Alain Resnais

Biography

Alain Resnais (3 June 1922 – 1 March 2014) was a French film director and screenwriter 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 (la 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 previously unconnected with the cinema such as Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Semprún and Jacques Sternberg. In later films, Resnais…

Directed

1. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) — Director
2. Night and Fog (1956) — Director
3. Last Year at Marienbad (1961) — Director
4. My American Uncle (1980) — Director
5. Muriel, or the Time of Return (1963) — Director
6. Same Old Song (1997) — Director
7. Stavisky... (1974) — Director
8. Je T'Aime, Je T'Aime (1968) — Director
9. Wild Grass (2009) — Director
10. Private Fears in Public Places (2006) — Director
11. Providence (1977) — Director
12. Smoking / No Smoking (1993) — Director
13. You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2012) — Director
14. Mélo (1986) — Director
15. All the World's Memory (1956) — Director
16. Statues Also Die (1953) — Director
17. The War Is Over (1966) — Director
18. Life of Riley (2014) — Director
19. Not on the Lips (2003) — Director
20. Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983) — Director
21. Guernica (1951) — Director
22. Love Unto Death (1984) — Director
23. The Song of Styrene (1958) — Director
24. Far from Vietnam (1967) — Director
25. I Want to Go Home (1989) — Director
26. Van Gogh (1948) — Director
27. No Smoking (1993) — Director
28. Smoking (1993) — Director
29. Cinétracts (1968) — Director
30. Gauguin (1950) — Director
31. Visite à Oscar Dominguez (1947) — Director
32. Lest We Forget (1991) — Director
33. The Mystery of Workshop 15 (1957) — Director
34. Visite à Hans Hartung (1947) — Director
35. Visite à Lucien Coutaud (1947) — Director
36. Visit to Felix Labisse (1947) — Director
37. Portrait d’Henri Goetz (1947) — Director
38. Visite à César Domela (1947) — Director
39. Pictura (1951) — Director
40. Gershwin (1993) — Director

Also appeared in

1. The Devil's Envoys (1942) — Extra (uncredited)
2. Sign of the Lion (1962) — Un Consommateur (uncredited)
3. The Lovely Month of May (1963) — Self (uncredited)
4. May Days (1978) — Self
5. Bacri, comme un air de famille (2022) — Self (archive footage)
6. Belmondo: The Incorrigible (2022)
7. Alain Resnais, the Audacious (2022) — Self (archive footage)
8. Cinépanorama (1956) — Self
9. Morceaux de Cannes (2021)
10. Hiroshima: The Time of Return (2005) — (voice)
11. Propos d'Alain Resnais (2007) — Self (voice)
12. In the Ears of Alain Resnais (2019) — Self (archive footage)
13. Ciné regards (1978) — Self