Alain Resnais (French:[alɛ̃ʁɛnɛ]; 3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. His films frequently explore the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he was noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives.[1][2]
After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, Resnais went on to direct short films includingNight and Fog (1956), an influential documentary about theNazi concentration camps.[3] Resnais then began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation withHiroshima mon amour (1959),Last Year at Marienbad (1961), andMuriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past.
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 byAlan Ayckbourn,Henri Bernstein andJean Anouilh, as well as films featuring various kinds of popular song.
Resnais was born in 1922 atVannes in Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist.[7] An only child, he was often ill with asthma in childhood, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home.[8] He was an eager reader, in a range that extended from classics to comic books, but from the age of 10 he became fascinated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 ofFantômas.[9] Around the age of 14, he discoveredsurrealism and through that an interest in the works ofAndré Breton.[10]
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 inGeorges Pitoëff's company at theThéâtre des Mathurins. From 1940 to 1942 he studied acting in theCours René-Simon (and one of his small jobs at this time was as an extra in the filmLes Visiteurs du soir[11]), but he then decided in 1943 to apply to the newly formed film schoolIDHEC to study film editing.[12] The filmmakerJean Grémillon was one of the teachers who had the most influence on him at that period.[13]
Resnais left in 1945 to do his military service which took him to Germany and Austria with the occupying French forces, as well as making him a temporary member of a travelling theatre company, Les Arlequins.[14] 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 actorGérard Philipe, he persuaded him to appear in a 16mm surrealist short,Schéma d'une identification (now lost).[12] A more ambitious feature-length work,Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, has also vanished without trace.[15]
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 ofVan Gogh, to coincide with an exhibition that was being mounted in Paris. He filmed it at first in 16mm, but when the producerPierre 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.[16] (Braunberger went on to act as producer for several of Resnais's films in the following decade.) Resnais continued to address artistic subjects inGauguin (1950) andGuernica (1950), which examined thePicasso painting based on the 1937 bombing of the town, and presented it to the accompaniment of a text written byPaul Éluard.[17] A political perspective on art also underpinned his next project (co-directed withChris Marker),Les statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1953), a polemic about the destruction of African art by French cultural colonialism.[18]
Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956) 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.[19] 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 byJean 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.[3][20]
A different kind of collective memory was considered inToute la mémoire du monde (1956), in which the seemingly endless spaces and bibliographic riches of theBibliothèque nationale were explored in another compendium of long travelling shots. The film was referenced in the novelAusterlitz byW.G. Sebald, portraying the library as "an immensely complex and constantly evolving creature which had to be fed with myriads of words, in order to bring forth myriads of words in its own turn."[21]
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, byRaymond Queneau who wrote the narration for the film in rhyming couplets.[22]
In his decade of making documentary short films, Resnais established his interest in and talent for collaboration with leading figures in other branches of the arts: with the painters who were the subjects of his early works; with writers (Eluard inGuernica, Cayrol inNuit et Brouillard, Queneau inLe Chant du styrène); with musicians (Darius Milhaud inGauguin,Hanns Eisler inNuit et Brouillard,Pierre Barbaud inLe Chant du styrène); and with other filmmakers (Resnais was the editor ofAgnès Varda's first film,La Pointe courte, and co-directed with Chris MarkerLes statues meurent aussi). Similar collaborations underpinned his future work in feature films.[23]
Resnais's first feature film wasHiroshima mon amour (1959). It originated as a commission from the producers ofNuit 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[24] and that it presented the same problem of how to film incomprehensible suffering.[25] However, in discussion with the novelistMarguerite Duras a fusion of fiction and documentary was developed which acknowledged the impossibility of speakingabout Hiroshima; one could only speak about the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima.[26] 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.[27] The film was shown at the 1959Cannes Film Festival, alongside Truffaut'sLes Quatre Cents Coups (The 400 Blows), and its success became associated with the emerging movement of theFrench New Wave.[28]
Resnais's next film wasL'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, 1961), which he made in collaboration with the novelistAlain 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 theGolden Lion at theVenice 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.[29]
At the beginning of the 1960s France remained deeply divided by theAlgerian War, and in 1960 theManifesto 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 filmMuriel (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.[30]
A contemporary political issue also formed the background forLa guerre est finie (The War Is Over, 1966), this time the clandestine activities of left-wing opponents ofthe Franco government in Spain. Resnais's scriptwriter on this film was the Spanish authorJorge Semprún, himself an ex-member of the Spanish Communist Party now in voluntary exile in France.[31] Both men denied that the film wasabout Spain, but when it was entered for the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966, an objection from the Spanish government caused it to be withdrawn and it was shown out of competition.[32] In 1967 Resnais participated with six other directors, including Chris Marker andJean-Luc Godard, in a collective work about the Vietnam war,Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam).
