Alain Resnais on AllMovie

French director Alain Resnais was an "auteur" at age 14, making brief films with his own 8mm camera. He studied the performing end of the business under drama instructor Rene Simon, then took directing courses at the newly formed Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographie from 1943 through 1945. He made his first professional appearance in 1945 as a member of an Allied Occupation entertainment troupe called Les Arlequins; one year later, he went back to directing, initially turning out 16mm shorts, then graduating to 35mm documentaries and dramas. In 1948, Resnais attracted critical attention with his short subject Van Gogh, the vanguard of a brief series of documentaries scrutinizing the works of such artists as Gauguin and Picasso. Eleven years later, Resnais burst upon the film-festival and art-house scene with his first feature, Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), which juxtaposed a modern love story with scenes of the atomic-bomb-induced carnage at Hiroshima. (Resnais had earlier toyed with this technique in his famous 1955 short subject Night and Fog, a study of the Nazi concentration camp system.) The film's ambiguity and lack of linear structure confused many, while others hailed Hiroshima as a brilliant exercise in "personal" cinema. Resnais stirred up further controversy with his next feature, Last Year at Marienbad (1961), a Proustian tale of love lost and found that won the 1961 Venice grand prize. The director's next award-winner was 1966's La Guerre est Finie, which eschewed his dreamlike style in favor of a more conventional narrative.

Most of Resnais' films are variations of the Hiroshima Mon Amour conceit of wavering between the tactile experiences of the present and the haunting memories of the past; perhaps his most characteristic effort is 1968's Je t'aime, je t'aime, in which the hero is trapped in a malfunctioning time machine. In 1993 Resnais again delighted his admirers with Smoking/No Smoking, an avant-garde filmization of Alan Aykbourn's expansive stage cycleIntimate Exchanges. The film was awarded several Cesars (French Oscars) including those for Best Picture and Best Direction.