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Alain Resnais

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Alain Resnais
Juliette Binoche and Alain Resnais, 1998
Born(1922-06-03)3 June 1922
Vannes, Morbihan, Brittany, France
Died1 March 2014(2014-03-01) (aged 91)
Paris, France
Occupation(s)Film director, film editor, screenwriter, cinematographer
Years active1946–2014

Alain Resnais (French: [alɛ̃ ʁɛnɛ]; 3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014) was a French film director whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Night and Fog (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.[1]

Resnais began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. These films were contemporary with, and associated with, the French New Wave (la nouvelle vague), though Resnais 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. 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.[1][2][3][4]

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.

His films frequently explore the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he was noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives.[5][6] Throughout his career, he won many awards from international film festivals and academies.

Early life

Resnais was born in 1922 at Vannes in Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist.[7] An only child, he was often ill with asthma in childhood, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home.[8] He was an eager reader, in a range that extended from classics to comic books, but from the age of 10 he became fascinated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.[9] Around the age of 14, he discovered surrealism and through that an interest in the works of André Breton.[10]

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[11]), but he then decided in 1943 to apply to the newly formed film school IDHEC to study film editing.[12] The film-maker Jean Grémillon was one of the teachers who had the most influence on him at that period.[13]

Resnais left in 1945 to do his military service which took him to Germany and Austria with the occupying forces, as well as making him a temporary member of a travelling theatre company, Les Arlequins.[14] 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).[12] A more ambitious feature-length work, Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, has also vanished without trace.[15]

Career

1946–58: 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.[16] (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.[17] 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.[18]

Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) 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.[19] 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.[1][20]

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. 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.[21]

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 film-makers (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.[22]

1959–68

Resnais's first feature film was Hiroshima mon amour (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 camps[23] and that it presented the same problem of how to film incomprehensible suffering.[24] 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.[25] 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.[26] 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.[27]

Resnais's next film was L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), 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.[28]

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 (1963), 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.[29]

A contemporary political issue also formed the background for La guerre est finie (The War Is Over, 1966), this time the clandestine activities of left-wing opponents of the Franco régime in Spain. Resnais's scriptwriter on this film was the Spanish author Jorge Semprun, himself an ex-member of the Spanish Communist Party now in voluntary exile in France.[30] 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.[31] 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 (Far from 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,[32] and his next project seemed to mark a change of direction. Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) drew upon the traditions of science-fiction[33] 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 (its planned screening at Cannes was cancelled amid the political events of May 1968), and it was almost five years before Resnais was able to direct another film.[34]

1969–80

Resnais spent some time in America working on various unfulfilled projects, including one about the Marquis de Sade. He also published Repérages, a volume of his photographs, taken between 1948 and 1971, of locations in London, Scotland, Paris, Nevers, Lyon, New York and Hiroshima; Jorge Semprun wrote the introductory text.[35] Some of the photographs relate to a long-cherished but unfulfilled idea for a film based on the Harry Dickson stories by Jean Ray.

After contributing an episode to L'An 01 (The Year 01) (1973), a collective film organised by Jacques Doillon, Resnais made a second collaboration with Jorge Semprun for Stavisky (1974), based on the life of the notorious financier and embezzler whose death in 1934 provoked a political scandal. With glamorous costumes and sets, a musical score by Stephen Sondheim, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in the title role, it was seen as Resnais's most commercial film to date, but its complex narrative structure showed clear links with the formal preoccupations of his earlier films.[36]

With Providence (1977), Resnais made his first film in English, with a screenplay written by David Mercer, and a cast that included John Gielgud and Dirk Bogarde. The story shows an ageing, maybe dying, novelist grappling with alternative versions of his own past as he adapts them for his fiction. Resnais was eager that the dark subject should remain humorous, and he described it as "a macabre divertissement".[37] Formal innovation characterised Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle, 1980) in which the theories of the neurobiologist Henri Laborit about animal behaviour are juxtaposed with three interwoven fictional stories; and a further counterpoint to the fictional characters is provided by the inclusion of film extracts of the classic French film actors with whom they identify.[38] The film won several international awards including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and it also proved to be one of Resnais's most successful with the public.[39]

