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Alain Resnais |
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Director / Editor |
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1922 - |
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Born June 3,
Vannes, Morbihan, Bretagne, France |
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Key
Production Countries: France, Italy |
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Key Genres:
Drama, Psychological Drama,
Short Film,
Avant-garde/Experimental,
Comedy of Manners,
Romantic Drama,
Ensemble Film |
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Key
Collaborators: Jacques Saulnier (Production Designer),
Sacha
Vierny (Cinematographer), Sabine Azema (Leading Player), Pierre Arditi
(Leading Player), Albert Jurgenson (Editor), Andre Dussollier
(Leading Player), Herve de Luze (Editor), Bruno Pesery (Producer),
Pierre Braunberger (Producer), Claude Rich (Leading
Character Player) |
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Highly
Recommended: Night
and Fog (1955)*, Le Chant du Styrène (1958), Muriel (1963)* |
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Recommended:
Toute la mémoire du monde (1956),
Hiroshima mon amour (1959)*, Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980)* |
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Worth
a Look: Guernica (1950), Last Year in Marienbad
(1961)*, La Guerra Est Finie (1966), Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968), Stavisky (1974), Providence (1977)*, L'Amour a Mort (1984), Melo (1986), Smoking/No Smoking (1993), Same Old
Song (1997), Private Fears in Public Places
(2006), Wild Grass (2009) |
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Approach with Caution: Not on the
Lips (2003) |
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* Listed in TSPDT's
1,000 Greatest Films
section. |
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Links:
[
Amazon
]
[
IMDB ] [
TCMDB ] [
All-Movie
Guide ] [
Film Reference ]
[
Boston Globe Article (2010) ] [
Strictly
Film School ] [
Wikipedia ] [
The Stream of
Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais (Book Website) ] [
Films de France ] [
New York Times Article (2007) ] [
Guardian Article (2007) ] [
Moving Image Source Article (2008) ]
[
Harvard Film Archive Program ] |
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Books:
[
Alain Resnais (French Film Directors) ] [
The
Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais ] [
Alain Resnais (French Film Directors) ] |
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"Resnais's
filmic output has been relatively small. He nonetheless
stands as a significant figure in modernist cinema. His
strategies of fragmented point-of-view and multiple
temporality, as well as his use of the medium to convey
past/present and fantasy/imagination/reality as equivocal
and equivalent modes of experience have amplified our
understanding of film's capacity for expression." -
M.B.
White (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers,
1991) |
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"Resnais
has made fifteen feature films in forty years, and has
confessed sometimes to wondering where a next picture might
come from. Is this sparseness the result of an
uncompromisingly difficult artistic personality or does
Resnais pursue complexity at the expense of self-expression?
It is all very well to claim that Resnais is dedicated to
the immense subjects of time and memory, and then adopt his
rather pusillanimous defenses of his own films." -
David
Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2002) |
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"A
leading figure in the development of a modernist cinema,
Alain Resnais seems recently to have retreated further into
an hermetic artiness that takes little account of the
demands of the popular audience. In dealing repeatedly with
the effect of memory and the imagination upon human
passions, his intellectual, near-abstract approach to plot
and character counteracts emotional involvement." -
Geoff
Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989) |
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"Resnais
is a cubist. I mean that he is the first modern filmmaker of the
sound film." -
Eric Rohmer
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"Themes of time and memory haunt this director's brilliant
career, with the individual consciousness the dictator of his
narratives, rather than the traditionally uninterrupted
beginning, middle, and end. Resnais' films flow from one
association to another, yet are not as inaccessible as might be
expected. The human being is his subject, and that accounts for
the beauty, strength, and empathy in his quilted stories." -
William R. Meyer (The Film Buff's Catalog, 1978) |
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"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." -
Alain
Resnais |
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Please
note that the rating given for this director (see top-right) is based
only on the films we have seen (listed above). Films by this director
that we haven't seen include Life is a Bed of Roses (1983). |
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"Resnais,
though often associated with the New Wave, is distinguished
from the typical New Wave directors by his willingness to
efface himself through the adaptation of works by other
writers, and by his highly intellectualized approach. His
major films from the late 1950s and 1960s include
Hiroshima mon amour, with a script by Marguerite Duras,
and Last Year at Marienbad, produced in collaboration
with Alain Robbe-Grillet, starring the cult actress Delphine
Seyrig, and with costumes by Coco Chanel… Resnais has
continued to make interesting films into his eighties, but
his reputation rests primarily on his uncompromisingly
modernist works under the nouvelle vague umbrella in the
period from 1959 to 1966."
-
Schirmer Encyclopedia of Film |
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●
Top 250 Directors |
| ●
100 Essential Directors (Pop
Matters) |
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●
Survey of Filmmakers:
Top 25 Directors (2005 poll by The Film Journal) |
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One of the twelve
greatest living narrative filmmakers - Jonathan Rosenbaum
(Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Critics, 1993) |
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●
501 Movie Directors: A
Comprehensive Guide to the Greatest Filmmakers |
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See Also |
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●
Chantal
Akerman |
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Jean
Cocteau |
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Jean-Luc
Godard |
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Krzysztof
Kieslowski |
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Joseph
Losey |
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●
Chris
Marker |
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●
Marcel
Ophüls |
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Jacques
Rivette |
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Nicolas
Roeg |
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●
Raúl Ruiz |
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●
Alain Tanner |
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●
François
Truffaut |
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