Alain Resnais was a French New Wave director celebrated for tackling in film Proustian themes of time and memory
In 1961 Photo: Alamy
Alain Resnais, the film director, who has died aged 91, was one of the most
important, original, controversial and fashionable of the post-war
generation of French film-makers known collectively as the New Wave.
Elliptical, elusive, literary and occasionally unintelligible, his films
defied conventional forms of cinema storytelling in favour of complicated
editing that sometimes took little account of plot or characterisation but
created instead a compelling air of mystery and depth.
His two most famous works, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) and Last Year at
Marienbad (1961), made him the most intellectually difficult film director
of his time. Above all he was an “auteur”, a director who stamped his
personal style on every film he made, even though he might, as Resnais did
with distinction, engage eminent authors, like Marguerite Duras or Alain
Robbe-Grillet, to write his screenplays.
Time and memory, illusion and reality, were Resnais’s favourite themes, and
his stock characters were a sort of displaced person. Later in his career he
found a rich vein of material to explore in the plays of Alan Ayckbourn.
But while he was accused of obscurity and pretentiousness, and of academic
coldness in expressing emotion, his films extended, if only for a while, the
frontiers of 20th-century cinema. The editing of image and sound, sometimes
overlapping, sometimes clashing, often merging, always amazing, challenged
the imagination and stirred the critical faculties.
And no fact of Alain Resnais’s life seemed to strike a stranger note than his assertion that the films which first inspired his ambition to become a film director were those in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced. Or was it Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler? He could never be sure. “I wondered if I could find the equivalent of that exhilaration,” he recalled.
If he never did it was perhaps because of his highly cultivated attitude to serious cinema. His character and temperament were more attuned to the theory of film and a kind of intellectual square dance which was far harder to bring to the screen with “exhilaration” than the art of Astaire and Rogers.
Alan Resnais was born at Vannes, Brittany, on June 3 1922, where his father was a pharmacist. A sickly child, he had a severe Jesuit education and was a voracious reader, consuming everything he could get his hands on from serious literature to thrillers and comics. As a schoolboy he made 8mm and 16mm amateur films.
His fascination with Thirties Hollywood dance films determined the nature of his career. “They had a kind of sensuality of movement which really took hold of me,” he reflected. “I decided then and there that I was going to try to make films which would have the same effect on people.”
He moved to Paris and flirted with an acting career before studying film editing and directing at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques; after a year he left, to his later regret, without completing the course. In place of such formal training he drew instead on his appreciation of comic books. “What I know about cinema is learned as much from comics as from films,” he admitted. “The rules of how to cut, how to frame, are the same.”
During a year’s military service in 1945 he served entertaining Allied troops in Germany and Austria and after the Second World War made 16mm shorts and medium lengths films, beginning his career in professional film as an editor and cameraman.
Although two of his short early films were fiction – one featuring his neighbour, the actor Gérard Philipe – mostly they were documentary studies of modern painters, which he made in order to meet the artists concerned and to learn about their work.
Some were shown on French television, but it was his first commissioned documentary – on Van Gogh in 1948 – that launched his career as a director. Similar shorts on Gauguin, and on Picasso’s Guernica, which he co-directed with Robert Hessens and for which Paul Eluard wrote the script, also brought him credit, though none of them hinted at the distinctive, somewhat surrealistic style which was to make him famous.
He collaborated with Chris Marker on an anti-colonial short about the decline of African art (Les Statues Meurent Aussi), but it was Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), a study of Nazi concentration camps, which he made with Jean Cayrol, that struck the deepest chord with connoisseurs. It explored what were to become some of his favourite themes – the way in which the cinema could juggle time and memory, past, and present and future, as well as place and space. Powerful yet understated, the film showed Resnais’s ability to handle the rawest of emotions with subtlety and grace, and remains one of his most admired pieces of work.
His distinct visual style emerged more fully in Toute la Mémoire du Monde (1957), which dealt with France’s national library and its miles of corridors and bookshelves. Long, tracking shots conveyed Proustian preoccupations with remembrance of things past and contributed to an elevated, if oblique, view of the archives.
Two other documentaries, Le Mystère de l’Atelier Quinze (1957), which was about industrial illness, and Le Chant du Styrène (1958), about the production of polystyrene (with a witty commentary by the fashionable avant-garde writer Raymond Queneau) completed a series of finely imaginative and inventive short films which some of his critics still consider to be among his most accomplished pieces. Already his reputation was such that fellow New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard was moved to describe Resnais as the “second greatest director in the world after [Sergei] Eisenstein”.
With his first full-length feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Resnais created something of a sensation. Collaborating again with a distinguished avant-garde writer (this time Marguerite Duras), he applied his elaborate editing technique to a stylised evocation of an affair in Hiroshima between a French film star and her Japanese lover, while also portraying her remembered love for a German soldier whom she had met in France earlier in the Second World War.
