Biographies: Alain Resnais - Director

Biographies

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Alain Resnain was French film director, whose career spanned more than six decades. He started his career after finishing his military service in 1846. He started by making short documentaries about artists working in their studios, and a few commercials. He was then offered to make a film about Van Gogh, which was screened at Venice Film Festival and was awarded with a prize. Resnais followed with Night and Fog in 1955, one of a few documentaries made about Nazi concentration camps. In the film, he chose a very innovative technique in story-telling, that contrived alternating between black and white shots of the camps in the and colored shots of them filmed in the present. Resnais's first feature film was Hiroshima mon amour (1959). The film was associated with the emerging movement of the French New Wave, and was remarkable for the use of memories and the alternation between the past and the present in story-telling, a technique that Resnais developed and adapted in many of his work and became a definitive aspect of his style. Resnais's next film was L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961), which he made in collaboration with the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the film attracted great attention and provoked many divergent interpretations of how it should be understood, encouraged by interviews in which Robbe-Grillet and Resnais themselves appeared to give conflicting explanations of the film. With Providence (1977), Resnais made his first film in English, with a screenplay written by David Mercer, and a cast that included John Gielgud and Dirk Bogarde. My American Uncle (1980) was one of Resnais' most successful films with the public, and went on to win the Grand Prix at Cannes Film Festival. Resnais' most recent films were You Ain't Seen nothing Yet! (2012), and Love, Sing and Drink (2013). He died in 1 March, 2014, aged 91.

• 3 March 2014
• Tarek Sharkawy