Alain Resnais

Alain Resnais (French: [alɛ̃ ʁɛnɛ]; 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.

After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, Resnais went on to direct short films including Night and Fog (1956), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. Resnais then began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Muriel (1963) and Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past.

Resnais was associated with the French New Wave (la nouvelle vague), though he 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 (these included Agnès Varda and Chris Marker). 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 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.

Throughout his career, he won many awards from international film festivals and academies, including one Academy Award, two César Awards for best director (he was nominated on eight occasions), three Louis Delluc Prize and one Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.