1981–2014

From the 1980s onwards Resnais showed a particular interest in integrating material from other forms of popular culture into his films, drawing especially on music and the theatre.[5][40] In almost all of his remaining films he chose to work repeatedly with a core group of actors comprising Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, and André Dussollier, sometimes accompanied by Fanny Ardant or Lambert Wilson. The first four of these were among the large cast of La vie est un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses, 1983), a comic fantasy about utopian dreams in which three stories, from different eras and told in different styles, are interwoven within a shared setting. The action is punctuated by episodes of song which develop towards the end into scenes that are almost operatic; Resnais said that his starting point had been the desire to make a film in which dialogue and song would alternate.[41]

Music, very differently used, was a major component of L'Amour à mort (Love unto Death, 1984). For this intense chamber work with four principal actors (Azéma, Arditi, Ardant and Dussollier), Resnais asked Hans Werner Henze to compose musical episodes which would act as a "fifth character", not an accompaniment but a fully integrated element of the drama with which the speech of the actors would interact.[42] In subsequent years, Resnais gave his attention to music of more popular styles. He made Gershwin (1992), an innovative TV documentary in which the American composer's life and works were reviewed through the testimonies of performers and filmmakers, juxtaposed with commissioned paintings by Guy Peellaert. In On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song, 1997), his tribute to television works of Dennis Potter, the characters express their key emotions or private thoughts by bursting into snatches of well-known (recorded) popular songs without interrupting the dramatic situation.[43] A long-neglected operetta from the 1920s was the unexpected basis for Resnais's next film Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips, 2003), in which he sought to reinvigorate an unfashionable form of entertainment by recreating its theatricality for the camera and entrusting most of its musical numbers to actors rather than to trained singers.[44]

There are many references to the theatre throughout Resnais's filmmaking (Marienbad, Muriel, Stavisky, Mon oncle d'Amérique), but he first undertook the challenge of taking a complete stage work and giving it new cinematic life in Mélo (1986), an adaptation of Henri Bernstein's 1929 play of the same name. Resnais remained entirely faithful to the play (apart from shortening it) and he emphasised its theatricality by filming in long takes on large sets of evidently artificial design, as well as by marking off the acts of the play with the fall of a curtain.[45] After an excursion into the world of comic books and cartoons in I Want to Go Home (1989), an ambitious theatrical adaptation followed with the diptych of Smoking/No Smoking (1993). Resnais, having admired the plays of Alan Ayckbourn for many years, chose to adapt what appeared the most intractable of them, Intimate Exchanges, a series of eight interlinked plays which follow the consequences of a casual choice to sixteen possible endings. Resnais slightly reduced the number of permuted endings and compressed the plays into two films, each having a common starting point, and to be seen in any order. Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi played all the parts, and the theatricality of the undertaking was again emphasised by the studio set designs for a fictional English village.[46] Resnais returned to Ayckbourn in the following decade for his adaptation of Private Fears in Public Places to which he gave the film title of Cœurs (2006). Among the stage/film effects which contribute to its mood of "cheerful desolation" is the artificial snow which is continually seen through set windows until eventually it falls on the studio interior as well.[47]

Speaking in 1986, Resnais said that he did not make a separation between cinema and theatre and refused to make enemies of them.[48] He preferred working with "people of the theatre", and he said that he would never want to film a novel.[49] It was therefore something of a departure when he chose L'Incident, a novel by Christian Gailly, as the basis for Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass, 2009). He explained however that what initially attracted him to the book was the quality of its dialogue, which he retained largely unchanged for the film. When Les Herbes folles was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it was the occasion for a special jury award to Resnais "for his work and exceptional contribution to the history of cinema".[50]

