Editing Alain Resnais (section)

==Reputation==
Resnais was often linked with the group of French filmmakers who made their breakthrough as the [[French New Wave|New Wave]] or ''nouvelle vague'' in the late 1950s, but by then he had already established a significant reputation through his ten years of work on documentary short films. He defined his own relationship by saying: "Although I was not fully part of the New Wave because of my age, there was some mutual sympathy and respect between myself and Rivette, Bazin, Demy, Truffaut&nbsp;... So I felt friendly with that team."<ref name="cowie" /> He nevertheless acknowledged his debt to the New Wave because it created the conditions of production, and particularly the financial conditions, which allowed him to make a film like {{Lang|fr|Hiroshima mon amour}}, his first feature film.<ref>A. Adrian Maben, ''[[Films and Filming]]'', October 1966; quoted in Robert Benayoun, ''Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination''. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) p.77.</ref>

Resnais was more often associated with a "Left Bank" group of writers and filmmakers who included [[Agnès Varda]], [[Chris Marker]], [[Jean Cayrol]], [[Marguerite Duras]] and [[Alain Robbe-Grillet]] (with all of whom he collaborated in the earlier part of his career).<ref name="idff816" /> They were distinguished by their interests in documentary, left-wing politics, and the literary experiments of the ''[[nouveau roman]]''.<ref>''The French Cinema Book''; edited by Michael Temple and Michael Witt. (London: BFI, 2004.) p.183.</ref> At the same time, Resnais was also a devotee of popular culture. He owned the largest private collection of comic books in France and in 1962 became the vice president and co-founder of an International Society for Comic Books, ''[[Le Club des bandes dessinées]]'', renamed two years later as ''Centre d'Études des Littératures d'Expression Graphique (CELEG)''.<ref>{{cite web|last=Cole|first=Blake|title=Interview with Film Expert Karen Beckman on Animation|url=http://www.sas.upenn.edu/series/frontiers/moving-pictures|publisher=University of Pennsylvania Research and Scholarship Frontiers|access-date=14 October 2012|date=30 April 2012|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150906233543/https://www.sas.upenn.edu/series/frontiers/moving-pictures|archive-date=6 September 2015|url-status=dead}}</ref> CELEG members also included Resnais's artistic collaborators Marker and Robbe-Grillet.

The importance of creative collaboration in Resnais's films has been noted by many commentators.<ref name="katz" /><ref>Claude Beylie, ''Une histoire du cinéma français''. (Paris: Larousse, 2005.) p.501.</ref> Unlike many of his contemporaries, he always refused to write his own screenplays and attached great importance to the contribution of his chosen writer, whose status in the shared "authorship" of the film he fully acknowledged.<ref>''The French Cinema Book''; edited by Michael Temple and Michael Witt. (London: BFI, 2004.) p.205.</ref> He was also known to treat the completed screenplay with great fidelity, to the extent that some of his screenwriters remarked on how closely the finished film realised their intentions.<ref>Robert Benayoun, ''Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination''. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) pp.186–187, p.223.</ref> (On the few occasions when he did participate in writing the script, particularly for his last three films, his contribution is acknowledged under the pseudonym Alex Reval, since he did not want his name to appear more than once in the credits.)<ref>Jean-Luc Douin, ''Alain Resnais''. Paris: Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 2013. p. 242.</ref>

Time and memory have regularly been identified as two of the principal themes of Resnais's work, at least in his earlier films.<ref name="eec358" /><ref>James Monaco, ''Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination''. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.11.</ref> He however consistently tried to modify this view of his concerns: "I prefer to speak of the imaginary, or of consciousness. What interests me in the mind is that faculty we have to imagine what is going to happen in our heads, or to remember what has happened".<ref>Resnais quoted in, and translated by, Emma Wilson, ''Alain Resnais''. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.1.</ref> He also described his films as an attempt, however imperfect, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism.<ref>Quoted in Claude Beylie, ''Une histoire du cinéma français''. (Paris: Larousse, 2005.) p.501: "Mes films sont une tentative, encore très imparfaite, d'approcher de la complexité de la pensée, de son mécanisme".</ref>

