At the end of Life of Riley, a young woman places the image of a happy skull on the coffin of a man around whom all the action, all the talk has revolved throughout the film. That man, George, is never seen; all we know of him is what others have been saying about him. That image, that smile, that memento mori, is a final playful gesture from Alain Resnais, who died last night at the age of 91.
When the Arsenal here in Berlin ran a retrospective back in 2012, the programmers noted that Resnais had originally intended to become an actor:
However, he studied editing at Paris’ film school, the IDHEC, and the notion of montage remains essential to his work today. He started making miniature portraits of artists in 1946 and moved on to short documentaries in the 1950s. These were often commissions and were largely essayistic in form, treating a variety of subjects. At the time, he was especially interested in the relationship between film, art, language, history and society. Although Resnais was a contemporary of the Nouvelle Vague filmmakers, he felt more affinities with the loose “Rive Gauche” group (mainly Marker and Varda). In contrast to those of his colleagues who came from the Cahiers du Cinéma, Resnais has till today never written his own screenplay. To begin with, he worked from original screenplays written by novelists such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Semprun; he later adapted plays by Alan Ayckbourn or Jean Anouilh. His films Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L’annee derniere a Marienbad (1961) made a significant to the modern age of cinema. His trademark became the breaking of traditional linear narrative structures in favor of complex compositions with different time and space relations. Whereas until the end of the 1960s, his works examined war and the complicated relationship between past and present, between remembering and forgetting, in the 1980s, Resnais started examining the artificiality of theater’s impact on cinema. He has since developed a very personal form of anti-realism, and as his interest in the “trivial” has grown he has been inspired by material from boulevard theater, popular literature and chanson. The gap between high and pop culture is one he continues to bridge today in a playful manner.
There’s that word “playful” again. But let’s not get carried away. In 2003, Kent Jones noted that “Hiroshima mon amour’s status as a milestone in film history is both a blessing and a curse. It can be hard for new audiences to find their way to the actual movie, buried as it is beneath its own daunting reputation, monumental subject matter, and high cultural pedigree. Unlike Breathless, with its jump cuts and light, spontaneous feel, Hiroshima is deliberate, highly constructed, decidedly grave, and emotionally devastating. Where Godard is loose-limbed, Resnais has a spine of modernist steel. Where the Godard film feels like a free-jazz improvisation, the Resnais feels like a piece of atonal music with the weight of history on its shoulders—Ornette Coleman vs. Anton Webern.”
When Last Year at Marienbad turned 50 in 2011, I gathered links to essays measuring its impact in the Notebook. In “The Game,” another piece for the Notebook by Miriam Bale, she notes that the film “is often relegated to a peak of the separate-but-not-quite-equal Left Bank branch of the French New Wave, but as revealed in a longform interview with director Alain Resnais by André Labarthe and Jacques Rivette (Cahiers du cinéma, September 1961) Marienbad was major influence on French New Wave filmmaking strategies, particularly on Rivette.”
Just the other day, Jonathan Rosenbaum posted his 1980 interview with Resnais. Introducing the conversation, he wrote of Mon Oncle d’Amérique: “Resnais exhibits here his usual flair for composing beautiful shots that are at once richly suggestive (especially in color) and hauntingly symmetrical—like those centering on a wild boar, a sewing machine, or Russian dolls—and then arranging them in mysterious mosaic-like patterns in the editing. But these opulent visual pearls are basically strewn about for kicks, not provocation; and all the minor puzzles that Resnais sets up are neatly solved along the way.”
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