In his final two films, Resnais again drew his source material from the theatre. Vous n'avez encore rien vu (You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!, 2012) was adapted from two plays by Jean Anouilh, and it assembled thirteen actors (many of them regular performers in Resnais's earlier films) who have been summoned by the dying wish of an author to witness a new performance their roles in one of his plays.[51][52] The film was shown in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.[53][54] Aimer, boire et chanter (2014) was the third film which Resnais adapted from a play by Alan Ayckbourn, in this case Life of Riley, in which three couples are thrown into confusion by the news that a shared friend has a terminal illness. Three weeks before Resnais's death, the film received its premiere in the competition section of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2014, where it won a Silver Bear award "for a feature film that opens new perspectives".[55][56] At the time of his death, Resnais was preparing a further Ayckbourn project, based on the 2013 play Arrivals & Departures.[57]

Reputation

Resnais was often linked with the group of French filmmakers who made their breakthrough as the New Wave or nouvelle vague in the late 1950s, but by then he had already established a significant reputation through his ten years of work on documentary short films. He defined his own relationship by saying: "Although I was not fully part of the New Wave because of my age, there was some mutual sympathy and respect between myself and Rivette, Bazin, Demy, Truffaut ... So I felt friendly with that team."[2] He nevertheless acknowledged his debt to the New Wave because it created the conditions of production, and particularly the financial conditions, which allowed him to make a film like Hiroshima mon amour, his first feature film.[58]

Resnais was more often associated with a "Left Bank" group of writers and filmmakers who included Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet (with all of whom he collaborated in the earlier part of his career).[3] They were distinguished by their interests in documentary, left-wing politics, and the literary experiments of the nouveau roman.[59] At the same time, Resnais was also a devotee of popular culture. He owned the largest private collection of comic books in France and in 1962 became the vice president and co-founder of an International Society for Comic Books, Le Club des bandes dessinées, renamed two years later as Centre d'Études des Littératures d'Expression Graphique (CELEG).[60] CELEG members also included Resnais' artistic collaborators Marker and Robbe-Grillet.

The importance of creative collaboration in Resnais's films has been noted by many commentators.[1][61] Unlike many of his contemporaries, he always refused to write his own screenplays and attached great importance to the contribution of his chosen writer, whose status in the shared "authorship" of the film he fully acknowledged.[62] He was also known to treat the completed screenplay with great fidelity, to the extent that some of his screenwriters remarked on how closely the finished film realised their intentions.[63] (On the few occasions when he did participate in writing the script, particularly for his last three films, his contribution is acknowledged under the pseudonym Alex Reval, since he did not want his name to appear more than once in the credits.)[64]

Time and memory have regularly been identified as two of the principal themes of Resnais's work, at least in his earlier films.[6][65] He however consistently tried to modify this view of his concerns: "I prefer to speak of the imaginary, or of consciousness. What interests me in the mind is that faculty we have to imagine what is going to happen in our heads, or to remember what has happened".[66] He also described his films as an attempt, however imperfect, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism.[67]

Another view of the evolution of Resnais's career saw him moving progressively away from a realistic treatment of 'big' subjects and overtly political themes towards films that are increasingly personal and playful.[68] Resnais himself offered an explanation of this shift in terms of challenging what was the norm in film-making at the time: having made his early films when escapist cinema was predominant, he progressively felt the need to move away from exploration of social and political issues as that itself became almost the norm in contemporary cinema. Experimentation with narrative forms and genre conventions instead became a central focus of his films.[40][69]

A frequent criticism of Resnais's films among English-language commentators has been that they are emotionally cold; that they are all about technique without grasp of character or subject,[70] that his understanding of beauty is compromised by a lack of sensuousness,[71] and that his seriousness of intent fails to communicate itself to audiences.[72] Elsewhere however it is suggested that such views are partly based on a misreading of the films, especially his earlier ones, which has impeded an appreciation of the humour and irony which pervade his work; and other viewers have been able to make the connection between the film's form and its human dimension.[73]

