time; having made his early films when escapist cinema was predominant, he has progressively felt the need to move away from exploration of social and political issues as that has itself become almost the norm in contemporary cinema. Experimentation with narrative forms and genre conventions has instead become a central focus of his films.
A frequent criticism of Resnais's films among English-language commentators has been that they are emotionally cold; that they are all about technique without grasp of character or subject, that his understanding of beauty is compromised by a lack of sensuousness, and that his seriousness of intent fails to communicate itself to audiences. Elsewhere however it is suggested that such views are partly based on a misreading of the films, especially his earlier ones, which has impeded an appreciation of the exhilarating humour and irony which pervade his work; and other viewers have been able to make the connection between the film's form and its human dimension.
There is general agreement about Resnais's attachment to formalism in his approach to film; he himself regards it as the starting point of his work, and usually has an idea of a form, or method of construction, in his head even before the plot or the characters take shape. For him it is also the basis for the communication of feeling: "There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator."
Another term which appears in commentaries on Resnais throughout his career is "surrealism", from his documentary portrait of a library in Toute la mémoire du monde, through the dreamlike innovations of Marienbad, to the latterday playfulness of Les Herbes folles. Resnais himself traced a link to his teenage discovery of surrealism in the works of André Breton: "I hope that I always remain faithful to André Breton who refused to suppose that imaginary life was not a part of real life".
); she was a regular member of his production team, working as assistant director on most of his films from 1961 to 1986. His second wife is Sabine Azéma
, who acted in the majority of his films from 1983 onwards; they were married in the English town of Scarborough in 1998.
Night and Fog (film)
Night and Fog is a 1955 French documentary short film. Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Night and Fog was...
(Night and Fog) (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.
He began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour
Hiroshima Mon Amour
Hiroshima mon amour is an acclaimed 1959 drama film directed by French film director Alain Resnais, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. It is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French-Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness...
(1959), L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad) (1961), and Muriel
Muriel (film)
Muriel is a 1963 French film directed by Alain Resnais. It was Resnais's third feature film, following Hiroshima mon amour and L'Année dernière à Marienbad , and in common with those films it explores the challenge of integrating a remembered or imagined past with the life of the present...
(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
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
or nouvelle vague, though Resnais did not regard himself as being fully part of that movement. He had closer links to the 'Left Bank
Rive Gauche
La Rive Gauche is the southern bank of the river Seine in Paris. Here the river flows roughly westward, cutting the city in two: looking downstream, the southern bank is to the left, and the northern bank is to the right....
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
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras was a French writer and film director.-Background:...
, Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...
and Jorge Semprún
Jorge Semprún
Jorge Semprún Maura was a Spanish writer and politician who lived in France most of his life and wrote primarily in French. From 1953 to 1962, during the era of Francisco Franco, Semprún lived clandestinely in Spain working as an organizer for the exiled Communist Party of Spain, but was expelled...
.
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 two plays by Alan Ayckbourn
Alan Ayckbourn
Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE is a prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their...
, and two different styles of musical in On connaît la chanson
On connaît la chanson
On connaît la chanson is a 1997 French film. It was directed by Alain Resnais, and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri. Jaoui and Bacri also starred in the film with Sabine Azéma, Lambert Wilson, André Dussollier and Pierre Arditi.- Plot :Odile , a business executive, is married to weak,...
(Same Old Song) (1997) and Pas sur la bouche
Not on the Lips
Not on the Lips is a 2003 French musical film directed by Alain Resnais. It is an adaptation of the operetta Pas sur la bouche, written by André Barde and Maurice Yvain, which was first produced in Paris in 1925.-Plot:...
(Not on the Lips) (2003).
His films have frequently explored the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he is noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives. Throughout his career he has won many awards from international film festivals and academies.
Early life
Alain Resnais was born in 1922 at VannesVannes
Vannes is a commune in the Morbihan department in Brittany in north-western France. It was founded over 2000 years ago.-Geography:Vannes is located on the Gulf of Morbihan at the mouth of two rivers, the Marle and the Vincin. It is around 100 km northwest of Nantes and 450 km south west...
in Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist. He was an only child, and throughout his childhood he was often ill with asthma, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home. He was an eager reader, in a range that extended from classics to comic-books, but from the age of 10 he became fascinated by films. For his twelfth birthday his parents gave him a Kodak 8mm camera with which he began to make his own short films, including a three-minute version of Fantômas
Fantômas
Fantômas is a fictional character created by French writers Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre .One of the most popular characters in the history of French crime fiction, Fantômas was created in 1911 and appeared in a total of 32 volumes written by the two collaborators, then a subsequent 11...
. Around the age of 14 he discovered surrealism
Surrealism
Surrealism is a cultural movement that began in the early 1920s, and is best known for the visual artworks and writings of the group members....
and through that an interest in the works of André Breton
André Breton
André Breton was a French writer and poet. He is known best as the founder of Surrealism. His writings include the first Surrealist Manifesto of 1924, in which he defined surrealism as "pure psychic automatism"....
.
Visits to the theatre in Paris gave Resnais the desire to be an actor, and in 1939 he moved to Paris to become an assistant in Georges Pitoëff's company at the Théâtre des Mathurins. From 1940 to 1942 he studied acting in the Cours René-Simon
René Simon
René Simon, , born in Troyes was a French actor and founder in 1925 of the Cours Simon drama school.-External links:...
(and one of his small jobs at this time was as an extra in the film Les Visiteurs du soir
Les Visiteurs du soir
The Devil's Envoys is a 1942 film by French film director Marcel Carné, famous for his romantic tragedy, Children of Paradise...
