Name
Alain Resnais
Known For
Directing
Birthday
1922-06-03
Deathday
2014-03-01 (92 years old)
Place of Birth
Vannes, Morbihan, Bretagne, France
Biography
Alain Resnais (3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter 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.
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.
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. Throughout his career, he won many awards from international film festivals and academies.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Alain Resnais, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Known For
7.67
The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of...
5.7
In this whimsical fable, Resnais deftly interweaves three story lines: the creation of an ...
7.4
At a weekend gathering, a man tells a woman that they had spent time there together a year...
8.3
Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentratio...
6.6
On the eve of his 78th birthday, ailing, alcoholic writer Clive Langham spends a painful a...
6.5
On his way from Madrid to Paris, Diego, a chief of the Spanish Communist Party, is arreste...
6.9
In the seacoast town of Boulogne, antique furniture saleswoman Hélène lives with her ste...
6.805
At the end of the 15th century, a man and a woman, posing as traveling minstrels, are sent...
5.914
Biarritz, 1933. Charm and talent assist small-time swindler Serge Alexandre, alias Stavisk...
6.7
Elisabeth and Simon have been deeply in love for two months when Simon momentarily dies, b...
- 1942 The Devil's Envoys as Extra (uncredited)
- 2022 Alain Resnais, the Audacious as Self (archive footage)
- 1978 May Days as Self
- 2022 Bacri, comme un air de famille as Self (archive footage)
- 2005 Hiroshima: The Time of Return as (voice)
- 1963 The Lovely Month of May as Self (uncredited)
- 2007 Propos d'Alain Resnais as Self (voice)
- 2019 In the Ears of Alain Resnais as Self (archive footage)
- 1962 Sign of the Lion as Un Consommateur (uncredited)
- 2022 Belmondo: The Incorrigible
- 2021 Morceaux de Cannes
- 1956 Cinépanorama ( 1 episode ) as Self
- 1978 Ciné regards ( 1 episode ) as Self