From 1968 onwards, Resnais's films no longer addressed, at least directly, big political issues in the way that a number of his previous ones had done,[33] and his next project seemed to mark a change of direction.Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) drew upon the traditions of science-fiction[34] for a story of a man sent back into his past, a theme which enabled Resnais again to present a narrative of fragmented time. Alain Resnais's scriptwriter on this film was the authorJacques Sternberg. The film was unlucky in its release (its planned screening at Cannes was cancelled amid the political events of May 1968), and it was almost five years before Resnais was able to direct another film.[35]
Throughout the 1960s, Resnais was attached to direct an international production calledLes Aventures deHarry Dickson, based on the stories byJean Ray, withAnatole Dauman as producer. The project was intended to star eitherDirk Bogarde orLaurence Olivier as the titular detective, withAndré Delvaux attached as the production designer, and the composerKarlheinz Stockhausen attached for the score. Resnais and Dauman worked towards the project for a decade before finally giving up.[36] The screenplay for the film by Frédéric de Towarnicki was published in 2007.[37]
Resnais spent some time in America working on various unfulfilled projects, including one about theMarquis de Sade. He also publishedRepérages, 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.[38] Some of the photographs relate to his unfulfilled Harry Dickson film.
After contributing an episode toL'An 01 (The Year 01) (1973), a collective film organised byJacques Doillon, Resnais made a second collaboration with Jorge Semprun forStavisky (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 byStephen Sondheim, andJean-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.[39]
WithProvidence (1977), Resnais made his first film in English, with a screenplay written byDavid Mercer, and a cast that includedJohn Gielgud,Dirk Bogarde andEllen Burstyn. 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".[40] Formal innovation characterisedMon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle, 1980) in which the theories of the neurobiologistHenri 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.[41] 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.[42]
From the 1980s onwards Resnais showed a particular interest in integrating material from other forms of popular culture into his films, drawing especially on music and the theatre.[1][43] In almost all of his remaining films he chose to work repeatedly with a core group of actors comprisingSabine Azéma,Pierre Arditi, andAndré Dussollier, sometimes accompanied byFanny Ardant orLambert Wilson. The first four of these were among the large cast ofLa vie est un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses, 1983), a comic fantasy about utopian dreams in which three stories, from different eras and told in different styles, are interwoven within a shared setting. The action is punctuated by episodes of song which develop towards the end into scenes that are almost operatic; Resnais said that his starting point had been the desire to make a film in which dialogue and song would alternate.[44]
Music, very differently used, was a major component ofL'Amour à mort (Love unto Death, 1984). For this intense chamber work with four principal actors (Azéma, Arditi, Ardant and Dussollier), Resnais askedHans Werner Henze to compose musical episodes which would act as a "fifth character", not an accompaniment but a fully integrated element of the drama with which the speech of the actors would interact.[45] In subsequent years, Resnais gave his attention to music of more popular styles. He madeGershwin (1992), an innovative TV documentary in which the American composer's life and works were reviewed through the testimonies of performers and filmmakers, juxtaposed with commissioned paintings byGuy Peellaert. InOn connaît la chanson (Same Old Song, 1997), his tribute to television works ofDennis Potter, the characters express their key emotions or private thoughts by bursting into snatches of well-known (recorded) popular songs without interrupting the dramatic situation.[46] A long-neglected operetta from the 1920s was the unexpected basis for Resnais's next filmPas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips, 2003), in which he sought to reinvigorate an unfashionable form of entertainment by recreating its theatricality for the camera and entrusting most of its musical numbers to actors rather than to trained singers.[47]
There are many references to the theatre throughout Resnais's filmmaking (Marienbad,Muriel,Stavisky,Mon oncle d'Amérique), but he first undertook the challenge of taking a complete stage work and giving it new cinematic life inMélo (1986), an adaptation ofHenri Bernstein's 1929 play of the same name. Resnais remained entirely faithful to the play (apart from shortening it) and he emphasised its theatricality by filming in long takes on large sets of evidently artificial design, as well as by marking off the acts of the play with the fall of a curtain.[48] After an excursion into the world of comic books and cartoons inI Want to Go Home (1989), an ambitious theatrical adaptation followed with the diptych ofSmoking/No Smoking (1993). Resnais, having admired the plays ofAlan Ayckbourn for many years, chose to adapt what appeared the most intractable of them,Intimate Exchanges, a series of eight interlinked plays which follow the consequences of a casual choice to sixteen possible endings. Resnais slightly reduced the number of permuted endings and compressed the plays into two films, each having a common starting point, and to be seen in any order. Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi played all the parts, and the theatricality of the undertaking was again emphasised by the studio set designs for a fictional English village.[49] Resnais returned to Ayckbourn in the following decade for his adaptation ofPrivate Fears in Public Places to which he gave the film title ofCœurs (2006). Among the stage/film effects which contribute to its mood of "cheerful desolation" is the artificial snow which is continually seen through set windows until eventually it falls on the studio interior as well.[50]
