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| Alain
Resnais |
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| Director
/ Editor / Screenwriter |
| 1922 - |
| Born June 3,
Vannes, Morbihan, Bretagne, France |
| Key
Production Countries: France, Italy |
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Key Genres:
Drama, Psychological Drama,
Avant-garde/Experimental,
Comedy of Manners, Romantic Drama, Short Film,
Ensemble Film |
| Key
Collaborators: Jacques Saulnier (Production Designer),
Sacha
Vierny (Cinematographer), Pierre Arditi (Leading Player), Albert Jurgenson
(Editor), Sabine Azema (Leading Player), Andre Dussollier
(Leading Player), Bruno Pesery (Producer), Claude Rich (Leading
Character Player), Lambert Wilson (Leading Character Player), Renato Berta (Cinematographer) |
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Highly
Recommended: Night
and Fog (1955), Muriel (1963) |
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Recommended:
Toute la memoire du monde (1956),
Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) |
| 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), Not on the Lips (2003), Private Fears in Public Places
(2006) |
| Links:
[
IMDB ] [ All-Movie
Guide ] [
Film Reference ]
[ French
Culture.org Profile ] [ Strictly
Film School ] [
Films de
France Biography ] [
The Stream of
Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais (Book Website) ]
[
Encyclopedia of European Cinema Biography ] [
New York Times Article (2007) ] [
Guardian Article (2007) ] |
| Books: [
Alain
Resnais ] [ The
Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais ] [
Alain Resnais (French Film Directors) ] |
| DVD's:
[ Amazon
] |
| 1,000
Greatest Films: Night
and Fog (1955), Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year in Marienbad (1961), Muriel (1963), Providence
(1977), Mon oncle d'Amérique (1980) |
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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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