Alain Resnais Films | Alain Resnais Filmography | Alain Resnais Biography | Alain Resnais Career | Alain Resnais Awards

Alain Resnais is a prominent figure in the modernist narrative film tradition. His emergence as a feature director of international repute is affiliated with the eruption of the French New Wave in the late 1950s. This association was signaled by the fact that his first feature, Hiroshima mon amour, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival at the same time as Fran?ois Truffaut's Les 400 coups. However, Resnais had less to do with the group of directors emerging from the context of the Cahiers du cin?ma than he did with the so-called Left Bank group, including Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. This group provided an intellectual and creative context of shared interest. In the course of his film career Resnais frequently collaborated with members of this group. Marker worked with him on several short films in the 1950s; Cayrol wrote the narration for Nuit et brouillard and the script for Muriel, Duras scripted Hiroshima mon amour, and Robbe-Grillet wrote L'Ann?e derni?re ? Marienbad. All of these people are known as writers and/or filmmakers in their own right; their association with Resnais is indicative of his talent for fruitful creative collaboration.

Resnais began making films as a youth in 8 and l6mm. In the early 1940s he studied acting and filmmaking, and after the war made a number of l6mm films, including a series about artists. His first film in 35mm was the 1948 short, Van Gogh, which won a number of international awards. It was produced by Pierre Braunberger, an active supporter of new talent, who continued to finance his work in the short film format through the 1950s. From 1948-58 Resnais made eight short films, of which Nuit et brouillard is probably the best known. The film deals with German concentration camps, juxtaposing past and present, exploring the nature of memory and history. To some extent the film's reputation and the sustained interest it has enjoyed is due to its subject matter. However, many of the film's formal strategies and thematic concerns are characteristic of Resnais's work more generally. In particular, the relationship between past and present, and the function of memory as the mechanism of traversing temporal distance, are persistent preoccupations of Resnais's films. Other films from this period similarly reveal familiar themes and traits of Resnais's subsequent work. Toute la memoire du monde is a documentary about the Biblioth?que Nationale in Paris. It presents the building, with its processes of cataloguing and preserving all sorts of printed material, as both a monument of cultural memory and as a monstrous, alien being. The film almost succeeds in transforming the documentary film into a branch of science fiction.

Indeed, Resnais has always been interested in science fiction, the fantastic, and pulp adventure stories. If this interest is most overtly expressed in the narrative of Je t'aime, je t'aime (in which a human serves as a guinea pig for scientists experimenting with time travel), it also emerges in the play of fantasy/imagination/reality pervading his work, and in many of his unachieved projects (including a remake of Fant?mas and The Adventure of Harry Dickson).

Through editing and an emphasis on formal repetition, Resnais uses the medium to construct the conjunctions of past and present, fantasy and reality, insisting on the convergence of what are usually considered distinct domains of experience. In Hiroshima mon amour the quivering hand of the woman's sleeping Japanese lover in the film's present is directly followed by an almost identical image of her nearly-dead German lover during World War II. Tracking shots through the streets of Hiroshima merge with similar shots of Nevers, where the woman lived during the war. In Stavisky, the cutting between events in 1933 and a 1934 investigation of those events presents numerous, often conflicting versions of the same thing; one is finally convinced, above all else, of the indeterminacy and contingency of major historical events. And in Providence, the central character is an aged writer who spends a troubled night weaving stories about his family, conjoining memory and fantasy, past, present, and future, in an unstable mix.

The past's insistent invasion of the present is expressed in many different ways in Resnais's films. In Nuit et brouillard, where the death camps are both present structures and repressed institutions, it is a question of social memory and history; it is an individual and cultural phenomenon in Hiroshima mon amour, as a French woman simultaneously confronts her experiences in occupied France and the Japanese experience of the atomic bomb; it is construed in terms of science fiction in Je t'aime, je t'aime when the hero is trapped in a broken time-machine and continuously relives moments from his past; and it is a profoundly ambiguous mixture of an individual's real and imagined past in L'Ann?e derni?re ? Marienbad (often considered Resnais's most avant-garde film) as X pursues A with insistence, recalling their love affair and promises of the previous year, in spite of A's denials. In all of these films, as well as Resnais's other work, the past is fraught with uncertainty, anxiety, even terror. If it is more comfortable to ignore, it inevitably erupts in the present through the workings of the psyche, memory traces, or in the form of documentation and artifacts.

In recent years, Resnais's presence on the international film scene barely has been noticed. While serious and provocative in intention, none of his films have measured up to his earlier work. However, in the early 1980s, he did direct two strikingly original films which are outstanding additions to his filmography.

In Mon Oncle d'Amerique, Resnais probes human responses and relations by illustrating the theories of Henri Laborit, a French research biologist. The scenario's focus is on the intertwined relationship between three everyday characters: a Catholic farm boy who has become a textile plant manager (G?rard Depardieu); a former young communist who now is an actress (Nicole Garcia); and a conformist (Roger Pierre) who is married to his childhood sweetheart. La vie est un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses) is a bewitching allegory contrasting the accounts of a rich man (Ruggero Raimondi) constructing a ?temple of happiness? around the time of World War I, and a seminar on education being held at that location decades later. Resnais's points are that there are no easy answers to complex dilemmas and, most tellingly, that individuals who attempt to dictate to others their concepts of perfection are as equally destructive as those whose actions result in outright chaos.

Resnais's filmic output has been relatively small. He nonetheless stands as a significant figure in modernist cinema. His strategies of fragmented point-of-view and multiple temporality, as well as his use of the medium to convey past/present and fantasy/imagination/reality as equivocal and equivalent modes of experience have amplified our understanding of film's capacity for expression.?M.B. WHITE and ROB EDELMAN