Etudes Cinematographiques, Ivan Pyriev sur L'Idiot a l'ecran, entretien avec Alexandre Astruc (ALL TEXT IN FRENCH; film studies of Fellini, Bresson, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Mizoguchi etc.)
Alain Resnais 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.
Background
Son of Pierre and Jeanne (nee Gachet) Resnais. Resnais was born in 1922 at Vannes in Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist. An only child, he was often ill with asthma in childhood, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home. He was an eager reader, in a range that extended from classics to comic books, but from the age of 10 he became fascinated by films. For his twelfth birthday his parents gave him a Kodak 8mm camera with which he began to make his own short films, including a three-minute version of Fantômas. Around the age of 14, he discovered surrealism and through that an interest in the works of André Breton.
Education
Visits to the theatre in Paris gave Resnais the desire to be an actor, and in 1939 he moved to Paris to become an assistant in Georges Pitoëff's company at the Théâtre des Mathurins. From 1940 to 1942 he studied acting in the Cours René-Simon (and one of his small jobs at this time was as an extra in the film Les Visiteurs du soir), but he then decided in 1943 to apply to the newly formed film school IDHEC to study film editing. The film-maker Jean Grémillon was one of the teachers who had the most influence on him at that period.
Resnais left in 1945 to do his military service which took him to Germany and Austria with the occupying forces, as well as making him a temporary member of a travelling theatre company, Les Arlequins. He returned to Paris in 1946 to start his career as a film editor, but also began making short films of his own. Finding himself to be a neighbour of the actor Gérard Philipe, he persuaded him to appear in a 16mm surrealist short, Schéma d'une identification (now lost). A more ambitious feature-length work, Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, has also vanished without trace.
Career
After beginning with a series of short documentary films showing artists at work in their studios, as well as a few commercial commissions, Resnais was invited in 1948 to make a film about the paintings of Van Gogh, to coincide with an exhibition that was being mounted in Paris. He filmed it at first in 16mm, but when the producer Pierre Braunberger saw the results, Resnais was asked to remake it in 35mm. Van Gogh received a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and also won an Oscar for Best 2-reel Short in 1949.(Braunberger went on to act as producer for several of Resnais's films in the following decade.) Resnais continued to address artistic subjects in Gauguin (1950) and Guernica (1950), which examined the Picasso painting based on the 1937 bombing of the town, and presented it to the accompaniment of a text written by Paul Éluard. A political perspective on art also underpinned his next project, co-directed with Chris Marker, Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953), a polemic about the destruction of African art by French cultural colonialism.
Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) was one of the first documentaries about the Nazi concentration camps, but it deals more with the memory of the camps than with their actual past existence. Realising that standard documentary techniques would be incapable of confronting the enormity of the horror (and even risked humanising it), Resnais chose to use a distancing technique by alternating historical black-and-white images of the camps with contemporary colour footage of the sites in long tracking shots. The accompanying narration (written by Jean Cayrol, himself a survivor of the camps) was intentionally understated to add to the distancing effect. Although the film encountered censorship problems with the French government, its impact was immense and it remains one of the director's most admired works.
A different kind of collective memory was considered in Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), in which the seemingly endless spaces and bibliographic riches of the Bibliothèque nationale were explored in another compendium of long travelling shots. In 1958 Resnais undertook a commission from the Pechiney company to make short film, in colour and wide-screen, extolling the merits of plastics, Le Chant du styrène. Poetry was brought to the project, literally, by Raymond Queneau who wrote the narration for the film in rhyming couplets.
Resnais's first feature film was Hiroshima mon amour (1959). It originated as a commission from the producers of Nuit et Brouillard (Anatole Dauman and Argos Films) to make a documentary about the atomic bomb, but Resnais initially declined, thinking that it would be too similar to the earlier film about the concentration camps and that it presented the same problem of how to film incomprehensible suffering. However, in discussion with the novelist Marguerite Duras a fusion of fiction and documentary was developed which acknowledged the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima; one could only speak about the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima. In the film, the themes of memory and forgetting are explored via new narrative techniques which balance images with narrated text and ignore conventional notions of plot and story development. The film was shown at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, alongside Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), and its success became associated with the emerging movement of the French New Wave.
Resnais's next film was L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), which he made in collaboration with the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. The fragmented and shifting narrative presents three principal characters, a woman and two men, in the opulent setting of a grand European hotel or château where the possibility of a previous encounter a year ago is repeatedly asserted and questioned and contradicted. After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the film attracted great attention and provoked many divergent interpretations of how it should be understood, encouraged by interviews in which Robbe-Grillet and Resnais themselves appeared to give conflicting explanations of the film. There was little doubt however that it represented a significant challenge to the traditional concept of narrative construction in cinema.
At the beginning of the 1960s France remained deeply divided by the Algerian War, and in 1960 the Manifesto of the 121, which protested against French military policy in Algeria, was signed by a group of leading intellectuals and artists who included Resnais. The war, and the difficulty of coming to terms with its horrors, was a central theme of his next film Muriel (1963), which used a fractured narrative to explore the mental states of its characters. It was among the first French films to comment, even indirectly, on the Algerian experience.