Speaking in 1986, Resnais said that he did not make a separation between cinema and theatre and refused to make enemies of them.[51] He preferred working with "people of the theatre", and he said that he would never want to film a novel.[52] It was therefore something of a departure when he choseL'Incident, a novel by Christian Gailly, as the basis forLes Herbes folles (Wild Grass, 2009). He explained however that what initially attracted him to the book was the quality of its dialogue, which he retained largely unchanged for the film. WhenLes Herbes folles was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it was the occasion for a special jury award to Resnais "for his work and exceptional contribution to the history of cinema".[53]
In his final two films, Resnais again drew his source material from the theatre.Vous n'avez encore rien vu (You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet!, 2012) was adapted from two plays byJean Anouilh, and it assembled thirteen actors (many of them regular performers in Resnais's earlier films) who have been summoned by the dying wish of an author to witness a new performance their roles in one of his plays.[54][55] The film was shown in competition for thePalme d'Or at the2012 Cannes Film Festival.[56][57]Aimer, boire et chanter (2014) was the third film which Resnais adapted from a play by Alan Ayckbourn, in this caseLife of Riley, in which three couples are thrown into confusion by the news that a shared friend has a terminal illness. Three weeks before Resnais's death, the film received its premiere in the competition section of the64th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2014, where it won a Silver Bear award "for a feature film that opens new perspectives".[58][59] At the time of his death, Resnais was preparing a further Ayckbourn project, based on the 2013 playArrivals & Departures.[60][61]
Resnais was often linked with the group of French filmmakers who made their breakthrough as theNew Wave ornouvelle 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."[4] 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 likeHiroshima mon amour, his first feature film.[62]
Resnais was more often associated with a "Left Bank" group of writers and filmmakers who includedAgnès Varda,Chris Marker,Jean Cayrol,Marguerite Duras andAlain Robbe-Grillet (with all of whom he collaborated in the earlier part of his career).[5] They were distinguished by their interests in documentary, left-wing politics, and the literary experiments of thenouveau roman.[63] 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 asCentre d'Études des Littératures d'Expression Graphique (CELEG).[64] CELEG members also included Resnais's artistic collaborators Marker and Robbe-Grillet.
The importance of creative collaboration in Resnais's films has been noted by many commentators.[3][65] 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.[66] 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.[67] (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.)[68]
Time and memory have regularly been identified as two of the principal themes of Resnais's work, at least in his earlier films.[2][69] He however consistently tried to modify this view of his concerns: "I prefer to speak of the imaginary, or of consciousness. What interests me in the mind is that faculty we have to imagine what is going to happen in our heads, or to remember what has happened".[70] He also described his films as an attempt, however imperfect, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism.[71]
Another view of the evolution of Resnais's career saw him moving progressively away from a realistic treatment of 'big' subjects and overtly political themes towards films that are increasingly personal and playful.[72] Resnais himself offered an explanation of this shift in terms of challenging what was the norm in filmmaking at the time: having made his early films when escapist cinema was predominant, he progressively felt the need to move away from exploration of social and political issues as that itself became almost the norm in contemporary cinema. Experimentation with narrative forms and genre conventions instead became a central focus of his films.[43][73]
A frequent criticism of Resnais's films among English-language commentators has been that they are emotionally cold; that they are all about technique without grasp of character or subject,[74] that his understanding of beauty is compromised by a lack of sensuousness,[75] and that his seriousness of intent fails to communicate itself to audiences.[76] Elsewhere however it is suggested that such views are partly based on a misreading of the films, especially his earlier ones, which has impeded an appreciation of the humour and irony which pervade his work; and other viewers have been able to make the connection between the film's form and its human dimension.[77]
There is general agreement about Resnais's attachment to formalism in his approach to film; he himself regarded it as the starting point of his work, and usually had an idea of a form, or method of construction, in his head even before the plot or the characters took shape.[78] For him this was also the basis for the communication of feeling: "There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator."[79]
Another term which appears in commentaries on Resnais throughout his career is "surrealism", from his documentary portrait of a library inToute la mémoire du monde,[80] through the dreamlike innovations ofMarienbad,[81] to the latterday playfulness ofLes Herbes folles.[82] Resnais himself traced a link to his teenage discovery of surrealism in the works of André Breton: "I hope that I always remain faithful to André Breton who refused to suppose that imaginary life was not a part of real life".[83]
In 1969 Resnais married Florence Malraux (daughter of the French statesman and writerAndré Malraux).[84] 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 wasSabine Azéma, who acted in the majority of his films from 1983 onwards; they were married in the English town ofScarborough in 1998.[85]
On his religious views, he called himself a "mystical atheist".[86]
^abUne histoire du cinéma français, [edited by] Claude Beylie. (Paris: Larousse, 2005.) p.501.
