Alain Resnais
French director of memory, time, and narrative innovation.
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Alain Resnais, a French director and screenwriter, worked in cinema for more than sixty years. His movies often look at how consciousness, memory, and imagination connect, and he became known for creating unusual narrative structures. After learning to be a film editor in the mid-1940s, he made short films, one of which was Night and Fog (1956), a documentary about Nazi concentration camps that had a strong impact. He started making feature films in the late 1950s, building his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Muriel (1963), and Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968), all of which used unconventional storytelling to explore troubled memory and imagined pasts.
Though often linked to the French New Wave, Resnais himself felt he was not fully part of it; he was more connected to the "Left Bank" group of writers and filmmakers—including Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, and Chris Marker—who were committed to modernism and left-wing politics. He often worked with writers new to cinema, such as Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Semprún, and Jacques Sternberg. In his later work, Resnais moved away from overtly political subjects and focused on mixing cinema with theatre, music, and comic books, leading to adaptations of plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Henri Bernstein, and Jean Anouilh, as well as films that incorporated popular songs. Over his career, he won many awards, including an Academy Award, two César Awards for Best Director (with eight nominations), three Louis Delluc Prizes, and a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Lore & Background
Resnais was born in 1922 in Vannes in Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist. An only child, he was often ill with asthma in childhood, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home.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 filmmaker Jean Grémillon was one of the teachers who had the most influence on him at that period. 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. 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).
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Alain Resnais's most famous films?
His two most celebrated works are Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), both of which redefined how cinema could handle non-linear narrative and the fluidity of recollection. These titles remain central to any discussion of mid-century art-house filmmaking.
Was Alain Resnais part of the French New Wave?
He is often grouped with the New Wave in broad overviews, but he never fully claimed that label for himself. His artistic and political sympathies aligned more closely with the 'Left Bank' circle of modernist, left-leaning directors and writers in Paris.
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Sources
Compiled from Wikipedia and the sources listed below. Text from Wikipedia is available under CC BY-SA 4.0; this entry is adapted from it.
- Wikipedia: Alain Resnais (CC BY-SA 4.0).
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