Alain Resnais  

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L’art nègre, nous le regardons comme s’il trouvait sa raison d’être dans le plaisir qu’il nous donne. Les intentions du nègre qui le créée, les émotions du nègre qui le regarde tout cela nous échappe. Parce qu’elles sont écrites dans le bois nous prenons leurs pensées pour des statues et nous trouvons du pittoresque là où un membre de la communauté noire voie le visage d’une culture.”--voice-over 2:53 Statues Also Die (1953) by Alain Resnais


"On dit qu'il y a dans le cinéma une tradition Méliès et une tradition Lumière, je crois qu'il y a aussi un courant Feuillade qui utilise merveilleusement le fantastique de Méliès et le réalisme de Lumière."

English:

“People say there is a Méliès tradition in the cinema, and a Lumière tradition: I believe there is also a Feuillade current, one which marvelously links the fantastic side of Méliès with the realism of Lumière, a current which creates mystery and evokes dreams by the use of the most banal elements of daily life.”

-- Alain Resnais in: Louis Feuillade (1964) by Emile Feuillade, Louis Feuillade, Francis Lacassin

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Alain Resnais (3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014) was a French film director 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.

Resnais began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. These films were contemporary with, and associated with, the French New Wave (nouvelle vague), though Resnais did not regard himself as being fully part of that movement. He had closer links to the "Left Bank" group of authors and filmmakers who shared a commitment to modernism and an interest in left-wing politics. He also established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers usually unconnected with the cinema, such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Semprún.

In later films Resnais moved away from the overtly political topics of some previous works and developed his interests in an interaction between cinema and other cultural forms, including theatre, music, and comic books. This led to imaginative adaptations of plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Henri Bernstein and Jean Anouilh, as well as films featuring various kinds of popular song.

His films frequently explored the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he was noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives. Throughout his career he won many awards from international film festivals and academies.

Filmography




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Alain Resnais" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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