), but he then decided in 1943 to apply to the newly-formed film school IDHEC
Institut des hautes études cinématographiques
L'Institut des hautes études cinématographiques is a French film school, founded during World War II under the leadership of Marcel L'Herbier who was its president from 1944 to 1969. IDHEC offered training for directors and producers, cameramen, sound technicians, editors, art directors and...
to study film editing. The film-maker Jean Grémillon
Jean Grémillon
Jean Grémillon was a French film director. After directing a number of documentaries during the 1920s, many now lost, he had his first substantial success with the dramatic feature Maldone in 1928...
was one of the teachers who had most influence on him at that period.
He left in 1945 to do his military service which took him to Germany and Austria with the occupying forces, as well as making him a temporary member of a travelling theatre company, Les Arlequins. He returned to Paris in 1946 to start his career as a film editor, but also embarked on short films of his own. Finding himself to be a neighbour of the actor Gérard Philipe
Gérard Philipe
Gérard Philipe was a prominent French actor, who had appeared in 34 films between 1944 and 1959.-Career:...
, he persuaded him to appear in a 16mm surrealist short, Schéma d'une identification (now lost). A more ambitious feature-length work, Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, has also vanished without trace.
1946-1958: Short films
After beginning with a series of short documentary films showing artists at work in their studios, as well as a few commercial commissions, Resnais was invited in 1948 to make a film about the paintings of Van GoghVincent van Gogh
Vincent Willem van Gogh , and used Brabant dialect in his writing; it is therefore likely that he himself pronounced his name with a Brabant accent: , with a voiced V and palatalized G and gh. In France, where much of his work was produced, it is...
, to coincide with an exhibition that was being mounted in Paris. He filmed it at first in 16mm, but when the producer Pierre Braunberger
Pierre Braunberger
Pierre Braunberger was a French producer, executive producer, and actor.- Biography :Born into a family of doctors, Braunberger at the age of seven was already determined not have the same life as his father, and not to take up medicine as a career...
saw the results, Resnais was asked to remake it in 35mm. Van Gogh
Van Gogh (1948 film)
Van Gogh is a 1948 short French film directed by Alain Resnais. It won an Academy Award in 1950 for Best Short Subject . It is a remake of a film made the previous year....
received a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and also won an Oscar for Best 2-reel Short in 1949. (Braunberger went on to act as producer for several of Resnais's films in the following decade.) Resnais continued to address artistic subjects in Gauguin (1950) and Guernica
Guernica (1950 film)
Guernica is a thirteen minute film directed by Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens in 1950. After a brief voiceover by Jacques Pruvost highlighting the Guernica atrocity of April, 1937, María Casares recites a poem by Paul Eluard on the subject, latterly over shots of the painting Guernica by Pablo...
(1950), which examined the Picasso
Pablo Picasso
Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
painting based on the 1937 bombing of the town, and presented it to the accompaniment of a text written by Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard
Paul Éluard, born Eugène Émile Paul Grindel , was a French poet who was one of the founders of the surrealist movement.-Biography:...
. A political perspective on art also underpinned his next project, co-directed with Chris Marker
Chris Marker
Chris Marker is a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée , A Grin Without a Cat , Sans Soleil and AK , an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa...
, Les statues meurent aussi
Statues Also Die
Statues Also Die is a 1953 French essay film directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, about historical African art and the effects colonialism has had on how it is perceived. The film won the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo...
(Statues also Die), a polemic about the destruction of African art by French cultural colonialism.
Nuit et Brouillard
Night and Fog (film)
Night and Fog is a 1955 French documentary short film. Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Night and Fog was...
(Night and Fog) (1955) was one of the first documentaries about the Nazi concentration camps, but it deals more with the memory of the camps than with their actual past existence. Realising that standard documentary techniques would be incapable of confronting the enormity of the horror (and even risked humanising it), Resnais chose to use a distancing technique by alternating historical black-and-white images of the camps with contemporary colour footage of the sites in long tracking shots. The accompanying narration (written by Jean Cayrol
Jean Cayrol
Jean Cayrol was a French poet, publisher, and member of the Académie Goncourt. He is perhaps best known for writing the narration in Alain Resnais's 1955 documentary film, Night and Fog...
, himself a survivor of the camps) was intentionally understated to add to the distancing effect. Although the film encountered censorship problems with the French government, its impact was immense and it remains one of the director's most admired works.
A different kind of collective memory was considered in Toute la mémoire du monde
Toute la mémoire du monde
Toute la mémoire du monde is a documentary short film by Alain Resnais released in 1956.- Synopsis :An essay on the potential and the limits of dutifully archived human knowledge, masquerading as a documentary on the organisation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.- Starring :*Jacques...
(1956), in which the seemingly endless spaces and bibliographic riches of the Bibliothèque nationale
Bibliothèque nationale de France
The is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...
were explored in another compendium of long travelling shots. In 1958 Resnais undertook a commission from the Pechiney company to make short film, in colour and wide-screen, extolling the merits of plastics, Le Chant du styrène
Le chant du Styrène
Le chant du Styrène is a 1958, 19 minutes French documentary film directed by Alain Resnais.The film was an order by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics. The commentary, narrated by Pierre Dux, was written by Raymond Queneau, all in alexandrines.-External links:*...
. Poetry was brought to the project, literally, by Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau
Raymond Queneau was a French poet and novelist and the co-founder of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle .-Biography:Born in Le Havre, Seine-Maritime, Queneau was the only child of Auguste Queneau and Joséphine Mignot...
who wrote the narration for the film in rhyming couplets.
In his decade of making documentary short films, Resnais had established his interest in and talent for collaboration with leading figures in other branches of the arts; with the painters who were the subjects of his early works; with writers (Eluard in Guernica, Cayrol in Nuit et Brouillard, Queneau in Le Chant du styrène); with musicians (Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud
Darius Milhaud was a French composer and teacher. He was a member of Les Six—also known as The Group of Six—and one of the most prolific composers of the 20th century. His compositions are influenced by jazz and make use of polytonality...
in Gauguin, Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler
Hanns Eisler was an Austrian composer.-Family background:Eisler was born in Leipzig where his Jewish father, Rudolf Eisler, was a professor of philosophy...
in Nuit et Brouillard, Pierre Barbaud in Le Chant du styrène); and with other film-makers (Resnais was the editor of Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda
Agnès Varda is a French film director and professor at the European Graduate School. Her movies, photographs, and art installations focus on documentary realism, feminist issues, and social commentary — with a distinct experimental style....
