Alain Resnais Films on DVD and Blu-ray

Alain Resnais Films

Now in his nineties, Alain Resnais remains one of the most innovative directors in world cinema. Fascinated by the relationship between page, stage and screen, he has explored the themes of time, space, memory, appearance and reality in both weighty dramas and sprightly entertainments. Indeed, whether bringing bookish sophistication to the nouvelle vague, making eclectic generic digressions or challenging the talents of his late-career acting ensemble, Resnais has always been a distinctive voice and defied critical labels that he is either overtly intellectual or impenetrably difficult.

He made his name with a series of acclaimed shorts in the postwar era, the most renowned of which is Night and Fog (1955), a poetic, but harrowing study of the Holocaust that Fran�ois Truffaut considered the greatest film ever made. His debut feature also touched upon the Second World War, as French actress Emmanuelle Riva embarks upon an affair with married Japanese architect Eiji Okada in the Marguerite Duras-scripted Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Yet, Resnais and Truffaut would find themselves in rival camps when the French New Wave broke, with Resnais identifying more closely with the Left Bank group of artists that also included Chris Marker, Agn�s Varda and Jacques Demy.

Pursuing his bid to find the visual equivalent of literary syntax, Resnais teamed with novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet to conduct an audacious experiment in the shifts between objective and subjective perspectives in the compellingly elliptical Last Year in Marienbad (1961), in which stranger Giorgio Albertazzi tries to convince Delphine Seyrig that their meeting at the exclusive spa is far from a coincidence. Having won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Resnais reunited with Seyrig for Muriel (1963), a mesmerising anti-drama that again dispensed with conventional linearity and causality to contrast dark deeds performed in Vichy and Algeria. But, while he resorted to a more traditional narrative form in The War Is Over (1966) and rather misfired with the time machine saga Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968), Resnais produced in Stavisky (1974) a searing study of fact and fallacy that recreated the scandal involving a Russian Jewish financier (Jean-Paul Belmondo) that nearly toppled the Third Republic in the mid-1930s.

Following his sole English-language venture, Providence (1977), Resnais starred G�rard Depardieu in the cod documentary My American Uncle (1980), which presaged a decade of trademark innovation, as Resnais combined music, fantasy, satire and drama in Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), brought a touch of theatricality to philosophical speculation in Love Unto Death (1984), employed proscenium stylisation in chronicling the affair between demure wife Sabine Az�ma and philandering violinist Andr� Dussollier in M�lo (1986) and paid homage to American screen comedy in lampooning artistic worth and middlebrow pretension in I Want to Go Home (1989).

By now working with a stock company of trusted actors, Resnais continued to surprise and delight with the musicals On conna�t le chanson (1997) and Pas sur la bouche (2003), and the same mischievous refinement has also characterised Private Fear in Public Places (2006) and Wild Grass (2009), which confirmed his mastery of exploring character through environment, and You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2012), which passed wry comment on the centrality of text and performance in the face of new technology and changing taste. Some reports have claimed this will be Resnais's swan song, but we have learned to expect the unexpected where this unique artist is concerned.
David Parkinson [-]

Highlights