There is general agreement about Resnais's attachment to formalism in his approach to film; he himself regarded it as the starting point of his work, and usually had an idea of a form, or method of construction, in his head even before the plot or the characters took shape.[74] For him this was also the basis for the communication of feeling: "There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator."[75]

Another term which appears in commentaries on Resnais throughout his career is "surrealism", from his documentary portrait of a library in Toute la mémoire du monde,[76] through the dreamlike innovations of Marienbad,[77] to the latterday playfulness of Les Herbes folles.[78] Resnais himself traced a link to his teenage discovery of surrealism in the works of André Breton: "I hope that I always remain faithful to André Breton who refused to suppose that imaginary life was not a part of real life".[79]

Personal life

In 1969 Resnais married Florence Malraux (daughter of the French statesman and writer André Malraux).[80] She was a regular member of his production team, working as assistant director on most of his films from 1961 to 1986. His second wife was Sabine Azéma, who acted in the majority of his films from 1983 onwards; they were married in the English town of Scarborough in 1998.[81]

Alain Resnais died in Paris on 1 March 2014; he was buried in Montparnasse cemetery.[82][83][84]

Awards

Filmography, as director

Feature films

Year Title English title Screenwriter
1959 Hiroshima mon amour Hiroshima mon amour Marguerite Duras
1961 L'Année dernière à Marienbad Last Year at (in) Marienbad Alain Robbe-Grillet
1963 Muriel ou le Temps d'un retour Muriel Jean Cayrol
1966 La guerre est finie The War Is Over Jorge Semprún
1968 Je t'aime, je t'aime Je t'aime, je t'aime Jacques Sternberg
1974 Stavisky... Stavisky... Jorge Semprún
1977 Providence Providence David Mercer
1980 Mon oncle d'Amérique My American Uncle Jean Gruault, (Henri Laborit)
1983 La vie est un roman Life Is a Bed of Roses Jean Gruault
1984 L'Amour à mort Love Unto Death Jean Gruault
1986 Mélo Mélo (Henri Bernstein)
1989 I Want to Go Home I Want to Go Home Jules Feiffer
1993 Smoking/No Smoking Smoking/No Smoking Jean-Pierre Bacri, Agnès Jaoui, (Alan Ayckbourn)
1997 On connaît la chanson Same Old Song Agnès Jaoui, Jean-Pierre Bacri
2003 Pas sur la bouche Not on the Lips (André Barde)
2006 Cœurs Private Fears in Public Places Jean-Michel Ribes, (Alan Ayckbourn)
2009 Les Herbes folles Wild Grass Alex Reval, Laurent Herbiet, (Christian Gailly)
2012 Vous n'avez encore rien vu You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet! Laurent Herbiet, Alex Reval, (Jean Anouilh)
2014 Aimer, boire et chanter Life of Riley Laurent Herbiet, Alex Reval, (Alan Ayckbourn)

Short films etc.

