R.I.P. Alain Resnais

Prolific award-winning filmmaker Alain Resnais passed away on Saturday night in Paris, his producer Jean-Louis Livi said this morning. He was 91. The Hiroshima Mon Amour director’s latest film, Aimer, Boire Et Chanter (Life Of Riley) was recently in competition at the Berlin Film Festival where it won the Silver Bear Alfred Bauer Prize. It is due to be released in France on March 26. A giant of French film whose career spanned six decades, Resnais was born in 1922 in Brittany. He began making 8mm shorts at age 12 and later attended film school, training as an editor. Of his 1958 short, Chant Du Styrène, Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, “Alain Resnais is the 2nd best editor in the world after Eisenstein.” Resnais first appeared at the Cannes Film Festival in 1947 with Nicole Védrès’ Paris 1900 on which he collaborated. In 1956 his influential documentary Night And Fog, about Nazi concentration camps, was shown out of competition in Cannes despite difficulties with French censors and protests of France’s West German embassy. It later screened in Berlin and also won the prestigious Jean Vigo prize. Resnais later attended Cannes with Toute La Memoire Du Monde and in 1959 was in competition with Hiroshima Mon Amour, which was part of the French New Wave. Marguerite Duras’ screenplay was ... Read More »

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