's first film, La Pointe courte, and co-directed with Chris Marker Les statues meurent aussi). Similar collaborations underpinned his future work in feature films.
1959-1967
Resnais's first feature film was Hiroshima mon amourHiroshima Mon Amour
Hiroshima mon amour is an acclaimed 1959 drama film directed by French film director Alain Resnais, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. It is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French-Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness...
in 1959. It had originated as a commission from the producers of Nuit et Brouillard (Anatole Dauman
Anatole Dauman
Anatole Dauman was a French film producer. He produced films by Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Bresson, Wim Wenders, Nagisa Oshima, Andrei Tarkovsky, Chris Marker, Volker Schlöndorff, Walerian Borowczyk, and Alain Resnais....
and Argos Films) to make a documentary about the atomic bomb, but Resnais initially declined, thinking that it would be too similar to the earlier film about the concentration camps; it presented the same problem of how to film incomprehensible suffering. Then however in discussion with the novelist Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras was a French writer and film director.-Background:...
a fusion of fiction and documentary was developed which acknowedged the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima; one could only speak about the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima. The themes of memory and forgetting were explored in a new narrative technique which balanced images with narrated text and ignored conventional notions of plot and story development. The film was shown at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival
Cannes Film Festival
The Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
, alongside Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups
The 400 Blows
The 400 Blows is a 1959 French film directed by François Truffaut. One of the defining films of the French New Wave, it displays many of the characteristic traits of the movement. The story revolves around Antoine Doinel, an ordinary adolescent in Paris, who is thought by his parents and teachers...
, and its success became associated with the emerging movement of the New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
.
Resnais's next film was L'Année dernière à Marienbad
Last Year at Marienbad
L'Année dernière à Marienbad is a 1961 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet....
(Last Year at Marienbad) (1961), which he made in collaboration with the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet , was a French writer and filmmaker. He was, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon, one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend. Alain Robbe-Grillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25, 2004, succeeding Maurice...
. The tantalisingly fragmented and shifting narrative presents three principal characters, a woman and two men, in the opulent setting of a grand European hotel or château where the possibility of a previous encounter a year ago is repeatedly asserted and questioned and contradicted. After winning the Golden Lion
Golden Lion
Il Leone d’Oro is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is now regarded as one of the film industry's most distinguished prizes...
at the Venice Film Festival
Venice Film Festival
The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
, the film attracted great attention and provoked many divergent interpretations of how it should be understood, encouraged by interviews in which Robbe-Grillet and Resnais themselves appeared to give conflicting explanations of the film. There was little doubt however that it represented a significant challenge to the traditional concept of narrative construction in cinema.
At the beginning of the 1960s France remained deeply divided by the Algerian War, and in 1960 the Manifesto of the 121
Manifesto of the 121
The Manifesto of the 121 was an open letter signed by 121 intellectuals and published on 6 September 1960 in the magazine Vérité-Liberté. It called on the French government, then headed by the Gaullist Michel Debré, and public opinion to recognise the Algerian War as a legitimate struggle for...
, which protested against French military policy in Algeria, was signed by a group of leading intellectuals and artists who included Alain Resnais. The war, and the difficulty of coming to terms with its horrors, was a central theme of his next film Muriel
Muriel (film)
Muriel is a 1963 French film directed by Alain Resnais. It was Resnais's third feature film, following Hiroshima mon amour and L'Année dernière à Marienbad , and in common with those films it explores the challenge of integrating a remembered or imagined past with the life of the present...
(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.
A contemporary political issue also formed the background for La guerre est finie (The War Is Over) (1966), this time the clandestine activities of left-wing opponents of the Franco régime in Spain. Resnais's scriptwriter on this film was the Spanish author Jorge Semprun
Jorge Semprún
Jorge Semprún Maura was a Spanish writer and politician who lived in France most of his life and wrote primarily in French. From 1953 to 1962, during the era of Francisco Franco, Semprún lived clandestinely in Spain working as an organizer for the exiled Communist Party of Spain, but was expelled...
, himself an ex-member of the Spanish Communist Party now in voluntary exile in France. Both men denied that the film was about Spain, but when it was entered for the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966, an objection from the Spanish government caused it to be withdrawn and it was shown out of competition. In 1967 Resnais participated with six other directors, including Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, in a collective work about the Vietnam war, Loin du Vietnam
Far from Vietnam
-Cast:* Anne Bellec* Karen Blanguernon* Bernard Fresson as Claude Ridder* Maurice Garrel* Jean-Luc Godard as Himself* Ho Chi Minh as Himself * Valérie Mayoux* Marie-France Mignal* Fidel Castro as Himself...
(Far from Vietnam).
1968-1980
From 1968 onwards, the films of Resnais no longer addressed, at least directly, big political issues in the way that a number of his previous ones had done, and his next project seemed to mark a change of direction. Je t'aime, je t'aimeJe t'aime, je t'aime
Je t'aime, je t'aime is a 1968 French science fiction film directed by Alain Resnais. It was listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was cancelled due to the countrywide wildcat strike that occurred in May 1968 in France....
(1968) drew upon the traditions of science-fiction for a story of a man sent back into his past, a theme which enabled Resnais again to present a narrative of fragmented time. The film was unlucky in its release (its planned screening at Cannes was cancelled amid the political events of May 1968), and it was almost five years before Resnais was able to direct another film. Resnais spent part of that period in America working on various unfulfilled projects, including one about the Marquis de Sade. He also published Repérages, a volume of his photographs, taken between 1948 and 1971, of locations (many of them for 'possible films') in London, Scotland, Paris, Nevers, Lyon, New York and Hiroshima; Jorge Semprun wrote the introductory text. Some of the photographs relate to a long-cherished but unfulfilled idea for a film based on the Harry Dickson stories by Jean Ray.
