In Alain Resnais, author Emma Wilson presents an incisive and comprehensive analysis of Resnais’s recurring themes of memory, plasticity, construction, and fragmentation. By placing contemporary history within the broader context of capturing internal states and subjective reality, Wilson proposes a means of reconciling Resnais’s more experimental, overtly political postwar films (through the 1960s) with his […]
In the book Alain Resnais, James Monaco seeks to demystify the prevalent notion of the filmmaker’s body of work as being purely “intellectual”, arguing that the perceived inscrutability of his films stems more as a result of the absence of familiar, accessible emotional “codes” rather than his realization of abstruse intellectualism. To this end, Monaco […]
Revisiting the shifting perspective, stream of consciousness narrative of Providence, Alain Resnais’s Les Herbes folles is a more whimsical variation on the themes of subjective reality and causality. An early image of wild grass poking through cracks in the concrete provides a paradigm for the film’s seemingly organic tale of subverted expectation: a middle-aged man […]
There is an early survey of the interiors of a vacant Bercy apartment at the opening sequence of Cœurs that immediately evokes early Alain Resnais in the recurring theme of architectural memory, as the camera pans to the majestic domed ceiling of a converted building, artificially bisected by a superfluous wall constructed for the sole […]
Resnais continues in the direction of his affectionate re-adaptation of early twentieth century French burlesque comedies (most notably, Mélo) in Not on the Lips, a faithful (which unfortunately, includes all the stereotypical and derogatory gibes at Americans), accessibly entertaining, technically accomplished, but hollow musical adaptation of the 1925 operetta by André Barde and Maurice Yvain. […]
On an idyllic summer day in 1933, a lone car traverses around the bend of a narrow gravel road along the side of a hill, stopping at a scenic overlook alongside the deserted coastline as three unidentified, college-aged spectators anxiously follow the course of a sparsely occupied motorboat through a pair of binoculars as it […]