^abEncyclopedia of European Cinema; edited by Ginette Vincendeau. (London: Cassell, British Film Institute, 1995.) p.358.
^abcdEphraim Katz,The International Film Encyclopedia. (London: Macmillan, 1980.) p. 966–967.
^abPeter Cowie,The Explosion of World Cinema in the 60s. (London: Faber, 2004.) p.67.
^abInternational Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers – 2: Directors; 4th ed., edited by Tom Prendergast and Sara Prendergast. (New York, London: St James Press, 2000.) p.816.
^Slavo Zizek,Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. (London: Verso, 2012). p.28.ISBN978-1-84467-897-6
^Emma Wilson,Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.2.
^James Monaco,Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.15.
^Robert Benayoun,Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). pp.22–25.
^Robert Benayoun,Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.29.
^International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers – 2: Directors; 2nd ed., edited by Nicholas Thomas. (Chicago, London: St James Press, 1991.) pp.689–692.
^Robert Benayoun,Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.42.
^Robert Benayoun,Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). pp.45–48.
^The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1996.) p.332.
^Uri Klein. "Memories of Alain Resnais, cinema's explorer of memory", inHaaretz, 3 March 2014. [Requires subscription.]
^Georges Sadoul,Dictionnaire des films. (Paris: Seuil, 1983.) p.218.
^Sebald, W.G. (2001).Austerlitz. Translated by Anthea Bell. New York: Random House. p. 261.
^Robert Benayoun,Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). pp.57–59.
^See the "Tableau des connivences" in Robert Benayoun,Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008). p.210.
^Emma Wilson,Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.48.
^James Monaco,Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.34.
^"Impossible de parler de HIROSHIMA. Tout ce qu'on peut faire c'est de parler de l'impossibilité de parler de HIROSHIMA." Marguerite Duras, in the published scriptHiroshima mon amour, (Paris: Gallimard, 1960.); quoted by Emma Wilson,Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.48.
^Towarnicki, Frédéric de,Les Aventures de Harry Dickson: scénario ... pour un film (non réalisé) par Alain Resnais. (Nantes: Capricci, 2007.)ISBN9782952696258.
^Repérages: photographies de Alain Resnais; texte de Jorge Semprun. (Paris: Chêne, 1974.) For a study of the book, see thearticle by Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues et Jean-Louis Leutrat in the online Bibliothèque du film of the Cinémathèque Française [retrieved 1 December 2010].
^Interview with Resnais (by Robert Benayoun) inPositif, no.190, février 1977; reprinted inAlain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) p.246: "... j'espère que ce film est drôle car je le vois comme un divertissement, macabre certes et noir, mais un divertissement tout de même."
^David Robinson, "Resnais's imaginative parallels of human behaviour", inThe Times (London), 12 Sept. 1980, p.8.
^Robert Benayoun,Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) p.252.
^abInterview with Gilbert Adair inThe Guardian, 22 June 2010.
^Interview inCahiers du Cinéma, 347 (1983) p.28; quoted by Emma Wilson inAlain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.157.
^Interview with Resnais (by Alain Masson and François Thomas) inPositif, no.284, octobre 1984; reprinted inAlain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) p.305.
^Robert Benayoun,Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) pp.206–207.
^Interview with Resnais (by François Thomas) inPositif, no.394, déc. 1993; reprinted inAlain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) pp.405–406, 409–410.