After contributing an episode to L'An 01 (The Year 01) (1973), a collective film organised by Jacques Doillon
Jacques Doillon
Jacques Doillon is a French film director. He has a habit of giving lead roles to inexperienced young actresses in his films on family life and women...
, Resnais made a second collaboration with Jorge Semprun for Stavisky
Stavisky
Stavisky... is a 1974 French film drama based on the life of the financier and embezzler Alexandre Stavisky and the circumstances leading to his mysterious death in 1934. This gave rise to a political scandal known as the Stavisky Affair, which led to fatal riots in Paris, the resignation of two...
(1974), based on the life of the notorious financier and embezzler whose death in 1934 provoked a political scandal. With glamorous costumes and sets, a musical score by Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Sondheim
Stephen Joshua Sondheim is an American composer and lyricist for stage and film. He is the winner of an Academy Award, multiple Tony Awards including the Special Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Theatre, multiple Grammy Awards, a Pulitzer Prize and the Laurence Olivier Award...
, and Jean-Paul Belmondo
Jean-Paul Belmondo
Jean-Paul Belmondo is a French actor initially associated with the New Wave of the 1960s.-Career:Born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, west of Paris, Belmondo did not perform well in school, but developed a passion for boxing and football."Did you box professionally very long?" "Not very long...
in the title-role, it was seen as Resnais's most commercial film to date, but its complex narrative structure showed clear links with some of the formal preoccupations of his earlier films.
With Providence
Providence (1977 film)
Providence is a French/Swiss 1977 film directed by Alain Resnais and starring Dirk Bogarde, David Warner, Ellen Burstyn, Elaine Stritch, and John Gielgud. The film won the 1978 César Award for Best Film.-Plot summary:...
(1977), Resnais made his first film in English, with a screenplay written by David Mercer, and a distinguished cast that included John Gielgud
John Gielgud
Sir Arthur John Gielgud, OM, CH was an English actor, director, and producer. A descendant of the renowned Terry acting family, he achieved early international acclaim for his youthful, emotionally expressive Hamlet which broke box office records on Broadway in 1937...
and Dirk Bogarde
Dirk Bogarde
Sir Dirk Bogarde was an English actor and novelist. Initially a matinee idol in such films as Doctor in the House and other Rank Organisation pictures, Bogarde later acted in art-house films such as Death in Venice...
. The story shows an ageing, maybe dying, novelist grappling with alternative versions of his own past as he adapts them for his fiction. Resnais was eager that the dark subject should remain humorous, and he described it as "a macabre divertissement". Formal innovation characterised Mon oncle d'Amérique
Mon oncle d'Amérique
Mon oncle d'Amérique is a 1980 French film directed by Alain Resnais.- Plot :The didactic film is built around the ideas of French physician, writer and philosopher Henri Laborit, who plays himself in the film...
(My American Uncle) (1980) in which the theories of the neurobiologist Henri Laborit
Henri Laborit
Henri Laborit was a French physician, writer and philosopher.Laborit was born in Hanoi, Vietnam and started his career as a neurosurgeon in the Marines and then moved on to fundamental research. He won the prestigious Albert Lasker Award for Clinical Medical Research in 1957...
about animal behaviour are juxtaposed with three interwoven fictional stories; and a further counterpoint to the fictional characters is provided by the inclusion of film extracts of the classic French film actors with whom they identify. The film won several international awards including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and it also proved to be one of Resnais's most successful with the public.
1981-
From the 1980s onwards Resnais has shown a particular interest in integrating material from other forms of popular culture into his films, drawing especially on music and the theatre. In almost all of his films since this period he has also chosen to work repeatedly with a core group of actors comprising Sabine AzémaSabine Azéma
Sabine Azéma is a French actress. Born in Paris, she graduated from the Paris Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, and began her film career in 1975...
, Pierre Arditi
Pierre Arditi
Pierre Arditi was born on 1 December 1944 in Paris, child of the French paintor Georges Arditi , from Marseille, and a Belgian mother. He is an award-winning French film and stage actor...
, and André Dussollier
André Dussollier
André Dussollier is a French actor.-Filmography:* 1970 : Ils, directed by Jean-Daniel Simon* 1972 : Les Chemins de pierre, directed by Joseph Drimal...
, sometimes accompanied by Fanny Ardant
Fanny Ardant
Fanny Marguerite Judith Ardant is a French actress. She has appeared in more than fifty motion pictures since 1976. Ardant won the César Award for Best Actress in 1997 for her performance in Pédale douce.-Early life:...
or Lambert Wilson
Lambert Wilson
Lambert Wilson is a French actor. He is internationally known for his portrayal of The Merovingian in The Matrix He was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, the son of Georges Wilson, who was an actor, theatrical manager and director of the Theatre National de Paris.Wilson screen tested for The...
. The first four of these were among the large cast of La vie est un roman
Life Is a Bed of Roses
Life Is a Bed of Roses is a 1983 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Jean Gruault. The English-language distribution title of the film is Life Is a Bed of Roses, though it has also been known as Forbek's Castle and Life Is a Fairy Tale...
(Life Is a Bed of Roses) (1983), a comic fantasy about utopian dreams in which three stories, from different eras and told in different styles, are interwoven within a shared setting. The action is punctuated by episodes of song which develop towards the end into scenes that are almost operatic; Resnais said that his starting point had been the desire to make a film in which dialogue and song would alternate.
Music, very differently used, was a major component of L'Amour à mort
L'amour à mort
L'amour à mort is a 1984 film directed by Alain Resnais.The film was shot in Uzès, Gard, in the south of France.-Cast:* Sabine Azéma - Elisabeth Sutter* Fanny Ardant - Judith Martignac* Pierre Arditi - Simon Roche...
