Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais 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.
After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, Resnais went on to direct short films including Night and Fog, an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. Resnais then began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel and Je t'aime, je t'aime 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, 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, which included the likes of Agnès Varda, Jacques Demy, 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.
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, three Louis Delluc Prize and one Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
Early life
Resnais was born in 1922 at 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 An only child, he was often ill with asthma in childhood, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home.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, 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. A more ambitious feature-length work, Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, has also vanished without trace.
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. Resnais continued to address artistic subjects in Gauguin and Guernica, 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. A political perspective on art also underpinned his next project, Les statues meurent aussi, a polemic about the destruction of African art by French cultural colonialism.Nuit et Brouillard 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. Realising that standard documentary techniques would be incapable of confronting the enormity of the horror, 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 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.
A different kind of collective memory was considered in Toute la mémoire du monde, 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.
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 ; with musicians ; and with other filmmakers. Similar collaborations underpinned his future work in feature films.
1959–1968
Resnais's first feature film was Hiroshima mon amour. It originated as a commission from the producers of Nuit et Brouillard 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 camps and that it presented the same problem of how to film incomprehensible suffering. 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. 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. The film was shown at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, alongside Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups, and its success became associated with the emerging movement of the French New Wave.Resnais's next film was L'Année dernière à Marienbad, which he made in collaboration with the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. The fragmented and shifting narrative presents three principal characters, a woman and two men, in the opulent setting of a grand European hotel or château where the possibility of a previous encounter a year ago is repeatedly asserted and questioned and contradicted. After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the film attracted great attention and provoked many divergent interpretations of how it should be understood, encouraged by interviews in which Robbe-Grillet and Resnais themselves appeared to give conflicting explanations of the film. There was little doubt however that it represented a significant challenge to the traditional concept of narrative construction in cinema.
At the beginning of the 1960s France remained deeply divided by the Algerian War, and in 1960 the Manifesto of the 121, which protested against French military policy in Algeria, was signed by a group of leading intellectuals and artists who included Resnais. The war, and the difficulty of coming to terms with its horrors, was a central theme of his next film Muriel, which used a fractured narrative to explore the mental states of its characters. It was among the first French films to comment, even indirectly, on the Algerian experience.
A contemporary political issue also formed the background for La guerre est finie, this time the clandestine activities of left-wing opponents of the Franco government in Spain. Resnais's scriptwriter on this film was the Spanish author Jorge Semprún, himself an ex-member of the Spanish Communist Party now in voluntary exile in France. Both men denied that the film was about Spain, but when it was entered for the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966, an objection from the Spanish government caused it to be withdrawn and it was shown out of competition. In 1967 Resnais participated with six other directors, including Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, in a collective work about the Vietnam war, Loin du Vietnam.
From 1968 onwards, Resnais's films no longer addressed, at least directly, big political issues in the way that a number of his previous ones had done, and his next project seemed to mark a change of direction. Je t'aime, je t'aime drew upon the traditions of science-fiction for a story of a man sent back into his past, a theme which enabled Resnais again to present a narrative of fragmented time. Alain Resnais's scriptwriter on this film was the author Jacques Sternberg. The film was unlucky in its release, and it was almost five years before Resnais was able to direct another film.
Throughout the 1960s, Resnais was attached to direct an international production called Les Aventures de Harry Dickson, based on the stories by Jean Ray, with Anatole Dauman as producer. The project was intended to star either Dirk Bogarde or Laurence Olivier as the titular detective, with André Delvaux attached as the production designer, and the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen attached for the score. Resnais and Dauman worked towards the project for a decade before finally giving up. The screenplay for the film by Frédéric de Towarnicki was published in 2007.