Alain Resnais

At 91 years old, Alain Resnais has this physical status:

Alain Resnais (3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter whose career spanned more than six decades.

Since beginning as a film editor in the mid-1940s, Resnais went on to produce a number of short films, including Night and Fog (1956), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps, and Muriel (1963), all of which used unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past.

These films were recent with, and associated with, the French New Wave (la nouvelle vague), but Resnais did not think himself to be a part of the movement.

He had closer links to the "Left Bank" group of writers and filmmakers who shared a commitment to modernism and an interest in left-wing politics.

Resnais also began a regular habit of filming on his films in collaboration with writers previously unconnected with the cinema, such as Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Semprillet, Jorge Semprillet, and Jacques Sternberg.

This resulted in imaginative adaptations of plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Henri Bernstein, and Jean Anouilh, as well as films starring various forms of popular song. His films often investigate the connection between consciousness, memory, and imagination, and imagination, and he was known for inventing new narrative systems.

He has received numerous accolades from international film festivals and academies throughout his career.

Early life

Resnais was born in 1922 in Vannes, Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist. He was often sick with asthma in childhood, which culminated in his being barred from school and educated at home. He loved reading from classics to comic books, but films intrigued him from the age of 10. His parents gave him a Kodak 8mm camera with which he started to make his own short films, including a three-minute version of Fantômas. He found awe and admiration for André Breton's work around the age of 14.

Resnais aspired to be an actor after going to Paris in 1939 to become an assistant in Georges Pitoff's company, Les Théâtres des Mathurins. He studied acting in the Cours René-Simon from 1940 to 1942 (and one of his little jobs at the time was as an extra in the film Les Visiteurs du soir), but he then decided to study film editing at the newly founded film school IDHEC in 1943. Jean Grémillon, a film-maker, was one of the few teachers with a greater reputation at that time.

Resnais left in 1945 to do his military service, which included trips to Germany and Austria with the occupying forces, as well as making him a temporary member of Les Arlequins, a touring theatre company. He returned to Paris in 1946 to begin his career as a film editor, but he also started making short films of his own. Gérard Philipe's brother is a student at the University of Leopol in the French surrealist short film Schéma d'une identification (now missing). Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, a more ambitious feature-length film, has also vanished without trace.

Personal life

Florence Malraux, the French statesman and writer André Malraux's daughter, married in 1969. She was a regular member of his production crew, serving as assistant director on the majority of his films from 1961 to 1986. Sabine Azéma, who appeared in the majority of his films from 1983 to 2000, was married in 1998 in Scarborough, England.

He referred to himself as a "mystical atheist" based on his religious convictions.

Resnais died in Paris on March 1st, 2014; he was buried in Montparnasse cemetery.

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Career

Resnais was invited in 1948 to film a film about Van Gogh's paintings while an exhibition was on display in Paris, beginning with a series of short documentary films starring artists at work in their studios as well as a few commercial commissions. He shot it at first in 16mm but Resnais was asked to remaster it in 35mm when the producer Pierre Braunberger saw the finals. In 1948, Van Gogh received a prize at the Venice Biennale and later received an Oscar for Best 2-Reel Short. (Braunberger went on to act as producer on several of Resnais' films in the ensuing decade.) Resnais' (1950) and Guernica (1950), which investigated the Picasso painting based on the town's 1937 bombings, then exhibited it alongside a text written by Paul Éluard, continued to explore artistic subjects in Gauguin (1950) and Guernica (1950), which brought the Picasso painting to the town's accompaniment. A political analysis of art also underpinned his current project (co-directed with Chris Marker), Les statues meurent également (Statues, 1953), a critique of African art's demise by French cultural colonialism.

Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956), one of the first documents to document the Nazi concentration camps, but it was more about the camps' memories than their actual existence. Resnais decided that standard documentary techniques would be ineffective at confronting the enormity of the horror (and even attempted to humanize it), and so used a distancing device by mixing historical black-and-white photos of the camps with new color footage of the camps in long tracking photos. To add to the distancing effect, the accompanying narration (written by Jean Cayrol, himself a survivor of the camps) was intentionally understated. Despite the fact that the film faced censorship difficulties with the French government, the film's impact was still strong, and it remains one of the director's most admired creations.

In Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), the seemingly endless spaces and bibliographic treasures of the Bibliothèque nationale were explored in another series of long-travel photos. Le Chant du styrène, 1959, Resnais undertook a Pechiney company's offer to produce a short film in color and wide-screen, extolling the benefits of plastics. In a rhyming couplets, poetry was brought to the project by Raymond Queneau, who wrote the script.

Resnais began to write documentary short films; with writers (Eluillard, Cayrol, Queneau, Le Chant du styrène); and with other film-makers (Resnais was the editor of Agnès Varda's first film, La Pointe courte; and with musicians (Darius Milhaud, Le Chant du styrène, Le Chant du styrène; and co-film avec writers; Similar collaborations underpinned his future work in feature films.

Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Resnais' first feature film. It began as a commission from Nuit et Brouillard (Anatole Dauman and Argos Films) to produce a documentary about the atomic bomb, but Resnais turned down initially, fearing that it would be too similar to the previous film about the concentration camps and that it would be too similar to the earlier film about incomprehensible suffering. However, a fusion of fiction and documentary was produced in response to Marguerite Duras' book The impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima was confirmed in a dialogue with the author; one could only discuss the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima. The themes of memory and forgetting are explored in the film by new narrative strategies that blend images with narrated text and dismiss conventional notions of plot and story development. The film was on view at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, alongside Truffaut's Les Quatre Coups (The 400 Blows), and its popularity was associated with the French New Wave's emergence.

L'Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961), Resnais' next film was L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), which he made in collaboration with author Alain Robbe-Grillet. In the opulent setting of a grand European hotel or château where the possibility of a previous encounter a year ago is repeatedly stated and denied, three main characters, a woman and two men, are repeatedly stated and contradicted. The film, after winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, attracted a lot of curiosity and sparked many differing interpretations of how it should be understood, aided by interviews in which Robbe-Grillet and Resnais themselves appeared to give conflicting accounts of the film. However, there was no doubt that it was a significant challenge to cinema's traditional model of narrative construction.

At the start of the 1960s, France was deeply divided by the Algerian war, and a group of leading intellectuals and artists, including Resnais, was signed by a group of influential intellectuals and artists in Algeria in 1960, which protested against French military policy in Algeria. The war and the inability of comprehending its horrors was a central theme of his forthcoming film Muriel (1963), which used a fractured plot to explore the characters' psychological states. It was one of the first French films to comment, even indirectly, on the Algerian experience.

A current political topic also influenced La guerre est finie (The War Is Over, 1966), this time in Spain, the clandestine activities of left-wing opponents of Franco's Franco regime were also present. The scriptwriter for Resnais was Jorge Semprn, an ex-member of the Spanish Communist Party who is now in voluntary exile in France. Both men denied that the film was about Spain, but when it was accepted for the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966, the Spanish government ordered it to be withdrawn, and the film was withdrawn out of competition. Resnais was involved with six other artists, including Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, in a joint effort against the Vietnam war Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam).

Resnais' films no longer addressed, at least explicitly, significant political issues in the way that a number of his predecessors had done, and his current project seemed to mark a change of direction. Je t'aime (1968) drew upon science-fiction traditions to tell a tale of a man brought back to his past, which allowed Resnais to tell a tale of fragmented time. The scriptwriter on this film, Alain Resnais, was Jacques Sternberg, the author of Jacques Sternberg. The film was unfortunate in its launch (its planned screening at Cannes was postponed due to political events in May 1968), and it was almost five years before Resnais was able to direct another film.

Resnais was recruited to direct Les Aventures de Harry Dickson, based on Jean Ray's novels, with Anatole Dauman as producer. With André Delvaux as the production designer and composer Karlheinz Stockhausen attached for the score, the film was supposed to star either Dirk Bogarde or Laurence Olivier as the titular detective. Resnais and Dauman have been planning the project for a decade before finally giving up. In 2007, the screenplay for Frédéric de Towarnicki's film was published.

Resnais spent some time in America on various unfull projects, one of which was about the Marquis de Sade. Jorge Semprun wrote the introduction and published Repérages, a collection of his photographs taken between 1948 and 1971 in London, Scotland, Paris, Nevers, Lyon, New York, and Hiroshima. Any of the photographs depict Harry Dickson's unfullled film.

Resnais' second collaboration with Jorge Semprun (1974), based on the life of the infamous financier and embezzler whose death in 1934 sparked a national scandal, began with an episode to L'An 01 (The Year 01) (1973). It was seen as Resnais' most commercial film to date, with glamorous costumes and sets, a musical score by Stephen Sondheim, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in the title role, but the complex narrative structure showed strong links to his earlier films' formal preoccupations.

Resnais made his first English film with Providence (1977), with a screenplay written by David Mercer and a cast featuring John Gielson and Dirk Bogarde. The story portrays an old, possibly dead, novelist struggling with alternate interpretations of his own experience as he adapts them for his fiction. Resnais was keen that the humourous topic would remain amusing, and he described it as "a macabre divertissement." Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle, 1980), where Henri Laborit's theories of animal behavior are juxtaposed with three interwoven fictional stories; a new counterpoint to the fictional characters is provided by the inclusion of film excerpts of the classic French film actors with whom they identify. Several international awards, including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, were given to the film, and it also proved to be one of Resnais' most popular with the public.