(Love unto Death) (1984). For this intense chamber work with four principal actors (Azéma, Arditi, Ardant and Dussollier), Resnais asked Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze
Hans Werner Henze is a German composer of prodigious output best known for "his consistent cultivation of music for the theatre throughout his life"...
to compose musical episodes which would act as a "fifth character", not an accompaniment but a fully integrated element of the drama with which the speech of the actors would interact. In subsequent years, Resnais gave his attention to music of more popular styles. He made Gershwin (1992), an innovative TV documentary in which the American composer's life and works were reviewed through the testimonies of performers and filmmakers, juxtaposed with commissioned paintings by Guy Peellaert
Guy Peellaert
Guy Peellaert was a Belgian artist, painter, illustrator, comic artist and photographer, most famous for the book Rock Dreams, and his album covers for rock artists like David Bowie and The Rolling Stones ...
. In On connaît la chanson
On connaît la chanson
On connaît la chanson is a 1997 French film. It was directed by Alain Resnais, and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri. Jaoui and Bacri also starred in the film with Sabine Azéma, Lambert Wilson, André Dussollier and Pierre Arditi.- Plot :Odile , a business executive, is married to weak,...
(Same Old Song) (1997), his tribute to television works of Dennis Potter
Dennis Potter
Dennis Christopher George Potter was an English dramatist, best known for The Singing Detective. His widely acclaimed television dramas mixed fantasy and reality, the personal and the social. He was particularly fond of using themes and images from popular culture.-Biography:Dennis Potter was born...
, the characters express their key emotions or private thoughts by bursting into snatches of well-known (recorded) popular songs without interrupting the dramatic situation. A long-neglected operetta from the 1920s was the unexpected basis for Resnais's next film Pas sur la bouche
Not on the Lips
Not on the Lips is a 2003 French musical film directed by Alain Resnais. It is an adaptation of the operetta Pas sur la bouche, written by André Barde and Maurice Yvain, which was first produced in Paris in 1925.-Plot:...
(Not on the Lips) (2003), in which he sought to reinvigorate an unfashionable form of entertainment by recreating its theatricality for the camera and entrusting most of its musical numbers to actors rather than to trained singers.
References to the theatre are plentiful throughout Resnais's filmmaking (Marienbad, Muriel, Stavisky, Mon oncle d'Amérique), but he first undertook the challenge of taking a complete stage work and giving it new cinematic life in Mélo
Mélo
Mélo is a 1929 play by Henri Bernstein.It was first filmed in 1932 by Paul Czinner.The better-known 1986 French film based on the play was directed by Alain Resnais, and starred Fanny Ardant, André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi...
(1986), an adaptation of Henry Bernstein's 1929 play of the same name. Resnais remained entirely faithful to the play (apart from shortening it) and he emphasised its theatricality by filming in long takes on large sets of evidently artificial design, as well as by marking off the acts of the play with the fall of a curtain. After an excursion into the world of comic-books and cartoons (another of Resnais's enthusiasms) in I Want to Go Home
I Want to Go Home (film)
I Want to Go Home is a 1989 French film directed by Alain Resnais, from a screenplay by Jules Feiffer. It explores the differences between French and American cultural values through a story about a veteran cartoonist who encounters conflicting reactions to his work during a trip abroad.-Plot:Joey...
(1989), an ambitious theatrical adaptation followed with the diptych of Smoking/No Smoking
Smoking/No Smoking
Smoking/No Smoking is a 1993 French movie. It was directed by Alain Resnais and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, from the play Intimate Exchanges by Alan Ayckbourn...
(1993): Resnais, having admired the plays of Alan Ayckbourn
Alan Ayckbourn
Sir Alan Ayckbourn CBE is a prolific English playwright. He has written and produced seventy-three full-length plays in Scarborough and London and was, between 1972 and 2009, the artistic director of the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough, where all but four of his plays have received their...
for many years, chose to adapt what appeared the most intractable of them, Intimate Exchanges
Intimate Exchanges
Intimate Exchanges is a play by Alan Ayckbourn. Written between 1982 and 1983 it consists of eight major stories all originating from a single opening scene. As the play progresses, the characters make choices each of which causes the story to go in one of two directions, leading to one of 16...
, a series of eight interlinked plays which follow the consequences of a casual choice to sixteen possible endings. Resnais slightly reduced the number of permuted endings and compressed the plays into two films, each having a common starting point, and to be seen in any order. Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi played all the parts, and the theatricality of the undertaking was again emphasised by the studio set designs for a fictional English village. Resnais returned to Ayckbourn in the following decade for his adaptation of Private Fears in Public Places
Private Fears in Public Places
Private Fears in Public Places is a 2004 play by British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The bleakest play written by Ayckbourn for many years, it intimately follows a few days in the lives of six characters, in four tightly-interwoven stories through 54 scenes.In 2006, it was made into a film Cœurs,...
to which he gave the film title of Cœurs
Private Fears in Public Places (film)
Private Fears in Public Places is the English-language title of Cœurs , a 2006 French film directed by Alain Resnais. It was adapted from Alan Ayckbourn's play Private Fears in Public Places...
(2006). Among the stage/film effects which contribute to its mood of "cheerful desolation" is the artificial snow which is continually seen through set windows until eventually it falls on the studio interior as well.
Speaking in 1986, Resnais said that he did not make a separation between cinema and theatre and refused to make enemies of them. He preferred working with "people of the theatre", and he said that he would never want to film a novel. It was therefore something of a departure when he chose L'Incident, a novel by Christian Gailly, as the basis for Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass) (2009). He explained however that what initially attracted him to the book was the quality of its dialogue, which he retained largely unchanged for the film. When Les Herbes folles was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it was the occasion for a special jury award to Resnais "for his work and exceptional contribution to the history of cinema".
