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Alain Resnais (1922 - )

Related: art films - Anatole Dauman - Nouvelle Vague films - director - Alain-Robbe Grillet - French cinema

Titles: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) - Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) - Alain Resnais

Biography

Alain Resnais (born June 3, 1922) is a famous French film director, perhaps best known for his masterpieces Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (L'année dernière à Marienbad) (1961), written by the French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, but also recognised for his other moving and challenging work, such as the pre-eminent Holocaust documentary Night and Fog (1955) --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Resnais [Apr 2005]

Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog - (1955) - Alain Resnais

Nuit et Brouillard/Night and Fog - Criterion Collection (1955) - Alain Resnais [Amazon US] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man’s violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again. --criterionco.com

Though only a short subject, this groundbreaking documentary remains one of the most influential and powerful explorations of the Holocaust ever made. Director Alain Resnais bluntly presents an indictment not only of the Nazis but of the world community, and the film is all the more remarkable for its harsh judgment considering the time in which it was made, less than a decade after the end of the war, when questions of responsibility were not yet being addressed. Juxtaposing archival clips from the concentration camps across Germany and Poland with the present-day denials of the camps' existence, the film seeks to once and for all expose the horrifying truth of the Final Solution, as well as to address the continuing anti-Semitism and bigotry that existed long after the war's end. An invaluable resource and testament to history, this film was a profound influence on all films to address issues of the Holocaust, from Judgment at Nuremberg and Shoah to Schindler's List. Night and Fog remains an essential and indispensable document of the 20th century. --Robert Lane, amazon.com

[...] this film was a profound influence on all films to address issues of the Holocaust, from Judgment at Nuremberg and Shoah to Schindler's List. Night and Fog remains an essential and indispensable document of the 20th century. --Robert Lane, amazon.com --James Leahy , http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/26/cteq/nuit_et_brouillard.html

Resnais' classic, definitive study of the concentration camp universe is a searing meditation on individual and collection responsibility, a film about human forgetfulness, a reminder of a reproduceable past, an account of a cosmic horror, an archetypal, surrealist nightmare come alive. Based on exhaustive and terrifying documentary footage and shots of the camps ten years later -- the horror receding beneath vegetation as part of the inevitable "healing" of time -- it aims to shock into awareness "those who believe that this happened once and for all and in a single country and who do not think to look around and do not hear the cries without end." Jean Cayrol provides a cruel, poetic commentary that will live forever, Hans Eisler one of his most memorable scores. The constant transitions from then to now presage Resnais' later work and serve to confirm that the horror the film depicts continues into the present and is, in fact, concurrent to it. --Film As a Subversive Art (1974) - Amos Vogel

Nuit et brouillard grew out of an exhibition at the Institut Pédagogique National in November 1954. This was organised by the Comité d'Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale, and Olga Wormser (with Henri Michel, the co-director of the Comité and co-organiser of the exhibition) suggested to film producer Anatole Dauman that he go to the exhibition. Michel and Dauman then agreed a new film should be made, and Dauman invited Alain Resnais to be the director. At first he refused. He felt his lack of first-hand experience of the camps would mean his film lacked the authenticity he felt essential for any effective treatment of the subject matter. However, he then relented, provided Jean Cayrol became involved to guarantee such authenticity. Cayrol's 1946 collection Poèmes de la nuit et du brouillard had evoked his experience as a survivor of Mauthausen with great power. At first Cayrol was reluctant to become involved; the idea of revisiting these experiences was too painful for him. He offered only to take a look at the material when Resnais had his first cut, without undertaking to participate even then. However Chris Marker, a mutual friend, was able to persuade him to change his mind. Marker had collaborated with Resnais a couple of years earlier on Les Statues meurent aussi, an account of the appropriation of traditional art objects by colonial museum and ethnographic collections. This had been banned by the censors for its anti-colonialist stance, the argument that these objects, detached from their cultural contexts and meanings, had effectively been sentenced to death. --James Leahy , http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/03/26/cteq/nuit_et_brouillard.html

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