Alain Resnais
| Alain Resnais | |
| Date of birth: | June 3 1922 (age 101) |
| Birth location: | Vannes, Morbihan, Bretagne, France |
|---|---|
Alain Resnais (born June 3, 1922 ) is a French film director whose early works are often grouped—incorrectly—within the New Wave or Nouvelle Vague film movement. Although he has had a long and fruitful career, Resnais is best known internationally for three of his early works: Night and Fog (1955), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), and L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961).
Career
Resnais was born in Vannes, France, and is highly regarded in his native country and by some international cinephiles. He began making films in the mid-1940s after completing his studies at L`Institut hautes études cinématographiques. He made several short films during this time, such as Guernica (1950), based on the Picasso painting and the town and battle that inspired it. His seminal short Night and Fog (1955) was one of the first documentaries about the Nazi Holocaust against the Jews. Resnais chose to approach the subject indirectly because he felt an excess of gruesome imagery might make the Holocaust seem unreal and incomprehensible to his viewers. Instead he chose to film the empty concentration camps as they appeared in the fifties and avoided using stock footage of the actual Holocaust until the very end of the film. The form of the film was revolutionary at the time and has been imitated many times since. In fact, Resnais's film oeuvre is known for challenging the boundaries and assumptions of what film is or should be about.
Resnais' most famous feature films also use innovative techniques to explore the subjectivity of memory in dealing with past violence and horrors. He completed his first full-length film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour based on the novel by Marguerite Duras, in 1959. It is a romantic drama about a young French actress appearing in an anti-war film in the rubble and reconstruction of the city of Hiroshima. She quickly begins a brief unstable affair with a Japanese architect. The affair brings to light the political and cultural tensions that underlie even their most personal experiences and memories. The film made groundbreaking use of then innovative flashbacks to explore her repressed memories of a German lover killed in World War II and the subsequent humiliation and captivity imposed on her by her family. This movie was a great success for Resnais, garnering him international fame and cementing his place in French cinema history.
In 1960 Resnais completed his other world-known classic Last Year at Marienbad in partnership with writer/filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. The film concerns a man known only as X who meets a woman named A at an old-fashioned European resort and attempts to convince her that they met there once before as lovers. In this film Resnais took his exploration of subjective memory to shockingly experimental lengths, creating an unstable reality that shifts fluidly along with its characters' perceptions. As X attempts to conveys to A his memories of their previous meeting the very landscape around them morphs rapidly from shot to shot as the memories he describes flood into the present moment. Similar scenes play out in different ambiguous versions, and the viewer is unable to ascertain whether X is a villain who actually raped A or a hero/lover who helps her to escape from a dystopic prison-like resort. Many believe the film to be loosely based on the Novel "The Invention of Morel." The film remains controversial; many critics hail it as one of the heights of world cinema, but it has also been denounced as an overrated, overblown and boring piece of twaddle imposed on unsuspecting film students by their pretentiously pseudo-intellectual teachers.
Some other notable Rsenais films include Le Chant du Styrène, an industrial film about styrene thermoplastic that was commissioned by the Société Pechiney to illustrate the variety and versatility of their product; Muriel ou Le Temps d'un Retour, starring actress Delphine Seyrig, a visual account of the effects of war on the lives of three emotionally scarred survivors; and La Guerre est finie, with actor Yves Montand and actress Ingrid Thulin, concerning the life and activities of a world-weary career resistance operator.
Resnais was a contemporary but not really a member of the French New Wave, the group of critics-turned-filmmakers who came out of the journal Les cahiers du cinéma, including François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and some others. More precisely, Resnais belonged to the filmmaking and literary community of the Left Bank, which included Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy and other filmmakers and authors with a commitment to modernism and little debt to the American cinema.
Resnais worked regularly during the 1960s and '70s. Although not especially prolific, he has nonetheless achieved great success. In the 1980s, he experienced a disappointment after the critical and box office failure of several films. With Smoking/No Smoking (1993), he once again achieved international critical and commercial success.
In his eighties Resnais remains active in creating more filmic output, most recently with Coeurs (2006, known as Private Fears in Public Places in North America).
Personal life
Resnais was married to Florence Malraux (the only daughter of the late French statesman André Malraux). His current companion is French actress Sabine Azéma.
Collaborators
Many of Renais's films were produced by Anatole Dauman and Argos Films who also produced films for other Left Bank film makers such as Chris Marker. He was also known for his collaborations with literary figures such as Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras.
Awards
- Prix Jean Vigo in 1954 and 1956
- Silver Lion at Venice Film Festival 2006 for Coeurs (aka Private Fears in Public Places).
Filmography
- L'aventure de Guy (1936)
- Schéma d'une identification (1946)
- Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (1946)
- Visite à Oscar Dominguez (1947)
- Visite à Lucien Coutaud (1947)
- Visite à Hans Hartnung (1947)
- Visite à Félix Labisse (1947)
- Visite à César Doméla (1947)
- Van Gogh (1947)
- Portrait d'Henri Goetz (1947)
- Le lait Nestlé (1947)
- Journée naturelle (1947)
- La bague (1947)
- L'alcool tue (1947) (as Alzin Rezarail)
- Van Gogh (1948)
- Malfray (1948)
- Les jardins de Paris (1948)
- Châteaux de France (1948)
- Guernica (1950/I)
- Gauguin (1950)
- Pictura (1952)
- Les statues meurent aussi (1953)
- 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 (1961)
- Muriel ou Le temps d'un retour (1963)
- La Guerre est finie (1966)
- Loin du Vietnam (1967)
- Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968)
- Cinétracts (1968)
- L'an 01 (1973) (New York scenes)
- Stavisky (1974)
- Providence (1977)
- Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980)
- La vie est un roman (1983)
- L'amour à mort (1984)
- Mélo (1986)
- I Want to Go Home (1989)
- Contre l'oubli (1991)
- Gershwin (1992)
- Smoking/No Smoking (1993)
- On connaît la chanson (1997)
- Pas sur la bouche (2003)
- Cœurs (2006)
Further reading
- Wilson, Emma, Alain Resnais (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006). ISBN 0719064066 (hbk.)
- Monaco, James, Alain Resnais (New York: 0xford University Press, 1979, c1978). ISBN-10 0195200373; ISBN-13 978-0195200379
- Kreidl, John Francis, Alain Resnais (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977 [i.e. 1978]). ISBN 0805792562
External links
- Alain Resnais at the Internet Movie Database
- Filmmaker: Alain Resnais
- Interview at the Venice Film Festival with Cœurs
- Analysis of several Resnais films
- Hiroshima mon amour Essay
- Night And Fog Essays
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