In spring 2011 Resnais completed filming a new work, Vous n'avez encore rien vu, an adaptation of Jean Anouilh
Jean Anouilh
Jean Marie Lucien Pierre Anouilh was a French dramatist whose career spanned five decades. Though his work ranged from high drama to absurdist farce, Anouilh is best known for his 1943 play Antigone, an adaptation of Sophocles' Classical drama, that was seen as an attack on Marshal Pétain's...
's 1941 play Eurydice
Eurydice (Anouilh play)
Eurydice is a play by French writer Jean Anouilh, written in 1941. The story is set in the 1930s, among a troupe of travelling performers. It combines skepticism about romance in general and the intensity of the relationship between Orpheus and Eurydice with an other-worldly mysticism...
. It is scheduled to be released in 2012.
Reputation
Resnais is often linked with the group of French filmmakers who made their breakthrough as the New WaveFrench New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
or nouvelle vague in the late 1950s, but by then he had already established a significant reputation through his ten years of work on documentary short films. He defined his own relationship by saying: "Although I was not fully part of the New Wave because of my age, there was some mutual sympathy and respect between myself and Rivette, Bazin, Demy, Truffaut... So I felt friendly with that team." He nevertheless acknowledged his debt to the New Wave because it created the conditions of production, and particularly the financial conditions, which allowed him to make a film like Hiroshima mon amour, his first feature film.
Resnais is more often associated with a 'Left Bank group' of writers and filmmakers who included Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet (with all of whom he collaborated in the earlier part of his career). They were distinguished by their interests in documentary, left-wing politics, and the literary experiments of the nouveau roman
Nouveau roman
The nouveau roman is a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres. Émile Henriot coined the title in an article in the popular French newspaper Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe certain writers who experimented with style in each novel, creating an essentially new...
.
The importance of creative collaboration in Resnais's films has been noted by many commentators. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has always refused to write his own screenplays and has attached great importance to the contribution of his chosen writer, whose status in the shared "authorship" of the film he fully acknowledges. He is also known to treat the completed screenplay with great fidelity, to the extent that some of his screenwriters have remarked on how closely the finished film has realised their intentions.
Time and memory have regularly been identified as two of the principal themes of Resnais's work, at least in his earlier films. He has however consistently tried to modify this view of his concerns: "I prefer to speak of the imaginary, or of consciousness. What interests me in the mind is that faculty we have to imagine what is going to happen in our heads, or to remember what has happened". He has also described his films as an attempt, however imperfect, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism.
Another view of the evolution of Resnais's career has seen him moving progressively away from a realistic treatment of 'big' subjects and overtly political themes towards films that are increasingly personal and playful. Resnais himself has offered an explanation of this shift in terms of challenging what has been the norm in film-making at the time; having made his early films when escapist cinema was predominant, he has progressively felt the need to move away from exploration of social and political issues as that has itself become almost the norm in contemporary cinema. Experimentation with narrative forms and genre conventions has instead become a central focus of his films.
A frequent criticism of Resnais's films among English-language commentators has been that they are emotionally cold; that they are all about technique without grasp of character or subject, that his understanding of beauty is compromised by a lack of sensuousness, and that his seriousness of intent fails to communicate itself to audiences. Elsewhere however it is suggested that such views are partly based on a misreading of the films, especially his earlier ones, which has impeded an appreciation of the exhilarating humour and irony which pervade his work; and other viewers have been able to make the connection between the film's form and its human dimension.
There is general agreement about Resnais's attachment to formalism in his approach to film; he himself regards it as the starting point of his work, and usually has an idea of a form, or method of construction, in his head even before the plot or the characters take shape. For him it is also the basis for the communication of feeling: "There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator."
Another term which appears in commentaries on Resnais throughout his career is "surrealism", from his documentary portrait of a library in Toute la mémoire du monde, through the dreamlike innovations of Marienbad, to the latterday playfulness of Les Herbes folles. Resnais himself traced a link to his teenage discovery of surrealism in the works of André Breton: "I hope that I always remain faithful to André Breton who refused to suppose that imaginary life was not a part of real life".
Personal life
In 1969 Resnais married Florence Malraux (daughter of the French statesman and writer André MalrauxAndré Malraux
André Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
); she was a regular member of his production team, working as assistant director on most of his films from 1961 to 1986. His second wife is Sabine Azéma
Sabine Azéma
Sabine Azéma is a French actress. Born in Paris, she graduated from the Paris Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, and began her film career in 1975...
, who acted in the majority of his films from 1983 onwards; they were married in the English town of Scarborough in 1998.
Awards
- Prix Jean VigoPrix Jean VigoThe Prix Jean Vigo is an award in the Cinema of France given annually since 1951 to a French film director in homage to Jean Vigo. It was founded by French writer Claude...
: 1954, for Les statues meurent aussiStatues Also DieStatues Also Die is a 1953 French essay film directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, about historical African art and the effects colonialism has had on how it is perceived. The film won the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo...
; and 1956, for Nuit et BrouillardNight and Fog (film)Night and Fog is a 1955 French documentary short film. Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Night and Fog was... - César AwardCésar AwardThe César Award is the national film award of France, first given out in 1975. The nominations are selected by the members of the Académie des arts et techniques du cinéma....
: 1977 Best DirectorCésar Award for Best DirectorThis is the list of winners and nominees of the César Award for Best Director .-1970s:-1980s:-1990s:-2000s:-2010s:...
1977, for ProvidenceProvidence (1977 film)Providence is a French/Swiss 1977 film directed by Alain Resnais and starring Dirk Bogarde, David Warner, Ellen Burstyn, Elaine Stritch, and John Gielgud. The film won the 1978 César Award for Best Film.-Plot summary:...