Year Title Screenwriter Notes
1936 L'Aventure de Guy Gaston Modot 10 mins. Unfinished.
1946 Schéma d'une identification 30 mins. Lost.
1946 Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire 90 mins. Lost.
1947 Visite à Oscar Dominguez 30 mins. Uncompleted.
1947 Visite à Lucien Coutaud
1947 Visite à Hans Hartung
1947 Visite à Félix Labisse
1947 Visite à César Doméla
1947 Portrait d'Henri Goetz
1947 Journée naturelle (Visite à Max Ernst)
1947 La Bague
1947 L'Alcool tue Remo Forlani, Roland Dubillard Director credited as Alzin Rezarail.
1947 Le Lait Nestlé 1 min.
1947 Van Gogh (16mm) Gaston Diehl, Robert Hessens 20 mins.
1948 Van Gogh (35mm) Gaston Diehl, Robert Hessens 20 mins.
1948 Châteaux de France (Versailles) 5 mins.
1948 Malfray Gaston Diehl, Robert Hessens
1948 Les Jardins de Paris Roland Dubillard Unfinished.
1950 Gauguin Gaston Diehl 11 mins.
1950 Guernica Paul Eluard 12 mins.
1951 Pictura: An Adventure in Art (Gauguin segment) One of seven segments in US documentary.
1953 Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die) Chris Marker 30 mins. Co-written and directed with Chris Marker.
1955 Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) Jean Cayrol 32 mins.
1956 Toute la mémoire du monde Remo Forlani 22 mins.
1957 Le Mystère de l'atelier quinze Chris Marker 18 mins.
1958 Le Chant du styrène Raymond Queneau 19 mins.
1967 Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam) - segment Jacques Sternberg "Claude Ridder" segment.
1968 Cinétracts - segment Uncredited.
1973 L'An 01 - segment New York scenes only.
1991 Contre l'oubli - segment Contribution called "Pour Esteban Gonzalez Gonzalez, Cuba".
1992 Gershwin Edward Jablonski TV film. 52 mins.

