Alain Resnais

Biography: life and films

The memory man

The cinema of Alain Resnais is one that appears to be fixated on the complexities and functioning of the human mind. The interplay between memory and the imagination, from which we derive our notion of self and an awareness of the passage of time, is a recurring motif in Resnais's films, and in his multiple explorations of human consciousness the filmmaker would frequently cross the boundaries into other modes of artistic expression - literature, music, painting, even comic books. It would be a gross simplification to sum up Resnais's diverse body of work as the cinematic equivalent of Marcel Proust's grand literary tome À la recherche du temps perdu, but it is instructive to make comparisons between these two daring attempts to use art, almost as a scientific instrument, to probe the workings of the human mind.

Resnais may have been a contemporary of the French New Wave, but he never regarded himself as being part of that movement. Indeed, his approach to filmmaking was in many ways at variance with that of, say, Truffaut and Godard, two committed advocates of the auteur principle. For one thing, Resnais seldom worked on the screenplays for his films, preferring to hand this job over to an experienced writer (usually one with an impressive pedigree) so that he could concentrate on his sphere of expertise. He was therefore right to regard his films as collaborative ventures, with the writer and director having a roughly equal level of artistic input into the end product.

For his early features, Resnais worked exclusively with leading exponents of the Nouveau Roman (New Novel) - notably Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Cayrol - and these films can be considered as attempts to develop a new form of cinematic expression from this advanced literary form. This strong association with modernism also served to set Resnais apart from his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, and brought him into alignment with the so-called Nouveau Cinéma or Left Bank group, which included other notable experimentalists of the early 1960s, such as Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Georges Franju and Pierre Kast.

In the decade before the arrival of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais had steadily gained his reputation as an avant-garde documentary filmmaker, winning acclaim and prizes galore with a series of short films that were distinguished by their poetry, visual flair and arresting humanity. Some of these dealt with themes that the director would develop in his subsequent features, most importantly the role that collective and personal memory play in determining who we are and how we experience life.

As he matured as an artist, Resnais would move away from everyday concerns such as contemporary politics and become increasingly preoccupied with form, his films acquiring a heightened sense of artificiality and abstraction as he sought to bring in other kinds of artistic expression. His later films are far more theatrical than cinematic in form, and yet still have a powerful resonance, dealing as they do with concerns that are of interest to us all - the nature of love, the existence of free will, the trauma of loneliness, facing up to our mortality, and so on. For all its experimentation with form and style, Resnais's cinema is remarkably consistent in its preoccupation with the most essential aspects of human existence - and therein lies its enduring appeal.

His early life

Alain-Pierre-Marie-Jean-Georges Resnais, to give him his full name, was of Breton origin, born in Vannes, Morbihan on 3rd June 1922. The son of a pharmacist, he enjoyed a comfortable cultured upbringing and shared his parents' keen interest in classic literature from an early age. Other passions included photography, painting and comic books. At the age of 12, he was given a Kodak cine-camera with which he made a number of 8 mm short films, including his own version of Fantômas.

Intent on pursuing a career as an actor, Resnais moved to Paris in 1939 and took drama lessons at the Cours Simon. He became an assistant to Georges Pitoëff at the Théâtre des Mathurins and made his screen debut as an extra in Marcel Carné's Les Visiteurs du soir (1942). In 1943 he enrolled in the recently established French film school IDHEC to study film editing. After completing his military service in Germany, he returned to Paris and resumed his theatrical career. It was around this time that he began making his first professional films, beginning with two that are no longer in existence - a documentary short, Schéma d'une identification (1946), with Gérard Philipe and a fictional feature, Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (1946), starring Danièle Delorme.

Resnais then embarked on a series of silent short films dedicated to eminent painters such as Lucien Coutard, Félix Labisse and Max Ernst. One of his early films was a short entitled Le Sommeil d'Albertine, inspired by Marcel Proust's In Search Of Lost Time. Proust's celebrated novel would impinge on much of Resnais's subsequent work, feeding his fascination with the relationship between time and memory that is so fundamental to all human experience.

