Alain resnais

Renowned French director and master of film language, Alain Resnais is another innovator of traditional film narrative. Born in Vannes (French Brittany) on June 3, 1922, and a movie buff since he was thirteen years old, he was part of the first class of the famous IDHEC in Paris.

After cultivating photography, he shot a series of 16mm films on surrealism. A famous documentarian ( Night and Fog , Toute la mémoire du monde ) and also an innovator of art short films (those dedicated to Van Gogh -Hollywood Oscar for best documentary-, Gauguin and Guernica are very famous), he has contributed enormously to the progress of the syntax of the art of images, also as an editor.

He started making feature films parallel to the “Nouvelle Vague” and the so-called “Rivière Gauche”: Agnès Varda , Alain Robbe-Grillet , Marguerite Duras , Chris Marker …, which was made up of left-wing intellectuals who added to the avant-garde, literature and experimentation.

Known as the “filmmaker of time”, Resnais has taken the problems of memory and recollection to quite original metaphysical limits, as can be seen in his famous Last Year in Marienbad (1961), according to the text by Robbe-Grillet. His experimental films, about the mixture of the past and the present with the projective imagination of the characters, have made him a singular director, whose internal coherence is inimitable, as in the aforementioned Marienbad and with Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) . , based on a harsh story by Duras.

In this sense, he commented: “My films are an attempt, still very crude and primitive, to approach the complexity of thought, its mechanism… We all have images inside, things that determine us and that are not a logical succession of perfectly chained acts. I find it interesting to explore that world of the subconscious, from the point of view of truth, if not morality”.

He cultivates the dialectical montage of Soviet cinema, aesthetically influenced by Marxism; and also by surrealism, as is evident in the “psychic automatism” of André Breton. For Resnais, cinematographic art is montage: selection and ordering of shots, rhythm and organization of audiovisual counterpoint and spatio-temporal combinatorics, working with extreme meticulousness and rigor on technical scripts.

Within his usual sobriety, he sometimes falls into an overly explicit eroticism that wants to be symbolic (especially in the aforementioned Hiroshima ), insisting on a theme that becomes a constant in his cinema: the determined combat of the protagonists against the death. In this regard, he had also stated: “Death is the country you arrive at when you have lost your memory.”

His maverick and anti-colonialist political stance, best appreciated in Muriel (1963), led him to an ideological crisis after the French May. Hence the spaced out work by Resnais, perfectly constructed and reflective, which often turns out to be amoral in his treatment: The war has ended (1966) and Stavisky (1974), with scripts by communist dissident Jorge Semprún .

His cinema is, therefore, a reason to approach the mechanism of human thought ( Je t’aime, je t’aime , 1968) and to expose his particular vision of the world, always controversial, as in the behaviorist My uncle from America ( 1980). Worldview that seems to reveal a clearly atheistic existentialist background, shown above all in Providence (1976).

However, his personal poetics, reminiscent of Marcel Proust and the “nouvelle roman”, would open up new possibilities for film narrative, whose influence has been felt by other authors. In the 1970s and 1980s, Alain Resnais would still continue working on semantic and iconographic experimentation, breaking with spatiotemporal logic.

At this turn of the century, this French master has been present on world screens with minority works ( Smoking, no smoking , On connaît la chanson , Not in the mouth , Private affairs in public places , The weeds ), which have been recognized at international festivals.