References

Notes

  1. ^ a b c d Ephraim Katz, The International Film Encyclopedia. (London: Macmillan, 1980.) p. 966–967.
  2. ^ a b Peter Cowie, The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s. (London: Faber, 2004.) p.67.
  3. ^ a b 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.
  4. ^ Slavo Zizek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. (London: Verso, 2012). p.28. ISBN 978-1-84467-897-6
  5. ^ a b Une histoire du cinéma français, [edited by] Claude Beylie. (Paris: Larousse, 2005.) p.501.
  6. ^ a b Encyclopedia of European Cinema; edited by Ginette Vincendeau. (London: Cassell, British Film Institute, 1995.) p.358.
  7. ^ Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.2.
  8. ^ James Monaco, Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.15.
  9. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). pp.22–25.
  10. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.29.
  11. ^ Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006). pp.176–177.
  12. ^ a b James Monaco, Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.17.
  13. ^ Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006). p.180.
  14. ^ International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers – 2: Directors; 2nd ed., edited by Nicholas Thomas. (Chicago, London: St James Press, 1991.) pp.689–692.
  15. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.42.
  16. ^ Van Gogh at IMDb.
  17. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). pp.45–48.
  18. ^ The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996.) p.332.
  19. ^ Uri Klein. "Memories of Alain Resnais, cinema's explorer of memory", in Haaretz, 3 March 2014. [Requires subscription.]
  20. ^ Georges Sadoul, Dictionnaire des films. (Paris: Seuil, 1983.) p.218.
  21. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). pp.57–59.
  22. ^ See the "Tableau des connivences" in Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.210.
  23. ^ Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.48.
  24. ^ James Monaco, Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.34.
  25. ^ "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.
  26. ^ Roy Armes, French Cinema. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1985.) p.184.
  27. ^ The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996.) p.577.
  28. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.84, p.88, p.85.
  29. ^ Jean-Pierre Jeancolas, Le Cinéma des Français: la Ve République 1958–1978. (Paris: Stock, 1979.) pp.161–162.
  30. ^ The Times (London), 1 September 1966, p.11, col.F.
  31. ^ Ville de Cannes, The 60s: The Festival and the Film Market. [Retrieved 28 November 2010.]
  32. ^ René Prédal, L'Itinéraire d'Alain Resnais. (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1999.) p.114.
  33. ^ See also Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962.
  34. ^ Une histoire du cinéma français, [edited by] Claude Beylie. (Paris: Larousse, 2005.) p.211.
  35. ^ Repérages: photographies de Alain Resnais; texte de Jorge Semprun. (Paris: Chêne, 1974.) For a study of the book, see the article by Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues et Jean-Louis Leutrat in the online Bibliothèque du film of the Cinémathèque Française [retrieved 1 December 2010].
  36. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) p.143, pp.150–151.
  37. ^ Interview with Resnais (by Robert Benayoun) in Positif, no.190, février 1977; reprinted in Alain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) p.246: "... j'espère que ce film est drôle car je le vois comme un divertissement, macabre certes et noir, mais un divertissement tout de même."
  38. ^ David Robinson, "Resnais's imaginative parallels of human behaviour", in The Times (London), 12 Sept. 1980, p.8.
  39. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) p.252.
  40. ^ a b Interview with Gilbert Adair in The Guardian, 22 June 2010.
  41. ^ Interview in Cahiers du Cinéma, 347 (1983) p.28; quoted by Emma Wilson in Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.157.
  42. ^ Interview with Resnais (by Alain Masson and François Thomas) in Positif, no.284, octobre 1984; reprinted in Alain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) p.305.
  43. ^ Interview (with Ronald Bergan) in The Guardian, 27 November 1998.
  44. ^ Ginette Vincendeau in Sight & Sound, May 2004 [retrieved 21 December 2010].
  45. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) pp.206–207.
  46. ^ Interview with Resnais (by François Thomas) in Positif, no.394, déc. 1993; reprinted in Alain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) pp.405–406, 409–410.
  47. ^ Dave Kehr, "Restless Innovations from Alain Resnais", in The New York Times, 8 April 2007: "As Mr. Resnais told a French interviewer, the effect he is after is one of 'désolation allègre,' a blithe, jaunty despair."
  48. ^ Interview with Resnais (by François Thomas) in Positif, no.307, septembre 1993; reprinted in Alain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) p.335.
  49. ^ Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006). p.198: "Ce qui m'intéresse c'est de travailler non-avec des écrivains mais avec des gens de théâtre ... [e.g. Duras, Cayrol, Semprun, Mercer]. C'est pourquoi cela ne m'a gêné de tourner une pièce, mais je pourrais pas tourner un roman."
  50. ^ a b "Festival de Cannes: Wild Grass". festival-cannes.com. Retrieved 21 December 2010.
  51. ^ Jean-Luc Douin, Alain Resnais. Paris: Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2013. p. 234.
  52. ^ Festival de Cannes press kit for Vous n'avez encore rien vu. Retrieved 2012-05-22.
  53. ^ "2012 Official Selection". Cannes. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
