Alain Resnais

Infobox actor


name = Alain Resnais
birthdate = birth date and age|1922|6|3
location = Vannes, Morbihan, Bretagne, France
yearsactive = 1936 - present
cesarawards = Best Director
1978 "Providence"
1994 "Smoking/No Smoking"
Best Film
1978 "Providence"
1994 "Smoking/No Smoking"
1998 "On connaît la chanson"

Alain Resnais (born June 3, 1922 in Vannes, France) is a French film director whose early works are often grouped 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 "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961).

Career

Resnais 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 Jewish Holocaust. 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.Fact|date=May 2008 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.

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" with a script by novelist 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 2 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 "Last Year at Marienbad" in partnership with writer (and later, 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".Fact|date=May 2008

Resnais was a contemporary, but not fully a member, of the French New Wave, the group of critics-turned-filmmakers that included François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard . 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.

He 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.

Now in his eighties, Resnais is still creating more cinematic 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, whom he married in Scarborough, North Yorkshire.

Collaborators

Many of his 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, Alan Ayckbourn and Marguerite Duras.

Awards

*Prix Jean Vigo in 1954 and 1956
*Golden Lion at Venice Film Festival 1960 for "Last Year at Marienbad"
*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)
* "Les herbes folles" (2008) "(in pre-production)"

Further reading

* Wilson, Emma, "Alain Resnais" (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

External links

*imdb name|id=0720297|name=Alain Resnais
* [http://www.filmmakermagazine.com/spring2000/features/all_tomorrow.php "Filmmaker": Alain Resnais]
* [http://cineuropa.org/interview.aspx?documentID=66603 Interview at the Venice Film Festival with Cœurs]
* [http://www.filmref.com/directors/dirpages/resnais.html Analysis of several Resnais films]
* [http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=196&eid=317&section=essay "Hiroshima mon amour" Essay]
* [http://www.criterion.com/asp/release.asp?id=197 "Night And Fog" Essays]

Persondata
NAME= Resnais, Alain
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Film director
DATE OF BIRTH= 1922-6-3
PLACE OF BIRTH= Vannes, Morbihan, Bretagne, France
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=