A group of scientists anxiously await word for a despondent, melancholic patient named Claude Ridder (Claude Rich) to regain consciousness at an unidentified hospital, where he is gradually recuperating from a gunshot wound resulting from an attempted suicide, in order to approach him on an ambiguous proposal to participate in a short duration human time […]
A world-weary, career resistance operative and Spanish exile using the alias Diego Mora (Yves Montand) arrives at a customs checkpoint on the French-Spanish border on a quiet Easter Sunday en route to an unspecified assignment and begins to rehearse his cover story with the driver, a bookstore owner and revolution sympathizer named Jude (Dominique Rozan). […]
Muriel opens with a seemingly idiosyncratic series of fragmented images, as a client stands in the doorway of an antique dealer, Helene’s (Delphine Seyrig) apartment to provide specific details on her furniture request. Oddly, the client specifies that she does not want anything “old fashioned”. Helene is a widow, anxiously awaiting the arrival of her […]
Similar to Alain Resnais’ previous film Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad begins with a postulate of memory and perspective. A handsome stranger, X (Giorgio Albertazzi) encounters an alluring socialite, A (Delphine Seyrig) at a grand, baroque hotel and, captivated by her, attempts to convince the reluctant object of his desire that they have […]
From the opening sequence of a lovers’ embrace shot in extreme close-up, intercut with footage of atomic bomb survivors, Alain Resnais creates an asynchronous narrative rhythm in Hiroshima mon amour. A Parisian actress (Emmanuelle Riva) filming an antiwar public service announcement in Hiroshima, has a brief, passionate affair with a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada). A […]
A prefacing passage by author Victor Hugo provides the overarching structure for Alain Resnais’ tongue-in-cheek meditation on the ingenious creation and infinite utility of ductile and formable thermoplastics in Le Chant du Styrène: “Man is served by blind matter. He thinks, he searches, he creates. With his living breath the seeds of nature tremble as […]