Prompted by the availability of a number of new prints from France, we return to the subject of one of our most successful complete retrospectives, Alain Resnais, and append four impossible-to-see films by recently deceased novelist and director Alain Robbe-Grillet to reveal the connections (and differences) between these two artists, welded forever in the history of cinema by their epochal collaboration, Last Year at Marienbad, and by their shared reputations as masters of modernism. 

Like Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais radically transformed our sense of the possibilities of film. After making a series of short documentaries, including the influential meditation on the Holocaust, Night and Fog (1955), Resnais produced one of the key works of modernist cinema: Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Addressing themes that were to become his preoccupations-memory and willed forgetfulness, the subjective nature of time, the imminence of death-Resnais established in Hiroshima a narrative structure and editing style which were acclaimed for their ability to represent interior states. Some attributed the film's radical interiority to Marguerite Duras, who wrote the script, as they would later attribute the intricacies of Last Year at Marienbad to its script-writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet. However, Hiroshima's combination of documentary realism and formal abstraction, its conflation of public history and private memory, past and present, fact and artifice, "objective" images and "subjective" monologue, and its unconventional use of montage to replicate the obscure workings of consciousness, defined the style for which Resnais subsequently became renowned.

Featured Works:

Guernica (Alain Resnais, 1950); Satues Also Die (Les statues meurent aussi, Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953); Night and Fog (Nuit et Bruillard, Alain Resnais, 1955); Hiroshima mon amour (Alain Resnais, 1959); Last Year at Marienbad (L'année dernière à Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961); L'immortelle (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1963); Muriel (Muriel ou le temps d'un retour, Alain Resnais, 1963, pictured); Trans-Europ-Express  (Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1966); The Man Who Lies (L'homme qui ment, Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1968); Eden and After (L'Éden et après, Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1970); Stavisky... (Alain Resnais, 1974); My American Uncle (Mon Oncle D'Amérique, Alain Resnais, 1980)

Program information:

Memory/Montage/Modernism: Alain Resnais & Alain Robbe-Grillet

Related Articles:
After the Revolution by Andrew Tracy posted Aug. 07, 2008