Another view of the evolution of Resnais's career saw him moving progressively away from a realistic treatment of 'big' subjects and overtly political themes towards films that are increasingly personal and playful.<ref>René Prédal, ''L'Itinéraire d'Alain Resnais''. (Paris: Lettres Modernes, 1999.) p.114, p.200</ref> Resnais himself offered an explanation of this shift in terms of challenging what was the norm in filmmaking at the time: having made his early films when escapist cinema was predominant, he progressively felt the need to move away from exploration of social and political issues as that itself became almost the norm in contemporary cinema. Experimentation with narrative forms and genre conventions instead became a central focus of his films.<ref name="adair" /><ref>Emma Wilson, ''Alain Resnais''. (Manchester: Manchester U.P., 2006.) p.196.</ref>

A frequent criticism of Resnais's films among English-language commentators has been that they are emotionally cold; that they are all about technique without grasp of character or subject,<ref>Pauline Kael, "Werewolf, mon amour", in ''New Yorker'', 31 January 1977; quoted by James Monaco, ''Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination''. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) p.5: "...&nbsp;Resnais has little grasp of character or subject; he's an innovator who hasn't got a use for innovations.&nbsp;... What he doesn't seem able to do is to imbue his situations with enough feeling for these tricks to mean something to us – they're just beautiful diddles".</ref> that his understanding of beauty is compromised by a lack of sensuousness,<ref>Susan Sontag, ''Film Quarterly'', vol.17, no.2, (Winter 1963–1964) p.27: "Resnais knows all about beauty. But, unlike Bresson and Godard and Truffaut, he lacks sensuousness. And this, in a film-maker, is a fatal deficiency".</ref> and that his seriousness of intent fails to communicate itself to audiences.<ref>David Thomson, ''The New Biographical Dictionary of Film''. (London: Little, Brown, 2002.) p.729: "Resnais's seriousness is more elevated than his use of film&nbsp;... he has shown himself unable to make a communicative contact with audiences".</ref> Elsewhere however it is suggested that such views are partly based on a misreading of the films, especially his earlier ones, which has impeded an appreciation of the humour and irony which pervade his work; and other viewers have been able to make the connection between the film's form and its human dimension.<ref>James Monaco, ''Alain Resnais: the Rôle of Imagination''. (London: Secker & Warburg, 1978.) pp.3–4; p.9: "...&nbsp;Resnais's films are tempered with a concern for human character and feelings which never loses sight of the vital connection between the forms of the art and its human subjects".</ref>

There is general agreement about Resnais's attachment to formalism in his approach to film; he himself regarded it as the starting point of his work, and usually had an idea of a form, or method of construction, in his head even before the plot or the characters took shape.<ref>Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues & Jean-Louis Leutrat, ''Alain Resnais: liaisons secrètes, accords vagabonds''. (Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2006). p.136.</ref> For him this was also the basis for the communication of feeling: "There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator."<ref>Interview (with Robert Benayoun) in ''Positif'', no.190, février 1977; quoted in ''Alain Resnais'': anthologie établie par Stéphane Goudet. (Paris: Gallimard, 2002.) p.241: "Il ne peut y avoir de communication qu'à travers la forme. S'il n'y a pas de forme, on ne peut pas créer d'émotion chez le spectateur".</ref>

Another term which appears in commentaries on Resnais throughout his career is "surrealism", from his documentary portrait of a library in ''Toute la mémoire du monde'',<ref>""Resnais grasped the surreal futility of archives&nbsp;...": David Thomson, ''The New Biographical Dictionary of Film''. (London: Little, Brown, 2002.) p.729.</ref> through the dreamlike innovations of ''Marienbad'',<ref>Marienbad's "distilled surrealist poetry": Jonathan Rosenbaum, in [http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/last-year-at-marienbad/Film?oid=1056611 ''Chicago Reader''] [retrieved 3 January 2011]</ref> to the latterday playfulness of ''Les Herbes folles''.<ref>"Wild Grass, an authentic surrealist romance": Gilbert Adair in [https://www.theguardian.com/film/2010/jun/22/alain-resnais-interview ''The Guardian''], 22 June 2010.</ref> Resnais himself traced a link to his teenage discovery of surrealism in the works of André Breton: "I hope that I always remain faithful to André Breton who refused to suppose that imaginary life was not a part of real life".<ref>Robert Benayoun, ''Alain Resnais: arpenteur de l'imagination''. (Paris: Ramsay, 2008.) p.143, p.39: "J'espère toujours demeurer fidèle à André Breton qui se refusait de considérer que la vie imaginaire ne fait pas partie de la réelle".</ref>