Resnais' interest in incorporating content from other aspects of popular culture was evident in his films, particularly in music and theatre. In nearly all of his previous films, he continued to work with a core group of actors including Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, and André Dussollier, who are occasionally joined by Fanny Ardant or Lambert Wilson. The first four of these stories were among the large cast of La vie est un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses, 1983), a literary fantasy about utopian dreams in which three tales from various periods and told in a unique way are interwoven within a common setting. Scenes of song that progress towards the end are turned 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.

Music, which was very differently used, was a vital component of L'Amour à mort (Love unto Death, 1984). Resnais asked Hans Werner Henze to produce musical episodes for this intense chamber performance starring four main actors (Azéma, Arditi, Ardant, and Dussollier). Resnais' interest in newer styles of music in the years have flourished. Gershwin (1992), an experimental television documentary in which the American composer's life and works were compared to commissioned paintings by Guy Peellaert, he made Gershwin (1992), an innovative TV documentary in which the American composer's life and works were explored through the testimonies of actors and filmmakers. The characters in On connaître la chanson (Same Old Song, 1997), Dennis Potter's tribute to television works, are bursting into snatches of well-known (recorded) popular songs without interrupting the dramatic scene. Resnais' next film Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips, 2003), in which he attempted to revive an outdated form of entertainment by returning to the camera and entrusting the majority of its musical numbers to actors rather than to professionally trained singers, was an unexpected source.

Many references to the theatre in Resnais' filmmaking (Marienbad, Muriel, Stavisky, Mon oncle d'Amérique), but he first rose to the challenge of completing the 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 utterly faithful to the role (apart from shortening it) and emphasized its theatricality by filming in long takes on large sets of clearly artificial design, as well as showing off the scene's actions with the fall of a curtain. In 1989, I Want to Go Home (1989), an exciting theatrical interpretation was accompanied by a diptych of Smoking/No Smoking (1993). Resnais, who had admired Alan Ayckbourn's plays for many years, decided to adapt Intimate Exchanges, a series of eight interlinked plays that follow the consequences of a casual choice to sixteen possible endings. Resnais only cut the number of perfuncional ends and reduced the number of perfeding scenes and compressed the plays into two movies, each with a common starting point and can be seen in any order. Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi played all of the roles, and the production's dramaticity was once more emphasised by the studio's set designs for a fictional English village. Resnais returned to Ayckbourn in the ensuing decade for his film version of Private Fears in Public Places, which he gave the film title Curs (2006). The artificial snow, which is often seen through set windows until finally falling on the studio's interior as well as other stage/film effects, is one of the film effects that contribute to its mood of "cheerful desolation."

Resnais said in 1986 that he did not make a distinction between cinema and theatre and that he did not make enemies of them. He loved being with "people of the theater," and he said he did not want to film a book. It was therefore a change for Les Herbes folles to choose L'Incident, a Christian Gailly book, as the basis for Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass, 2009). He explained that what attracted him to the book was still the quality of its dialogue, which he kept largely unchanged for the film. It was the occasion for a special jury award to Resnais "for his contribution to cinema" at the Cannes Film Festival.

Resnais collected his source material from the theatre in his final two films. Vous n'avez déjà vu (You Ain't Seen Nothin' Still?, 2012) was based on two Jean Anouilh scripts and brought together thirteen actors (many of whom have appeared in Resnais' earlier films) who had been summoned by an author's dying wish to see a new performance in one of his productions. At the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, the film was shown in a competition for the Palme d'Or. Aimer, et chanter (2014) was Resnais' third film, in this case Life of Riley, in which three couples are put into disarray over the discovery that a shared friend has a terminal illness. The film premiered in the competition section of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2014, three weeks before Resnais' death, where it received a Silver Bear Award "for a feature film that opens new perspectives." Resnais, at the time of his death, was planning a new Ayckbourn project based on the 2013 play Arrivals & Departures.

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Awards

• Academy Award: 1950 (22nd Oscar ceremony) for "Van Gogh" (1948): Best Short Subject (two-reel), awarded to producers Gaston Diehl and Robert Haessens.
• Prix Jean Vigo: 1954, for Les statues meurent aussi; and 1956, for Nuit et Brouillard
• César Award: 1977 Best Director 1977, for Providence; and 1993 Best Director, for Smoking/No Smoking
• Prix Louis-Delluc: 1966, for La guerre est finie; 1993, for Smoking/No Smoking; and 1997, for On connaît la chanson
• Lumières Award for Best Director: 2004, for Pas sur la bouche
• Venice Film Festival: 1960 Golden Lion, for L'Année dernière à Marienbad; and 2006 Silver Lion, for Cœurs
• Berlin Film Festival: 1994 Silver Bear for Smoking/No Smoking; 1998 Silver Bear, for On connaît la chanson; 2014 Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize for Aimer, boire et chanter.
• Cannes Film Festival: 1980 Grand Prix, for Mon oncle d'Amérique; and 2009, Lifetime achievement award.