In 1947, Resnais assisted director Nichole Védrès on her ambitious documentary feature Paris 1900, and co-directed the short L'Alcool tue with Remo Forlani, adopting the pseudonym Alzin Rezarail. The following year, he made the film that first earned him international recognition, Van Gogh (1948). Produced by Pierre Braunberger, this short met with considerable acclaim, even though it eschewed historical accuracy in favour of the popular myth about the artist. It received a prize at the 1948 Venice Film Festival (the CIDALC Award) and an Oscar for Best Short film in 1950. Resnais followed this with a similar work, Gauguin (1950), but his dismissed this as a failure because it was less experimental.

A master of the short film

Over the course of the next decade, Alain Resnais became one of Europe's most revered short film makers. A passionate exponent of the short, at a time when it was all but overtaken by the feature, he continued to garner favourable critical attention for a series of works that are among his finest. These include Guernica (1950), a stirring meditation on the Spanish Civil War and its effect on how the worst atrocities of the conflict are now perceived, and Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1956), the first documentary on the Nazi concentration camps, still a remarkably moving piece of cinema and a worthy recipient of the Prix Jean Vigo.

Between these two celluloid monuments to the horrors of the 20th century Resnais collaborated with Chris Marker on another remarkable short, Les Statues meurent aussi (1953). Commissioned by Présence Africaine, an African cultural and political magazine, this started out as a film on African art but ended up as a powerful anti-colonialist statement, winning the Prix Jean Vigo in 1954. Resnais then worked with Agnès Varda, in the capacity of editor, on her first film, La Pointe-Courte (1955).

In 1956, Resnais received a state commission to make a short documentary film on the Bibliothèque Nationale. Entitled Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), this eloquent tribute to France's national library is distinguished by its dazzling use of camera movement, in particular the long tracking shots that create a sense of unending space and timelessness, a device that Resnais would use to great effect on his subsequent films. This was followed by Le Mystère de l'atelier quinze (1957), a public service film condemning working conditions in factories whilst arguing in favour of preventative measures to benefit the workforce. His next short, Chant du styrène (1958), was commissioned by the company Pechiney and offers an alluring visual poem to that ubiquitous modern marvel, polystyrene.

Time and memory

It was purely by chance that Alain Resnais's feature debut (if we disregard his lost 1946 offering) coincided with the arrival of the French New Wave. The latter movement had its official baptism at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, with the first screening of François Truffaut's Les 400 coups. Resnais's first feature, Hiroshima mon amour, was also shown for the first time at this festival, but was barred from the competition through fear that it might offend the Americans.

Scripted by Marguerite Duras, one of the leading exponents of the Nouveau Roman, this first feature was originally conceived as a documentary about the atomic bomb but developed into something far more potent and original. Dispensing with conventional narrative form, Hiroshima mon amour picks up Proustian ideas about the interrelationship of time and memory and shows how the past and present become inextricably linked in the human mind, to the extent that neither can be objectively separated from the other. Co-winner of the Prix Méliès in 1959 with Truffaut's debut feature, the film divided the critics but went on to become a huge commercial success, attracting an audience of 2.2 million in France and enjoying similar popularity in the United States.

The interdependence of time and memory became a crucial thematic trope of Resnais's early features and has its most poetic expression in his 1961 film L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), an impressive collaboration with another eminent Nouveau Roman writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet. Famous for its haunting opening sequence consisting of a five-minute montage of long gliding tracking shots through the deserted passages of a sprawling baroque palace, this dreamlike rendering of a classic melodramatic plot (a man returns to steal the woman he loves from her husband) created something of a sensation in France on its first release. It was hailed by some as a modernist masterpiece, dismissed by others as pretentious nonsense.

The unreliability of memory lies at the heart of the drama, with the two central protagonists (one played by a captivating screen debutante, Delphine Seyrig) unable to agree on whether they had an intense love affair the previous year. With its frustrating ambiguities, displacements in time, highly stylised compositions and endless repetitions, Marienbad has the feel of a dream-maze from which the spectator, like the characters trapped within it, can never escape. This seductively crafted flight of fancy received one of cinema's highest accolades, the Golden Lion award at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, and is now widely considered a triumph of modernist cinema.