^Dave Kehr,"Restless Innovations from Alain Resnais", inThe New York Times, 8 April 2007: "As Mr. Resnais told a French interviewer, the effect he is after is one of 'désolation allègre,' a blithe, jaunty despair."
^Interview with Resnais (by François Thomas) inPositif, no.307, septembre 1993; reprinted inAlain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) p.335.
^Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Jean-Louis Leutrat,Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006). p.198: "Ce qui m'intéresse c'est de travailler non-avec des écrivains mais avec des gens de théâtre ... [e.g. Duras, Cayrol, Semprun, Mercer]. C'est pourquoi cela ne m'a gêné de tourner une pièce, mais je pourrais pas tourner un roman."
^Jean-Luc Douin,Alain Resnais. Paris: Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2013. p. 242.
^James Monaco,Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.11.
^Resnais quoted in, and translated by, Emma Wilson,Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.1.
^Quoted in Claude Beylie,Une histoire du cinéma français. (Paris: Larousse, 2005.) p.501: "Mes films sont une tentative, encore très imparfaite, d'approcher de la complexité de la pensée, de son mécanisme".
^Emma Wilson,Alain Resnais. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.196.
^Pauline Kael, "Werewolf, mon amour", inNew Yorker, 31 January 1977; quoted by James Monaco,Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.5: "... Resnais has little grasp of character or subject; he's an innovator who hasn't got a use for innovations. ... What he doesn't seem able to do is to imbue his situations with enough feeling for these tricks to mean something to us – they're just beautiful diddles".
^Susan Sontag,Film Quarterly, vol.17, no.2, (Winter 1963–1964) p.27: "Resnais knows all about beauty. But, unlike Bresson and Godard and Truffaut, he lacks sensuousness. And this, in a film-maker, is a fatal deficiency".
^David Thomson,The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. (London: Little, Brown, 2002.) p.729: "Resnais's seriousness is more elevated than his use of film ... he has shown himself unable to make a communicative contact with audiences".
^James Monaco,Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) pp.3–4; p.9: "... Resnais's films are tempered with a concern for human character and feelings which never loses sight of the vital connection between the forms of the art and its human subjects".
^Interview (with Robert Benayoun) inPositif, no.190, février 1977; quoted inAlain Resnais: anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) p.241: "Il ne peut y avoir de communication qu'à travers la forme. S'il n'y a pas de forme, on ne peut pas créer d'émotion chez le spectateur".
^""Resnais grasped the surreal futility of archives ...": David Thomson,The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. (London: Little, Brown, 2002.) p.729.
^Marienbad's "distilled surrealist poetry": Jonathan Rosenbaum, inChicago Reader [retrieved 3 January 2011]
^"Wild Grass, an authentic surrealist romance": Gilbert Adair inThe Guardian, 22 June 2010.
^Robert Benayoun,Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) p.143, p.39: "J'espère toujours demeurer fidèle à André Breton qui se refusait de considérer que la vie imaginaire ne fait pas partie de la réelle".
^Dates of marriages recorded inInternational Who's Who 2004. (London: Europa, 2004.) p.1401.
^Philip Nord, "Heroes and Martyrs", inAfter the Deportation – Memory Battles in Postwar France. (Cambridge University Press, 2020). p. 92.ISBN9781108478908. Retrieved 7 July 2021. "Spiritualizing currents coursed through the Latin Quarter world Resnais frequented in the immediate postwar years. He himself had given up on organized religion, but that didn't mean he remained unmarked by the Catholic world he had grown up in. He described himself as a "mystical atheist", the kind of nonbeliever who was spellbound on hearing by chance the radio broadcast of a sermon delivered in accompaniment to morning Mass."
^Obituary notice inThe Guardian, 2 March 2014. [Retrieved 8 March 2014.]
^"Alain Resnais, prodige du cinéma français, est mort", inLe Figaro, 2 mars 2014. (Archived at the Wayback Machine.) [Retrieved 14 May 2024.]
Callev, Haim.The Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain Resnais. New York: McGruer Publishing, 1997.
Douin, Jean-Luc.Alain Resnais. Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2013. [In French].
Goudet, Stéphane.Alain Resnais: anthologie Paris: Gallimard, 2002. [Articles originally published inPositif, revue de cinéma. In French]
Higgins, Lynne A.Alain Resnais: Interviews; with translations by T. Jefferson Kline. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021.ISBN978-1-4968-3393-8