; and 1993 Best Director, for Smoking/No SmokingSmoking/No SmokingSmoking/No Smoking is a 1993 French movie. It was directed by Alain Resnais and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, from the play Intimate Exchanges by Alan Ayckbourn... - Prix Louis-DellucLouis Delluc PrizeLe Prix Louis-Delluc is a French film award.For every year It has been awarded since its creation in 1937 , it has been bestowed on the second Thursday of December. The jury is composed of 20 members, made up of a group of film critics and personalities who are cultural significance. Gilles Jacob...
: 1966, for La guerre est finie; 1993, for Smoking/No SmokingSmoking/No SmokingSmoking/No Smoking is a 1993 French movie. It was directed by Alain Resnais and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, from the play Intimate Exchanges by Alan Ayckbourn...
; and 1997, for On connaît la chansonOn connaît la chansonOn connaît la chanson is a 1997 French film. It was directed by Alain Resnais, and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri. Jaoui and Bacri also starred in the film with Sabine Azéma, Lambert Wilson, André Dussollier and Pierre Arditi.- Plot :Odile , a business executive, is married to weak,... - Venice Film FestivalVenice Film FestivalThe Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...
: 1960 Golden LionGolden LionIl Leone d’Oro is the highest prize given to a film at the Venice Film Festival. The prize was introduced in 1949 by the organizing committee and is now regarded as one of the film industry's most distinguished prizes...
, for L'Année dernière à Marienbad; and 2006 Silver LionSilver LionThe Leone d’Argento refers to a number of awards presented at the Venice Film Festival. The Silver Lion is awarded irregularly and have gone through several changes of purpose. Until 1995, Silver Lions were infrequently awarded to a number of films as second prize for those nominated for the...
, for CœursPrivate Fears in Public Places (film)Private Fears in Public Places is the English-language title of Cœurs , a 2006 French film directed by Alain Resnais. It was adapted from Alan Ayckbourn's play Private Fears in Public Places... - Berlin Film FestivalBerlin International Film FestivalThe Berlin International Film Festival , also called the Berlinale, is one of the world's leading film festivals and most reputable media events. It is held in Berlin, Germany. Founded in West Berlin in 1951, the festival has been celebrated annually in February since 1978...
: 1994 Silver Bear for Smoking/No SmokingSmoking/No SmokingSmoking/No Smoking is a 1993 French movie. It was directed by Alain Resnais and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, from the play Intimate Exchanges by Alan Ayckbourn...
; and 1998 Silver Bear, for "lifetime achievement" - Cannes Film FestivalCannes Film FestivalThe Cannes International Film Festival , is an annual film festival held in Cannes, France, which previews new films of all genres including documentaries from around the world. Founded in 1946, it is among the world's most prestigious and publicized film festivals...
: 19801980 Cannes Film FestivalThe 33rd Cannes Film Festival was held on May 9-23. The showing of Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker is interrupted by an electricians strike.- Jury :*Kirk Douglas *Ken Adam *Robert Benayoun *Veljko Bulajić...
Grand PrixGrand Prix (Cannes Film Festival)The Grand Prix is an award of the Cannes Film Festival bestowed by the jury of the festival on one of the competing feature films. It is the second-most prestigious prize of the festival after the Palme d'Or...
, for Mon oncle d'AmériqueMon oncle d'AmériqueMon oncle d'Amérique is a 1980 French film directed by Alain Resnais.- Plot :The didactic film is built around the ideas of French physician, writer and philosopher Henri Laborit, who plays himself in the film...
; and 20092009 Cannes Film FestivalThe 62nd annual Cannes Film Festival was held from May 13 to May 24, 2009. French actress Isabelle Huppert was the President of the Jury. It was announced on March 19, 2009, that Pixar's film Up would open the festival...
, Lifetime achievement award.
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 Hartnung (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 GoghVan Gogh (1948 film)Van Gogh is a 1948 short French film directed by Alain Resnais. It won an Academy Award in 1950 for Best Short Subject . It is a remake of a film made the previous year....
(35mm) (1948) - Malfray (1948)
- Les Jardins de Paris (1948) (unfinished)
- Gauguin (1950)
- GuernicaGuernica (1950 film)Guernica is a thirteen minute film directed by Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens in 1950. After a brief voiceover by Jacques Pruvost highlighting the Guernica atrocity of April, 1937, María Casares recites a poem by Paul Eluard on the subject, latterly over shots of the painting Guernica by Pablo...
(1950) - Pictura (Goya segment) (1952)
- Les statues meurent aussiStatues Also DieStatues Also Die is a 1953 French essay film directed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, about historical African art and the effects colonialism has had on how it is perceived. The film won the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo...
(Statues Also Die) (1953) - Nuit et BrouillardNight and Fog (film)Night and Fog is a 1955 French documentary short film. Directed by Alain Resnais, it was made ten years after the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps. Night and Fog was...
(Night and Fog) (1955) - Toute la mémoire du mondeToute la mémoire du mondeToute la mémoire du monde is a documentary short film by Alain Resnais released in 1956.- Synopsis :An essay on the potential and the limits of dutifully archived human knowledge, masquerading as a documentary on the organisation of the Bibliothèque nationale de France.- Starring :*Jacques...
(1956) - Le Mystère de l'atelier quinze (1957)
- Le Chant du styrèneLe chant du StyrèneLe chant du Styrène is a 1958, 19 minutes French documentary film directed by Alain Resnais.The film was an order by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics. The commentary, narrated by Pierre Dux, was written by Raymond Queneau, all in alexandrines.-External links:*...
(1958) - Hiroshima mon amourHiroshima Mon AmourHiroshima mon amour is an acclaimed 1959 drama film directed by French film director Alain Resnais, with a screenplay by Marguerite Duras. It is the documentation of an intensely personal conversation between a French-Japanese couple about memory and forgetfulness...
