Director: Alain Resnais

One of France’s most distinctive directors, Alain Resnais was born in Vannes, France, in 1922. He studied at L`Institut hautes études cinématographiques before starting a career as a filmmaker in the mid-1940s, making short films. Of these, the most celebrated is Nuit et brouillard, an eye-opening and poignant documentary about deportations and Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War.

Resnais’ first full-length film was Hiroshima mon amour(1959), a poignant romance that Resnais developed from an idea for short documentary. The film was critically acclaimed in France and abroad and won Resnais instant fame, establishing him as a cult director of the New Wave. His following film, L’année dernière à Marienbad (1961), was no less successful, a remarkable interplay of time and memory with some unforgettable visual imagery.

Although less prolific and reactionary than his new wave contemporaries, Resnais continued to make original and provocative cinema, which was, for the most part, well received by the critics. This included films such as Muriel (1963) , La guerre est finie (1966), Stavisky (1974) and Providence (1977).

His most recent success has been the two-part film, Smoking/No Smoking which was based on a series of plays by the distinguished English playwright Alan Ayckbourn. The film is probably the most extreme example to date of Resnais’ setting of a film entirely in an artificial, minimalist stage environment (following the trend of earlier films such as and Mélo(1986) and I Want to Go Home (1989)). This was followed by On connaît la chanson (1997), which takes the musical ideas which Resnais toyed with in La Vie est un roman (1983) one step further.

Resnais’cinema has always been challenging the boundaries and our assumptions of what cinema should be about, perhaps more successfully than any other director. Although his films have been increasingly divorced from the mainstream, his work is widely regarded and surprisingly accessible for such an obvious reactionary. For all their artistic flourishes, Resnais’films consistently show a profound compassion and humanity, something that allows the director to keep his audience whilst allowing him the freedom to try out daring new cinematographic ideas.