Alain Resnais (; 3 June 19221 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. His films frequently explore the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he was noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives.Une histoire du cinéma français, [edited by] Claude Beylie. (Paris: Larousse, 2005.) p.501.Encyclopedia of European Cinema; edited by Ginette Vincendeau. (London: Cassell, British Film Institute, 1995.) p.358.
After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, Resnais went on to direct short films including Night and Fog (1956), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.Ephraim Katz, The International Film Encyclopedia. (London: Macmillan, 1980.) p. 966–967. Resnais then began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Muriel (1963) and Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past.
Resnais was associated with the French New Wave (la nouvelle vague), though he 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 (these included Agnès Varda and Chris Marker). He also established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers previously unconnected with the cinema such as Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Semprún and Jacques Sternberg.Peter Cowie, The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s. (London: Faber, 2004.) p.67.International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers – 2: Directors; 4th ed., edited by Tom Prendergast and Sara Prendergast. (New York, London: St James Press, 2000.) p.816.Slavo Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. (London: Verso, 2012). p.28.
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.
Throughout his career, he won many awards from international film festivals and academies, including one Academy Award, two César Awards for best director (he was nominated on eight occasions), three Louis Delluc Prize and one Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Early life Resnais was born in 1922 in Vannes in Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist.Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.2. An only child, he was often ill with asthma in childhood, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home.James Monaco, Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.15. 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.Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). pp.22–25. Around the age of 14, he discovered surrealism and through that an interest in the works of André Breton.Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.29.
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 soirSuzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006). pp.176–177.), but he then decided in 1943 to apply to the newly formed film school IDHEC to study film editing.James Monaco, Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.17. The filmmaker Jean Grémillon was one of the teachers who had the most influence on him at that period.Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006). p.180.
Resnais left in 1945 to do his military service which took him to Germany and Austria with the occupying French forces, as well as making him a temporary member of a travelling theatre company, Les Arlequins.International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers – 2: Directors; 2nd ed., edited by Nicholas Thomas. (Chicago, London: St James Press, 1991.) pp.689–692. He returned to Paris in 1946 to start his career as a film editor, but also began making 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.Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.42.
Career
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 Gogh, 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.Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Awards Database . Retrieved 21 January 2018] (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.Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). pp.45–48. A political perspective on art also underpinned his next project (co-directed with Chris Marker), Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953), a polemic about the destruction of African art by French cultural colonialism.The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996.) p.332.
Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956) 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.Uri Klein. "Memories of Alain Resnais, cinema's explorer of memory", in Haaretz, 3 March 2014. [Requires subscription.] 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.Georges Sadoul, Dictionnaire des films. (Paris: Seuil, 1983.) p.218.
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. The film was referenced in the novel Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald, portraying the library as "an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn."
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.Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). pp.57–59.
In his decade of making documentary short films, Resnais 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 filmmakers (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.See the "Tableau des connivences" in Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.210.
1959–1968
Resnais's first feature film was (1959). It 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 campsEmma Wilson, Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.48. and that it presented the same problem of how to film incomprehensible suffering.James Monaco, Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.34. However, in discussion with the novelist Marguerite Duras a fusion of fiction and documentary was developed which acknowledged the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima; one could only speak about the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima."Impossible de parler de HIROSHIMA. Tout ce qu'on peut faire c'est de parler de l'impossibilité de parler de HIROSHIMA." Marguerite Duras, in the published script Hiroshima mon amour, (Paris: Gallimard, 1960.); quoted by Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.48. In the film, the themes of memory and forgetting are explored via new narrative techniques which balance images with narrated text and ignore conventional notions of plot and story development.Roy Armes, French Cinema. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.) p.184. The film was shown at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, alongside Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), and its success became associated with the emerging movement of the French New Wave.The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996.) p.577.