  54. ^ "Cannes Film Festival 2012 line-up announced". timeout. Retrieved 19 April 2012.
  55. ^ "Berlinale programme description". Retrieved 9 March 2014.
  56. ^ a b "Prizes of the International Jury. Berlinale 2014". Retrieved 9 March 2014.
  57. ^ Marie-Noëlle Tranchant. "Alain Resnais, prodige du cinéma français, est mort", in Le Figaro, 3 mars 2014. [Retrieved 9 March 2014.]
  58. ^ A. Adrian Maben, Films and Filming, October 1966; quoted in Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) p.77.
  59. ^ The French Cinema Book; edited by Michael Temple and Michael Witt. (London: BFI, 2004.) p.183.
  60. ^ Cole, Blake (30 April 2012). "Interview with Film Expert Karen Beckman on Animation". University of Pennsylvania Research and Scholarship Frontiers. Retrieved 14 October 2012.
  61. ^ Claude Beylie, Une histoire du cinéma français. (Paris: Larousse, 2005.) p.501.
  62. ^ The French Cinema Book; edited by Michael Temple and Michael Witt. (London: BFI, 2004.) p.205.
  63. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) pp.186–187, p.223.
  64. ^ Jean-Luc Douin, Alain Resnais. Paris: Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2013. p. 242.
  65. ^ James Monaco, Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.11.
  66. ^ Resnais quoted in, and translated by, Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.1.
  67. ^ Quoted in Claude Beylie, Une histoire du cinéma français. (Paris: Larousse, 2005.) p.501: "Mes films sont une tentative, encore très imparfaite, d'approcher de la complexité de la pensée, de son mécanisme".
  68. ^ René Prédal, L'Itinéraire d'Alain Resnais. (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1999.) p.114, p.200
  69. ^ Emma Wilson, Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.196.
  70. ^ Pauline Kael, "Werewolf, mon amour", in New Yorker, 31 January 1977; quoted by James Monaco, Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.5: "... Resnais has little grasp of character or subject; he's an innovator who hasn't got a use for innovations. ... What he doesn't seem able to do is to imbue his situations with enough feeling for these tricks to mean something to us – they're just beautiful diddles".
  71. ^ Susan Sontag, Film Quarterly, vol.17, no.2, (Winter 1963–1964) p.27: "Resnais knows all about beauty. But, unlike Bresson and Godard and Truffaut, he lacks sensuousness. And this, in a film-maker, is a fatal deficiency".
  72. ^ David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. (London: Little, Brown, 2002.) p.729: "Resnais's seriousness is more elevated than his use of film ... he has shown himself unable to make a communicative contact with audiences".
  73. ^ James Monaco, Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) pp.3–4; p.9: "... Resnais's films are tempered with a concern for human character and feelings which never loses sight of the vital connection between the forms of the art and its human subjects".
  74. ^ Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Jean-Louis Leutrat, Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006). p.136.
  75. ^ Interview (with Robert Benayoun) in Positif, no.190, février 1977; quoted in Alain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) p.241: "Il ne peut y avoir de communication qu'à travers la forme. S'il n'y a pas de forme, on ne peut pas créer d'émotion chez le spectateur".
  76. ^ ""Resnais grasped the surreal futility of archives ...": David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. (London: Little, Brown, 2002.) p.729.
  77. ^ Marienbad's "distilled surrealist poetry": Jonathan Rosenbaum, in Chicago Reader [retrieved 3 January 2011]
  78. ^ "Wild Grass, an authentic surrealist romance": Gilbert Adair in The Guardian, 22 June 2010.
  79. ^ Robert Benayoun, Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) p.143, p.39: "J'espère toujours demeurer fidèle à André Breton qui se refusait de considérer que la vie imaginaire ne fait pas partie de la réelle".
  80. ^ "Florence Malraux au CNC". Libération.fr.
  81. ^ Dates of marriages recorded in International Who's Who 2004. (London: Europa, 2004.) p.1401.
  82. ^ Obituary notice in The Guardian, 2 March 2014. [Retrieved 8 March 2014.]
  83. ^ "Alain Resnais, prodige du cinéma français, est mort", in Le Figaro, 2 mars 2014. [Retrieved 11 March 2014.]
  84. ^ "Les deux adieux à Alain Resnais", in Le Nouvel Observateur, 11 mars 2014. [Retrieved 11 March 2014.]
  85. ^ "Berlinale: 1994 Prize Winners". berlinale.de. Retrieved 29 December 2011.
  86. ^ "Berlinale: 1998 Prize Winners". berlinale.de. Retrieved 1 January 2012.

Further reading

  • Armes, Roy. The Cinema of Alain Resnais. London: Zwemmer, 1968.
  • Benayoun, Robert. Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imaginaire. Paris: Ramsay, 2008. [In French]. ISBN 978-2-84114-928-5.
  • Callev, Haim. The Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais. New York: McGruer Publishing, 1997.
  • Douin, Jean-Luc. Alain Resnais. Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2013. [In French].
  • Goudet, Stéphane. Alain Resnais: anthologie Paris: Gallimard, 2002. [Articles originally published in Positif, revue de cinéma. In French]
  • Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne, & Jean-Louis Leutrat. Alain Resnais : liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006. [In French].
  • Monaco, James. Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.
  • Thomas, François. L'Atelier d'Alain Resnais. Paris: Flammarion, 1989. [In French]. ISBN 978-2-08-211408-0.
  • Wilson, Emma. Alain Resnais. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-7190-6407-4.
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