With Muriel, ou le Temps d'un retour (1963), Resnais (in collaboration with writer Jean Cayrol) dared to broach one of the more contentious issues of his day - the Algerian War. Once again, the director employs a fractured narrative structure, this time in an attempt to get across the troubled consciences and splintered identities of his protagonists as they come to terms with past mistakes that look set to blight their lives forever. Now regarded as one of the director's most remarkable films, Muriel failed to engage either the audiences or the critics when it was first seen - perhaps because the time was not yet right to face the unpalatable truths of France's most shameless military escapade.

La Guerre est finie (1966) was a more overtly political film, offering a contemporary realist account of the activities of leftwing opponents to Franco's oppressive regime in modern day Spain. Scripted by the distinguished Spanish writer Jorge Semprún and starring Yves Montand, a prominent communist sympathiser, the film is the most conventional of Resnais's features and was honoured with the Prix Louis-Delluc and Prix Méliès in 1966. It attracted a respectable audience of 0.8 million in France but, being very much a product of its time, it has not enjoyed the longevity of its author's other films and is now all too easily overlooked. The same applies to Resnais's contribution to the well-meaning but flawed anthology film Loin du Vietnam (1967).

Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) steals a central idea from Chris Marker's famous short La Jetée (1962) and has its central protagonist (Claude Rich) being sent back into his own past in an attempt to alter the course of human history for the better. Resnais and his screenwriter Jacques Sternberg have some fun playing with a somewhat well-worn sci-fi conceit, employing a time machine to further develop Proust's ideas about the interdependency of time and memory, consciousness and imagination. This quirky reinterpretation of Time Regained is baffling for the most part but it comes together at the end with a blistering lucidity and rates as possibly the director's most successful attempt to capture on film the temporal-experiential relationships that Proust explores so powerfully in his seven-volume novel.

Illusions and delusions

It would be six years before Alain Resnais directed his next full-length film, Stavisky (1974). In the interim, he married Florence Malraux, the daughter of the prominent writer and politician André Malraux; she worked as an assistant on many of the films he made between 1961 and 1986. He also made a contribution to Jacques Doillon's anarchic comedy L'An 01, a short sequence depicting a stock-market panic. For Stavisky, a classy period drama depicting the dramatic downfall of the notorious 1930s swindler Serge Alexandre, Resnais once again teamed up with the writer Jorge Semprún and delivered his most overtly commercial film (although it only attracted an audience of one million, despite the casting of Jean-Paul Belmondo in the lead role).

Providence (1977) allowed Alain Resnais to explore the workings of the creative process, in collaboration with the eminent British playwright David Mercer and a bevy of distinguished British actors - Dirk Bogarde, John Gielgud, David Warner and Cyril Luckham. A hit with the critics, the film won no fewer than seven Césars, in categories that included Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography. For all its narrative complexity the plot can be summarised in one sentence: an ageing writer working on what may be his final novel seeks inspiration by conjuring up alternative versions of his own past. Here we have another take on a key Resnais theme, the role that imagination plays in our conscious awareness of the world. This time, the intention was to come at the subject from a darkly comedic angle, and the director described it as a 'macabre divertissement'.

The same epithet might be applied to the director's next film Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980), a wryly amusing flirtation with the idea of cosmic determinism. Informed by the theories of the distinguished philosopher Henri Laborit, the film presents three interweaving stories in which the protagonists' actions are entirely determined by their biology, social circumstances and environment, with no place for free will. With star-of-the-moment Gérard Depardieu headlining the film (in what is possibly his most unsuitable role) it's no surprise that it was a hit with the French public, attracting an audience of 1.3 million. Despite six nominations, the film failed to win a single César, although it did take the Grand Jury Prize at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.

Further experiments in form

The futility of seeking Utopia in this world is the subject of Resnais's next film, La Vie est un roman (1983), With its three interconnected plot strands depicting effectively the same story in three different time frames, this represents a more daring experimentation with narrative form and a transition towards the more stylised approach that Resnais would employ on all of his subsequent features. The film brings together the three actors making up the director's regular troupe from this point on - Sabine Azéma (his future life companion and wife), Pierre Arditi and André Dussollier, along with Fanny Ardant.