“I wanted to compose a sort of poem in which the images would work only as a counterpoint to the text,” Resnais noted. His treatment of this story of sudden physical passion was neither sensuous nor sensual but highly intelligent, like all his work; criticism was principally about its emotional coldness, and if Resnais cared more for places and landscapes rather than people and character.
In his second and most resolutely surrealist feature film, L’Année Dernière A Marienbad (1961), scripted by the nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet, Resnais seemed to wallow in ambiguities. Mystery surrounded the film’s three principal characters, and after its release Resnais and Robbe-Grillet only added to the confusion by suggesting conflicting explanations for the plot.
Are the couple who meet so mysteriously in the elegant setting of a grand European spa-hotel former lovers or prospective lovers? Their dialogue and relationship remains as puzzling as their situation, which can be taken as a profoundly arresting exploration of time and memory, reality and imagination, or dismissed as beautifully photographed bunk.
Perhaps most significantly for Resnais, however, it got everybody talking about the art of the cinema and what the director would do with it next.
Muriel (1963) divided opinions sharply between those who admiringly and unquestioningly sat back and let the narrative, however foggy, float by, and those who found themselves running out of patience with the on-screen swirl of undefined relationships. Events were, it was true, somewhat less baffling than before. Based on a story by Jean Cayrol, they concerned a widow in Boulogne (Delphine Seyrig), who invites a former lover to dinner with her and her stepson; he accepts, arriving with his so-called niece. Again the editing – with its flashbacks and juxtapositions – filled the screen with implications and rumination.
For some these uncertainties hinted at fracture and fragility in France’s national identity as the colonial war in Algeria reached a decisive moment; for many spectators, however, it again proved a tale of passion that was strangely and disappointingly passionless, and in which the presence of Delphine Seyrig proved the main consolation.
La Guerre Est Finie (The War Is Over, 1966) was Resnais’s most romantic film and featured Yves Montand reliving in his mind the Spanish Civil War. With a script by the political writer Jorge Semprun, a Spaniard, and with Ingrid Thulin as Montand’s mistress, it enjoyed modest success. Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime (1968), by contrast, was an all-out flop. Working with the Belgian writer, Jacques Sternberg, Resnais approached his favourite theme through science fiction, postulating a hero injected with a serum to see if he can relive a moment of his life. To audiences the result appeared more or less random, and no one knew whom to blame for the failure – the scriptwriter, the actors or Resnais himself.
Half a decade would pass before Resnais’s work again made it to the screen. Thankfully Stavinsky (1974), the story of a swindler who brings down the French government in the Thirties, was a hit. Paying homage to the era of Art Deco and to the style of film-making before the Second World War, Resnais evoked a vanished epoch without much fog or too much fanciful editing. A cast including Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Boyer pointed up the theme of gambling as a way of exorcising fear of death, but also underlined the film’s commercial flavour.
This trend continued in Providence (1977), with which Resnais enjoyed a popular success. This he owed to two factors: first, the film was in English; and, secondly, it had a starry cast led by John Gielgud.
The celebrated actor played an ageing novelist sitting for most of the film on a garden lavatory, seeking a subject for his next book . The novelist’s family appear to him in various guises, and Resnais’s preoccupations report for duty once again: identity, time, place and whether what we are watching is real or imaginary. By this stage in his career few people were still trying to make literal sense of a Resnais film; it was a relief not to have to try.
Popular success continued with Mon Oncle d’Amerique (My American Uncle, 1980), a typically fragmented study of three French youths from different backgrounds observed by a professor of social behaviour. It won the Special Prize at Cannes, and earned considerable respect with audiences.
Despite his recurring themes, however, Resnais’s work did evolve. From the early Eighties, often working repeatedly with the same actors, he incorporated musical and theatrical tropes into his work. La Vie Est Un Roman (Life is a bed of Roses, 1983) alternated song and dialogue to tell three stories set in different eras; L’Amour a Mort (Love unto Death, 1984), was a four-hander in which Resnais conceived of music as a “fifth character”. Meanwhile Gershwin (1992), a documentary; On Connait La Chanson (Same Old Song, 1997), which was openly indebted to the work of Dennis Potter; and the filmed operetta Pas sur la Bouche (Not on the Lips, 2003), all signalled his interest in popular song and theatrical form.
The latter concern he had already made explicit in two films: Mélo (1986) an adaptation of a play from the Twenties, and Smoking/No Smoking (1993), from Alan Ayckbourn’s play Intimate Exchanges. Smoking/No Smoking saw all the female characters in the three distinct stories played by Sabine Azema, while another Resnais regular, Pierre Arditi, took on all male roles, as Resnais guided audiences through possible consequences of apparently trifling decisions.
Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places, 2006) was another Ayckbourn adaptation, as was his last project Aimer, Boire et Chanter (The Life of Riley, 2013) which was well received at the Berlin film festival last month. Though unlikely to convert many Resnais detractors, the film proved that the director had become an extremely graceful and skilful orchestrator of themes, that were, by their nature, convoluted and hard to portray.
Alain Resnais married, first, in 1969, Florence Malraux, daughter of the novelist Andre Malreaux. He married, secondly, in 1998, Sabine Azema.
Alain Resnais, born June 3 1922, died March 1 2014
And no fact of Alain Resnais’s life seemed to strike a stranger note than his assertion that the films which first inspired his ambition to become a film director were those in which Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced. Or was it Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler? He could never be sure. “I wondered if I could find the equivalent of that exhilaration,” he recalled.
If he never did it was perhaps because of his highly cultivated attitude to serious cinema. His character and temperament were more attuned to the theory of film and a kind of intellectual square dance which was far harder to bring to the screen with “exhilaration” than the art of Astaire and Rogers.
Alan Resnais was born at Vannes, Brittany, on June 3 1922, where his father was a pharmacist. A sickly child, he had a severe Jesuit education and was a voracious reader, consuming everything he could get his hands on from serious literature to thrillers and comics. As a schoolboy he made 8mm and 16mm amateur films.
His fascination with Thirties Hollywood dance films determined the nature of his career. “They had a kind of sensuality of movement which really took hold of me,” he reflected. “I decided then and there that I was going to try to make films which would have the same effect on people.”
He moved to Paris and flirted with an acting career before studying film editing and directing at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques; after a year he left, to his later regret, without completing the course. In place of such formal training he drew instead on his appreciation of comic books. “What I know about cinema is learned as much from comics as from films,” he admitted. “The rules of how to cut, how to frame, are the same.”
During a year’s military service in 1945 he served entertaining Allied troops in Germany and Austria and after the Second World War made 16mm shorts and medium lengths films, beginning his career in professional film as an editor and cameraman.
Although two of his short early films were fiction – one featuring his neighbour, the actor Gérard Philipe – mostly they were documentary studies of modern painters, which he made in order to meet the artists concerned and to learn about their work.
Some were shown on French television, but it was his first commissioned documentary – on Van Gogh in 1948 – that launched his career as a director. Similar shorts on Gauguin, and on Picasso’s Guernica, which he co-directed with Robert Hessens and for which Paul Eluard wrote the script, also brought him credit, though none of them hinted at the distinctive, somewhat surrealistic style which was to make him famous.
He collaborated with Chris Marker on an anti-colonial short about the decline of African art (Les Statues Meurent Aussi), but it was Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955), a study of Nazi concentration camps, which he made with Jean Cayrol, that struck the deepest chord with connoisseurs. It explored what were to become some of his favourite themes – the way in which the cinema could juggle time and memory, past, and present and future, as well as place and space. Powerful yet understated, the film showed Resnais’s ability to handle the rawest of emotions with subtlety and grace, and remains one of his most admired pieces of work.
His distinct visual style emerged more fully in Toute la Mémoire du Monde (1957), which dealt with France’s national library and its miles of corridors and bookshelves. Long, tracking shots conveyed Proustian preoccupations with remembrance of things past and contributed to an elevated, if oblique, view of the archives.
Two other documentaries, Le Mystère de l’Atelier Quinze (1957), which was about industrial illness, and Le Chant du Styrène (1958), about the production of polystyrene (with a witty commentary by the fashionable avant-garde writer Raymond Queneau) completed a series of finely imaginative and inventive short films which some of his critics still consider to be among his most accomplished pieces. Already his reputation was such that fellow New Wave icon Jean-Luc Godard was moved to describe Resnais as the “second greatest director in the world after [Sergei] Eisenstein”.
With his first full-length feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Resnais created something of a sensation. Collaborating again with a distinguished avant-garde writer (this time Marguerite Duras), he applied his elaborate editing technique to a stylised evocation of an affair in Hiroshima between a French film star and her Japanese lover, while also portraying her remembered love for a German soldier whom she had met in France earlier in the Second World War.
“I wanted to compose a sort of poem in which the images would work only as a counterpoint to the text,” Resnais noted. His treatment of this story of sudden physical passion was neither sensuous nor sensual but highly intelligent, like all his work; criticism was principally about its emotional coldness, and if Resnais cared more for places and landscapes rather than people and character.
In his second and most resolutely surrealist feature film, L’Année Dernière A Marienbad (1961), scripted by the nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet, Resnais seemed to wallow in ambiguities. Mystery surrounded the film’s three principal characters, and after its release Resnais and Robbe-Grillet only added to the confusion by suggesting conflicting explanations for the plot.
