Resnais, Alain

Resnais, Alain (1922- ), French film director, born in Brittany. For the decade following Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953; Statues also Die, co-directed by Chris Marker), a study of African art that was banned for several years, Resnais was among the most important and innovative film-makers in the world. In 1956 Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog), a documentary about the concentration camps, preceded Toute le Mémoire du Monde, a Borges-like study of the Bibliothèque Nationale, France's national library. It is precisely Resnais's obsession with and mastery of form that gives the earlier film an emotional power unequalled in any fictional reconstruction of the Holocaust. The digressions of the subtly orchestrated and edited filmic narration and the ironies of the commentary (by Jean Cayrol, a former camp inmate) capture and focus the viewer's attention, ensuring that the most horrible images are seen with clear eyes, and therefore that their human meaning cannot be avoided. This film, too, was banned by the French authorities until an image indicating French involvement in the deportations was deleted.

Resnais's first features, Hiroshima mon Amour (1959) and L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961; Last Year at Marienbad), scripted respectively by Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet, address the concerns of the New Novel (nouveau roman) by reformulating filmic conventions for the articulation of time and space. However, only in Muriel, ou le Temps d'un Retour (1963; Muriel), a meditation upon time, change, and memory, again scripted by Cayrol, is Resnais able to generate a fictional structure that is consistently involving, and once again the emotional power is the result of his formal mastery.

La Guerre est Finie (1966; The War is Over), is powerful emotionally, but already less intriguing formally; conversely Providence (1977), while structurally intriguing, is less involving emotionally. Mélo (1986) is a compelling achievement, and there is some wonderfully funny farce in Smoking, but the basic conception of this two-part (with No Smoking) 1993 adaptation from Alan Ayckbourn seems naive in comparison with Resnais's earlier achievements. On Connaît la Chanson (1997; Same Old Song) won the 1998 César for Best French Film. Dedicated to the memory of the British writer Dennis Potter—whose characters in his influential television plays lip-sync and dance to short bits of familiar music in a highly original blend of drama and music—the film imitates Potter's idiosyncratic mélange of realism and surrealism. Pas sur la Bouche (2003; Not on the Mouth) continues in Resnais's recent vein of musical comedies, set in the world of music hall in 1920s Paris.