Alain Resnais: June 3, 1922 - March 1, 2014

RIP Alain Resnais

6/3/1922 - 3/1/2014

Last July I shared Alain Resnais' 1956 documentary Toute la Memoire de la Monde, a hypnotic look at the bibliotheque. The great French filmmaker who gave us Hiroshima Mon Amour, the mesmerizing, mystifying Last Year at Marienbad, and the unflinching look at the horrors of the concentration camps in Night and Fog passed away earlier this month at the age of 91. His new film (yes, he was still working!) Life with Riley was set to debut at the end of March. While the master filmmaker is no longer with us, his masterpieces will live forever. What a legacy to have left the world. Merci, Monsieur Resnais! 

"Although his name was often associated with the French New Wave directors — notably Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose careers coalesced around the same time his did — Mr. Resnais actually belonged to a tradition of Left Bank intellectualism that drew on more established, high-culture sources than the movie-centric influences of the New Wave. Where Godard’s 1960 film, “Breathless,” was a pastiche of low-budget American gangster films, Mr. Resnais’s breakthrough feature, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” in 1959, took on two subjects weighted with social and political significance: the American nuclear destruction of Hiroshima, Japan, and the German occupation of France." NY Times