(1959) - L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad) (1961)
- Muriel, ou le Temps d'un retourMuriel (film)Muriel is a 1963 French film directed by Alain Resnais. It was Resnais's third feature film, following Hiroshima mon amour and L'Année dernière à Marienbad , and in common with those films it explores the challenge of integrating a remembered or imagined past with the life of the present...
(1963) - La guerre est finie (The War is Over) (1966)
- Loin du VietnamFar from Vietnam-Cast:* Anne Bellec* Karen Blanguernon* Bernard Fresson as Claude Ridder* Maurice Garrel* Jean-Luc Godard as Himself* Ho Chi Minh as Himself * Valérie Mayoux* Marie-France Mignal* Fidel Castro as Himself...
(Far from Vietnam) ("Claude Ridder" segment) (1967) - Je t'aime, je t'aimeJe t'aime, je t'aimeJe t'aime, je t'aime is a 1968 French science fiction film directed by Alain Resnais. It was listed to compete at the 1968 Cannes Film Festival, but the festival was cancelled due to the countrywide wildcat strike that occurred in May 1968 in France....
(1968) - Cinétracts (segment, uncredited) (1968)
- L'An 01 (1973) (New York scenes)
- StaviskyStaviskyStavisky... is a 1974 French film drama based on the life of the financier and embezzler Alexandre Stavisky and the circumstances leading to his mysterious death in 1934. This gave rise to a political scandal known as the Stavisky Affair, which led to fatal riots in Paris, the resignation of two...
(1974) - ProvidenceProvidence (1977 film)Providence is a French/Swiss 1977 film directed by Alain Resnais and starring Dirk Bogarde, David Warner, Ellen Burstyn, Elaine Stritch, and John Gielgud. The film won the 1978 César Award for Best Film.-Plot summary:...
(1977) - Mon oncle d'AmériqueMon oncle d'AmériqueMon oncle d'Amérique is a 1980 French film directed by Alain Resnais.- Plot :The didactic film is built around the ideas of French physician, writer and philosopher Henri Laborit, who plays himself in the film...
(My American Uncle) (1980) - La vie est un romanLife Is a Bed of RosesLife Is a Bed of Roses is a 1983 French film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Jean Gruault. The English-language distribution title of the film is Life Is a Bed of Roses, though it has also been known as Forbek's Castle and Life Is a Fairy Tale...
(Life Is a Bed of Roses) (1983) - L'Amour à mortL'amour à mortL'amour à mort is a 1984 film directed by Alain Resnais.The film was shot in Uzès, Gard, in the south of France.-Cast:* Sabine Azéma - Elisabeth Sutter* Fanny Ardant - Judith Martignac* Pierre Arditi - Simon Roche...
(Love unto Death) (1984) - MéloMéloMélo is a 1929 play by Henri Bernstein.It was first filmed in 1932 by Paul Czinner.The better-known 1986 French film based on the play was directed by Alain Resnais, and starred Fanny Ardant, André Dussollier, Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi...
(1986) - I Want to Go HomeI Want to Go Home (film)I Want to Go Home is a 1989 French film directed by Alain Resnais, from a screenplay by Jules Feiffer. It explores the differences between French and American cultural values through a story about a veteran cartoonist who encounters conflicting reactions to his work during a trip abroad.-Plot:Joey...
(1989) - Contre l'oubli (segment "Pour Esteban Gonzalez Gonzalez, Cuba") (1991)
- Gershwin (TV documentary) (1992)
- Smoking/No SmokingSmoking/No SmokingSmoking/No Smoking is a 1993 French movie. It was directed by Alain Resnais and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri, from the play Intimate Exchanges by Alan Ayckbourn...
(1993) - On connaît la chansonOn connaît la chansonOn connaît la chanson is a 1997 French film. It was directed by Alain Resnais, and written by Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri. Jaoui and Bacri also starred in the film with Sabine Azéma, Lambert Wilson, André Dussollier and Pierre Arditi.- Plot :Odile , a business executive, is married to weak,...
(Same Old Song) (1997) - Pas sur la boucheNot on the LipsNot on the Lips is a 2003 French musical film directed by Alain Resnais. It is an adaptation of the operetta Pas sur la bouche, written by André Barde and Maurice Yvain, which was first produced in Paris in 1925.-Plot:...
(Not on the Lips) (2003) - CœursPrivate Fears in Public Places (film)Private Fears in Public Places is the English-language title of Cœurs , a 2006 French film directed by Alain Resnais. It was adapted from Alan Ayckbourn's play Private Fears in Public Places...
(Private Fears in Private Places) (2006) - Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass) (2009)
- Vous n'avez encore rien vuYou Haven't Seen Anything YetYou Haven't Seen Anything Yet is an upcoming French film directed by Alain Resnais, starring Mathieu Amalric, Lambert Wilson, Michel Piccoli and Anne Consigny. It is loosely based on the play Eurydice by Jean Anouilh...
(You Haven't Seen Anything Yet) (2012)
Further reading
- Armes, Roy. The Cinema of Alain Resnais. London: Zwemmer, 1968.
- Benayoun, Robert. Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imaginaire. Paris: Ramsay, 2008. [In French].
- Callev, Haim. The Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais. New York: McGruer Publishing, 1997.
- Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne, & Jean-Louis Leutrat. Alain Resnais : liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006. [In French].
- Monaco, James. Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.
- Thomas, François. L'Atelier d'Alain Resnais. Paris: Flammarion, 1989. [In French].
- Wilson, EmmaEmma WilsonEmma Wilson is a British academic and writer, specializing in French literature and cinema. She is Professor of French Literature and the Visual Arts at the University of Cambridge and a fellow of Corpus Christi College.-Life and Education:...
. Alain Resnais. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. - Alain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. Paris: Gallimard, 2002. [Articles originally published in Positif, revue de cinéma. In French].
External links
- Resnais biography in the New Wave Film Encyclopedia.
- Alain Resnais in Filmmaker magazine.
- Analysis of several Resnais films, at Strictly Film School.