Are the couple who meet so mysteriously in the elegant setting of a grand European spa-hotel former lovers or prospective lovers? Their dialogue and relationship remains as puzzling as their situation, which can be taken as a profoundly arresting exploration of time and memory, reality and imagination, or dismissed as beautifully photographed bunk.
Perhaps most significantly for Resnais, however, it got everybody talking about the art of the cinema and what the director would do with it next.
Muriel (1963) divided opinions sharply between those who admiringly and unquestioningly sat back and let the narrative, however foggy, float by, and those who found themselves running out of patience with the on-screen swirl of undefined relationships. Events were, it was true, somewhat less baffling than before. Based on a story by Jean Cayrol, they concerned a widow in Boulogne (Delphine Seyrig), who invites a former lover to dinner with her and her stepson; he accepts, arriving with his so-called niece. Again the editing – with its flashbacks and juxtapositions – filled the screen with implications and rumination.
For some these uncertainties hinted at fracture and fragility in France’s national identity as the colonial war in Algeria reached a decisive moment; for many spectators, however, it again proved a tale of passion that was strangely and disappointingly passionless, and in which the presence of Delphine Seyrig proved the main consolation.
La Guerre Est Finie (The War Is Over, 1966) was Resnais’s most romantic film and featured Yves Montand reliving in his mind the Spanish Civil War. With a script by the political writer Jorge Semprun, a Spaniard, and with Ingrid Thulin as Montand’s mistress, it enjoyed modest success. Je t’Aime, Je t’Aime (1968), by contrast, was an all-out flop. Working with the Belgian writer, Jacques Sternberg, Resnais approached his favourite theme through science fiction, postulating a hero injected with a serum to see if he can relive a moment of his life. To audiences the result appeared more or less random, and no one knew whom to blame for the failure – the scriptwriter, the actors or Resnais himself.
Half a decade would pass before Resnais’s work again made it to the screen. Thankfully Stavinsky (1974), the story of a swindler who brings down the French government in the Thirties, was a hit. Paying homage to the era of Art Deco and to the style of film-making before the Second World War, Resnais evoked a vanished epoch without much fog or too much fanciful editing. A cast including Jean-Paul Belmondo and Charles Boyer pointed up the theme of gambling as a way of exorcising fear of death, but also underlined the film’s commercial flavour.
This trend continued in Providence (1977), with which Resnais enjoyed a popular success. This he owed to two factors: first, the film was in English; and, secondly, it had a starry cast led by John Gielgud.
The celebrated actor played an ageing novelist sitting for most of the film on a garden lavatory, seeking a subject for his next book . The novelist’s family appear to him in various guises, and Resnais’s preoccupations report for duty once again: identity, time, place and whether what we are watching is real or imaginary. By this stage in his career few people were still trying to make literal sense of a Resnais film; it was a relief not to have to try.
Popular success continued with Mon Oncle d’Amerique (My American Uncle, 1980), a typically fragmented study of three French youths from different backgrounds observed by a professor of social behaviour. It won the Special Prize at Cannes, and earned considerable respect with audiences.
Despite his recurring themes, however, Resnais’s work did evolve. From the early Eighties, often working repeatedly with the same actors, he incorporated musical and theatrical tropes into his work. La Vie Est Un Roman (Life is a bed of Roses, 1983) alternated song and dialogue to tell three stories set in different eras; L’Amour a Mort (Love unto Death, 1984), was a four-hander in which Resnais conceived of music as a “fifth character”. Meanwhile Gershwin (1992), a documentary; On Connait La Chanson (Same Old Song, 1997), which was openly indebted to the work of Dennis Potter; and the filmed operetta Pas sur la Bouche (Not on the Lips, 2003), all signalled his interest in popular song and theatrical form.
The latter concern he had already made explicit in two films: Mélo (1986) an adaptation of a play from the Twenties, and Smoking/No Smoking (1993), from Alan Ayckbourn’s play Intimate Exchanges. Smoking/No Smoking saw all the female characters in the three distinct stories played by Sabine Azema, while another Resnais regular, Pierre Arditi, took on all male roles, as Resnais guided audiences through possible consequences of apparently trifling decisions.
Coeurs (Private Fears in Public Places, 2006) was another Ayckbourn adaptation, as was his last project Aimer, Boire et Chanter (The Life of Riley, 2013) which was well received at the Berlin film festival last month. Though unlikely to convert many Resnais detractors, the film proved that the director had become an extremely graceful and skilful orchestrator of themes, that were, by their nature, convoluted and hard to portray.
Alain Resnais married, first, in 1969, Florence Malraux, daughter of the novelist Andre Malreaux. He married, secondly, in 1998, Sabine Azema.
Alain Resnais, born June 3 1922, died March 1 2014
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