Resnais, Alain

Night and Fog - Criterion Collection

Though only a short subject, this groundbreaking documentary remains one of the most influential and powerful explorations of the Holocaust ever made. Director Alain Resnais bluntly presents an indictment not only of the Nazis but of the world community, and the film is all the more remarkable for its harsh judgment considering the time in which it was made, less than a decade after the end of the war, when questions of responsibility were not yet being addressed. Juxtaposing archival clips from the concentration camps across Germany and Poland with the present-day denials of the camps' existence, the film seeks to once and for all expose the horrifying truth of the Final Solution, as well as to address the continuing anti-Semitism and bigotry that existed long after the war's end. An invaluable resource and testament to history, this film was a profound influence on all films to address issues of the Holocaust, from Judgment at Nuremberg and Shoah to Schindler's List. Night and Fog remains an essential and indispensable document of the 20th century. --Robert Lane

Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps' quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man's violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.

Hiroshima Mon Amour - Criterion Collection

An extraordinary and deeply moving film that retains much of its power since its original release in 1959, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour is the story of a French woman (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese man (Eiji Okada) who become lovers in the city of Hiroshima, where the U.S. dropped a nuclear bomb to end World War II in the Pacific. Written by Marguerite Duras and juggled, as if by wandering thoughts, in chronology and setting by Resnais, the film reveals the miserable and mortifying experiences of each character during the war and suggests the obvious healing properties of their relationship in the present. An emotional allusion or two can certainly be made with the more recent The English Patient, but nothing can quite prepare one for Resnais's extreme yet intuitively accessible experiments in fusing the past, present, and future into great sweeps of subjectively experienced memory. Yet audiences have never had trouble relating to this bold milestone of the French New Wave, largely because at its heart is a genuinely affecting, soulful love story. --Tom Keogh

A cornerstone of French cinema, Alain Resnais' first feature is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. Utilizing an innovative flashback structure and an Academy Award®-nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, Resnais delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish, in this moody masterwork.

Muriel

Delphine Seyrig gives an award-winning performance in Alain Resnais hauntingly brilliant masterpiece. Helene (Seyrig) is a widow who sells antiques from the apartment she shares with her eccentric filmmaker stepson Bernard. Bernard is a veteran of the Algerian War and is haunted by his participation in the torture and murder of a young woman named Muriel. System Requirements:Run Time: 116 minutesFormat: DVD MOVIE Genre: FOREIGN/LATIN Rating: NR UPC: 741952310693 Manufacturer No: KLF-DV3106

Alain Resnais's 1963 memory film Muriel is a fascinating study of the relationship between the way things are remembered--a blend of fact, dream, and falsification--and the way things really are, with cinema itself the crucial bridge. A woman (Delphine Seyrig), haunted by the memory of her first love, meets up with him again and finds he's a long way from being the man she recalls. Meanwhile, her stepson (Jean-Baptiste Thierrée) is preoccupied with a torture death he witnessed in Algeria. In the case of the former, the present-day truths about Seyrig's old flame are mitigated and complicated by recollections of his old self, and what develops is a timeless portrait of the character more alive than his current actuality. In the latter, the young man's refusal to loosen the atrocity's grip on his life becomes increasingly fruitless as the tragedy only exists on film--and the world has moved on despite the injustice. A challenging work by Resnais in which perspective rapidly changes, the film nevertheless has a subtle, haunting quality in which the richness of the past and the bluntness of the present obscure one another and must be reconciled on celluloid. --Tom Keogh

La Guerre Est Finie

For some soldiers, the war is never over... Legendary "New Wave" director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) helms this emotionally-charged suspense-drama set in France and on the streets of fascist Spain, starring European film icon Yves Montand (Jean de Florette), a young Genevieve Bujold (Coma) in one of her first screen appearances, and the radiant Ingrid Thulin (Wild Strawberries). Montand is an aging revolutionary learning to accept that the fight for freedom should be passed to younger hands until a chance encounter with a student terrorist revives his militant passions, but catastrophe stalks Montand on his unswerving path to his last mission and a fateful choice.

Last Year at Marienbad

One of the most ferociously iconoclastic and experimental films of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais's 1961 feature, winner of the grand prize at that year's Venice Film Festival, is based on a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet. At its center is what seems to be a simple but unanswerable puzzle: Did its protagonist (Giorgio Albertazzi) have an affair the year before with a woman (Delphine Seyrig) he just met (or possibly re-met) at his hotel? The inquiry becomes an unsettling experiment in flattening the dimensions of past, present, and future so that any difference between them becomes meaningless, while Resnais's coldly formal but oddly dreamlike geometric compositions make space itself seem a function of subjective memory. Add to that Resnais's trademark tracking shots--long, smooth, a visual correlative of a wordless feeling--and this is a film that truly gets under the skin in almost inexplicable ways. One of the most influential works of its time. --Tom Keogh

Private Fears in Public Places

Set inside a magically snowbound Paris, six lonely souls converge and commingle in their search for lasting connections. A warm-hearted story about six characters longing for love in wintry Paris, PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES interweaves multiple stories into a beautifully realized and deeply affecting whole.