Resnais spent some time in America working on various unfulfilled projects, including one about the Marquis de Sade. He also published Repérages, a volume of his photographs, taken between 1948 and 1971, of locations in London, Scotland, Paris, Nevers, Lyon, New York and Hiroshima; Jorge Semprun wrote the introductory text. Some of the photographs relate to a long-cherished but unfulfilled idea for a film based on the Harry Dickson stories by Jean Ray.
After contributing an episode to L'An 01 (The Year 01) (1973), a collective film organised by Jacques Doillon, Resnais made a second collaboration with Jorge Semprun for Stavisky (1974), based on the life of the notorious financier and embezzler whose death in 1934 provoked a political scandal. With glamorous costumes and sets, a musical score by Stephen Sondheim, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in the title role, it was seen as Resnais's most commercial film to date, but its complex narrative structure showed clear links with the formal preoccupations of his earlier films.
With Providence (1977), Resnais made his first film in English, with a screenplay written by David Mercer, and a cast that included John Gielgud and Dirk Bogarde. The story shows an ageing, maybe dying, novelist grappling with alternative versions of his own past as he adapts them for his fiction. Resnais was eager that the dark subject should remain humorous, and he described it as "a macabre divertissement". Formal innovation characterised Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle, 1980) in which the theories of the neurobiologist Henri Laborit about animal behaviour are juxtaposed with three interwoven fictional stories; and a further counterpoint to the fictional characters is provided by the inclusion of film extracts of the classic French film actors with whom they identify. The film won several international awards including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and it also proved to be one of Resnais's most successful with the public.
Alain Resnais died in Paris on 1 March 2014; he was buried in Montparnasse cemetery.
(Buy Annee Derniere A Marienbad: Read 9 Movies & TV Review...)
Personality
Resnais was often linked with the group of French filmmakers who made their breakthrough as the New Wave or nouvelle vague in the late 1950s, but by then he had already established a significant reputation through his ten years of work on documentary short films. He defined his own relationship by saying: "Although I was not fully part of the New Wave because of my age, there was some mutual sympathy and respect between myself and Rivette, Bazin, Demy, Truffaut ... So I felt friendly with that team." He nevertheless acknowledged his debt to the New Wave because it created the conditions of production, and particularly the financial conditions, which allowed him to make a film like Hiroshima mon amour, his first feature film.
Resnais was more often associated with a "Left Bank" group of writers and filmmakers who included Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet (with all of whom he collaborated in the earlier part of his career). They were distinguished by their interests in documentary, left-wing politics, and the literary experiments of the nouveau roman. At the same time, Resnais was also a devotee of popular culture. He owned the largest private collection of comic books in France and in 1962 became the vice president and co-founder of an International Society for Comic Books, Le Club des bandes dessinées, renamed two years later as Centre d'Études des Littératures d'Expression Graphique (CELEG). CELEG members also included Resnais' artistic collaborators Marker and Robbe-Grillet.
The importance of creative collaboration in Resnais's films has been noted by many commentators. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he always refused to write his own screenplays and attached great importance to the contribution of his chosen writer, whose status in the shared "authorship" of the film he fully acknowledged. He was also known to treat the completed screenplay with great fidelity, to the extent that some of his screenwriters remarked on how closely the finished film realised their intentions. On the few occasions when he did participate in writing the script, particularly for his last three films, his contribution is acknowledged under the pseudonym Alex Reval, since he did not want his name to appear more than once in the credits.)
Connections
MaIn 1969 Resnais married Florence Malraux (daughter of the French statesman and writer André Malraux). She was a regular member of his production team, working as assistant director on most of his films from 1961 to 1986. His second wife was Sabine Azéma, who acted in the majority of his films from 1983 onwards; they were married in the English town of Scarborough in 1998.
Academy Award: 1950 for "Van Gogh" (1948); Best Short Subject (Two-Reel).
Prix Jean Vigo: 1954, for Les statues meurent aussi; and 1956, for Nuit et Brouillard
César Award: 1977 Best Director 1977, for Providence; and 1993 Best Director, for Smoking/No Smoking
Prix Louis-Delluc: 1966, for La guerre est finie; 1993, for Smoking/No Smoking; and 1997, for On connaît la chanson
Lumières Award for Best Director: 2004, for Pas sur la bouche
Venice Film Festival: 1960 Golden Lion, for L'Année dernière à Marienbad; and 2006 Silver Lion, for Cœurs
Berlin Film Festival: 1994 Silver Bear for Smoking/No Smoking;[87] 1998 Silver Bear, for On connaît la chanson;[88] 2014 Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize for Aimer, boire et chanter.
Cannes Film Festival: 1980 Grand Prix, for Mon oncle d'Amérique; and 2009, Lifetime achievement award.