The same quartet of talent would feature in Resnais's next two films, L'Amour à mort (1984) and Mélo (1986). The first of these offers another, far more sombre, meditation on how time and memory shape our lives, forging a conscious awareness that allows us to fashion a sense of order out of the chaos of existence. With its rigidly linear narrative structure, Mélo would seem to be the complete antithesis of the director's earlier work. Taken from a once popular stage play by Henri Bernstein, Mélo is meticulously constructed as a musical composition and resembles a piece of filmed theatre, although this surface impression gradually dissolves as the film acquires a heightened sense of reality through some incredibly subtle acting and camerawork.

At the start of his filmmaking career, Alain Resnais had a hankering to adapt one of his favourite comic books but somehow never managed to fulfil this ambition. A passionate devotee of the genre, Resnais was an avid collector of bandes dessinées from his youth and in the course of his life he amassed one of the largest collections in France. I Want to Go Home (1989) was the sole film in which he was able to indulge his obsessive love of comic books, aided and abetted by the American cartoonist Jules Feiffer. Despite its imaginative premise and the presence of such stars as Gérard Depardieu and Micheline Presle the film proved to be the director's most spectacular flop, barely drawing an audience of 40 thousand in France.

Smoking / No Smoking (1993) was the first of three films adapted from plays by the acclaimed British playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The popular screenwriting duo Jean-Pierre Bacri and Agnès Jaoui had the challenge of reworking and condensing Ayckbourn's eight plays making up his Intimate Exchanges cycle into two two-hour length films, and the result is one of Resnais's most engaging and entertaining screen offerings. Offering a multiplicity of endings from the same starting point, this stylish diptych explores the concept of free will to humorous and tragic effect, slyly counterpointing the director's earlier Mon oncle d'Amérique.

Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi were called upon to play all nine roles in the film, a tour de force that earned them nominations for the top acting César in 1994 (sadly only Arditi walked away with the award). Of the nine César nominations, the film achieved five wins, in categories that included Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Looking like a low budget BBC2 television play from the early 1980s, Smoking / No Smoking boldly asserts the more consciously stylised approach that would distinguish the director's final decade of filmmaking.

With On connaît la chanson (1997) Alain Resnais made his first foray into musical comedy. Inspired by Dennis Potter's musical serials for British television (The Singing Detective (1986), Lipstick on Your Collar (1993)), the film has its protagonists breaking into song at key moments, the actors lip-synched with snatches from popular songs. This highly original variation on a familiar theme proved to be immensely popular both with critics and the cinema-going public. It was to be Resnais's most successful film (with an audience of 2.6 million) and received twelve César nominations, with seven wins in categories including Best Film, Best Screenplay, Best Actor (André Dussollier) and Best Editing.

Resnais stuck with the musical form for his next feature, Pas sur la bouche (2003), taken from a long forgotten operetta of the 1920s. Far more theatrical than the director's previous musical fling and lacking that film's contemporary situations this was somewhat less of a success, although it still drew a respectable 0.6 million cinema-goers in France. The film's main appeal is its eclectic cast, which offers the most unlikely ensemble comprising Resnais's regular troupe along with Audrey Tautou, Jalil Lespert and Darry Cowl.

Just two years after it was first performed, Alan Ayckbourn's play Private Fears in Public Places was picked up by Resnais and adapted as Coeurs (2006), an intensely melancholic study in loneliness in modern times. The oppressive restrained theatricality of this film stands in stark contrast to the wild cinematographic excesses of the director's next film, Les Herbes folles (2009), a surreal love story based on a novel by Christian Gailly. After these two moderate successes, Resnais fell out of favour with audiences and critics with what was to be his penultimate film, Vous n'avez encore rien vu (2012), a self-indulgent study in the relation between art and life inspired by two Jean Anouilh plays.

The director was back on form for his swansong offering, Aimer, boire et chanter (2014), an inspired adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn's 2010 stage play Life of Riley. This film was released just a few weeks after Resnais's death on 1st March 2014. Aged 91, the director was preparing another adaptation of an Ayckbourn play, Arrivals and Departures, when he fell ill and had to go into hospital in Neuilly-sur-Seine, where he died within a week. He is now buried in Montparnasse cemetery, Paris. At the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, Alain Resnais's immense contribution to cinema was honoured with the Carrosse d'or, awarded by the Quinzaine des réalisateurs.

Filmography

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