Not on the Lips

A frothy 1925 operetta, performed by a glittering cast that includes Sabine Azema and Audrey Tautou, might not sound precisely like the great director Alain Resnais's glass of champagne. But Not on the Lips (Pas sur la bouche) is in a line of Resnais films that uses false sets and stylized acting for its effect. This musical farce follows a wife (Azema) trying to keep her husband (Pierre Arditi) from learning that she was actually married once before--to an American who is about to become hubby's business partner. Awkward. Audrey Tautou, in a distinctly supporting role, navigates the trickery of flirtation as she tries to attract lounge lizard-y Jalil Lespert. Azema and Arditi are smooth as glass, but the standout here is Lambert Wilson (the French dude of the Matrix saga) as the tall, cigar-smoking American businessman, who disdains the un-hygenic dangers of kissing on the lips. Wilson's delivery of English phrases and his American-accented French is spot-on--you can hear the joke even if you don't speak French. The lightness of touch is maintained throughout, however gently the director of Last Year at Marienbad may be prodding at the undercurrents of Franco-American hostility (which probably seemed more loaded in 2004 than in 1925) and marital anxiety. --Robert Horton

Alain Renais' (Last Year at Marienbad) delightful new period musical comedy is based on a 1925 Parisian Operetta and stars Audrey Tautou (A Very Long Engagement), Isabelle Nanty (Amelie) and Lambert Wilson (The Matrix sequels).

Mélo

Alain Resnais, the legendary, daring, and acclaimed director of Night and Fog, Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad, adds an offbeat entry into his stunning oeuvre with Mélo, a loose adaptation of Henri Bernstein s celebrated 1929 play. Resnais s first solo credit for screenplay in almost 40 years, Mélo tells the story of Marcel (Andre Dussollier) and Pierre (Pierre Arditi), two lifelong friends who are also concert violinists. While Marcel has gone on to stardom, Pierre has settled into a contented family life with his beautiful wife Romaine (Sabine Azema - A Sunday in the Country). But all is not perfect; Pierre is unaware that Romaine is having an affair with Marcel. For Mélo, Azema won the Cesar (France s Academy Award) as Best Actress, playing a woman so consumed by guilt, she eventually takes deadly measures to end her infidelity. Also featured in the film is renowned French actress Fanny Ardant (8 Women, The Woman Next Door).

Mon Oncle d'Amerique

Following a pair of films (Stavisky, Providence) that were more conventionally narrative than his explosively experimental early works (Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Last Year at Marienbad), French New Wave pioneer director Alain Resnais began a cycle of films beginning in 1980 (all written by Jean Gruault) that delved deeply into his philosophical and aesthetic concerns again. The first of these was Mon Oncle d'Amerique, starring Gérard Depardieu as one of three middle-class characters undergoing great degrees of personal stress. Presented as a docudrama of sorts with some pulp-fiction qualities, these parallel tales don't really resolve themselves within their own borders but gain another dimension of subjective resolution when Resnais ushers in a real-life scientist to discuss certain kinds of behavioral triggers in humans. The results are actually very satisfying and witty for viewers who can see the overt psychological elements not as a smug commentary on the action but a means of opening the action to a viewer's subconscious experience. Resnais takes the bold step of creating a new kind of filmed story here, and largely succeeds. --Tom Keogh

Stavisky

Could the true story of the financial scandal that shook France to the brink of civil war in 1933 be more timely? Jean Paul Belmondo is perfectly cast as Serge Alexander (a.k.a. Stavisky), the one-time underworld con man who charms his way to the top of the French financial world with bluff, cunning, and a bankroll of phony vouchers. Screenwriter Jorge Semprún (Z) weaves Stavisky's story through the tapestry of European politics: the rise of fascism, the stain of anti-Semitism, the shadow of impending war. The aloof style of Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) is warmed by the smiling charisma of Belmondo and by Charles Boyer's poignant turn as a sentimental, nearly bankrupt Baron. Elegantly shot by the great Sacha Vierny and accompanied by a lush Stephen Sondheim score, this multi-faceted gem is one of Resnais's most satisfying and accessible films. --Sean Axmaker

International sensation Jean-Paul Belmondo (Breathless, Le Professionnel) turns on the charm as Serge Alexandre, known to the world as Stavisky. Working his way from small time cons to high society stings, this rascal ignites a scandal in 1930s France by saturating the country with phony vouchers, causing a whirlwind of governmental and economic destruction shortly before World War II. Groundbreaking director Alain Resnais (Last Year At Marienbad, Hiroshima Mon Amour) guides a dazzling cast headed by screen idol Charles Boyer through this timeless saga of deception, romance, and fallen grace, accompanied by a lyrical score from Broadway legend Stephen Sondheim.