Alain Resnais - biography

1922-

Biography

One of France’s most distinctive and highly regarded directors, Alain Resnais was born in Vannes, France, in 1922. He studied at L`Institut hautes études cinématographiques before starting a career as a film-maker in the mid-1940s, making short films. Of these, the most celebrated is Nuit et brouillard (1955), an eye-opening and devastatingly poignant documentary about deportations and Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.

Resnais’ first full-length film was Hiroshima mon amour (1959), an unusual romantic drama which was developed from an idea for a short documentary. The film was critically acclaimed in France and abroad and won Resnais instant fame, establishing him as a major director of the French New Wave. His following film, L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961), was no less successful, a remarkable interplay of time and memory with some unforgettable visual imagery.

Although less prolific and reactionary than some of his New Wave contemporaries, Alain Resnais continued to make original and provocative cinema which was, for the most part, well received by the critics. This included films such as Muriel (1963) , La guerre est finie (1966), Stavisky (1974) and Providence (1977), the latter of which won him seven awards at the Césars in 1978.

After a few disappointments in the 1980s, Alain Resnais regained his reputation for inventive and highly artistic cinema in the 1990s. In Smoking/No Smoking (based on a series of plays by the distinguished English playwright Alan Ayckbourn), the stark minimalism which characterises Resnais’ later films is carried to its logical extreme, although the film is utterly compelling. This was followed by On connaît la chanson (1997) and Pas sur la bouche (2003), in which the director experimented with musical ideas, inviting favourable comparisons with the work of the English television writer Dennis Potter.

The cinema of Alain Resnais has always been challenging the boundaries and our assumptions of what cinema should be about, perhaps more successfully than any other director. Although some of his films are highly artistic, abstract and inaccessible, others have won notable mainstream success. Few directors have achieved this degree of diversity whilst pursuing an extraordinarily artistic vision of cinema. Alain Resnais’ work is challenging, mysterious and often entertaining, but it is also remarkably coherent, showing a keen appreciation of human issues whilst exposing a creative force of great talent and daring.

Alain Resnais is best-known for the following films:

Alain Resnais Quotes

“I am never driven. Every film I’ve made has been an assignment.”

“I never thought of becoming a director. When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me - I still watch silent films.”

“I’d even say it’s a realistic film because that’s the way it happens in our heads; that was the idea.”

“Luck, I never looked to make difficult movies on purpose. You make the films you can make.”

“Oh, yes, that never happened to me in my life before. It was a risky film, and I warned the producer.”

“So I used formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally.”

“That’s easy to answer: I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film.”

“Since we had little money and few documents, we had nothing.”

“There was a darkness, a melancholy, that people had trouble accepting. Maybe now, it would work better.”

“I saw part of The Singing Detective on TV in New York. I said, Something is going on here.”

“It was repugnant, but it was the only way to communicate.”

“The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn’t be in flashback.”

Filmography

The Film Director