Parky at the Pictures (DVD 6/3/2014)

Born in Vannes on 3 June 1922, Alain Resnais began making 8mm films as a teenager prior to studying acting in the early 1940s. Graduating from the IDHEC film school in 1945, he edited Le Sommeil d'Albertine before making his directorial debut with the 16mm feature Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (1946). He made his name, however, with a series of exceptional shorts and several have been included in the National Film Theatre's Curiouser and Curiouser season.

Initially, Resnais excelled at art studies like Van Gogh (1948), Gauguin and Guernica (both 1950). However, he proved he could provoke as well as inform with Les Statues meurent aussi (1953), which he made with Chris Marker and was long banned by the French authorities for demonstrating how colonial powers had set out to destroy African art. He reunited with Marker for Toute la mémoire du monde, an insight into the workings of the Bibliothèque Nationale that also included contributions from Agnès Varda, Georges Delerue and Maurice Jarre. Marker also wrote the commentary for Le Mystère de l'atelier quinze (1957), a profile of a doctor investigating a factory worker's sudden illness that Resnais co-directed with André Heinrich, while he renewed his association with cinematographer Sacha Vierny on the industrial documentary, Le Chant du Styrène (1958), which chronicled the daily routine in a polystyrene factory.

However, his finest short film was Nuit et brouillard/Night and Fog (1955), which touched on the themes of time and memory that would dominate his feature work and introduced the ambitious tracking style that became his trademark. François Truffaut considered this 33-minute documentary to be the greatest film ever made. Yet, neither Resnais nor writer Jean Cayrol was particularly keen to work on it.

Inspired by a 1954 exhibition at the Institut Pédagogique National, producer Anatole Dauman asked Resnais to direct a study of the Holocaust. But Resnais was reluctant to express opinions on an event he had not witnessed at first hand and agreed only if Cayrol scripted the commentary. However, the novelist, who had survived Mauthausen and recorded his feelings in the 1946 volume Poèmes de la Nuit et du Brouillard, had no desire to revisit painful memories and was only persuaded to accept the commission by Chris Marker.

The juxtaposition of colour images of the deserted environs of Auschwitz and Maïdenek with monochrome stills and newsreel footage gives the film a chilling immediacy, while also suggesting Resnais's perennial themes of memory and the difficulty of recollection. Abetted by Cayrol's commentary (voiced with a disconcerting lack of emotion by Michel Bouquet) and Hanns Eisler's sombre score, Resnais's prowling camera forces the viewer to look at what now seem unremarkable places and contemplate how easily they could become sites of mass extermination. The contrast between these stark realities and the stylised recreations of Hollywoodised versions could not be more marked.

Yet some critics were less than impressed by Resnais's decision to impose an artistic aesthetic on such harrowing material. Others lamented the failure to count the 300,000 murdered gays and lesbians among the other ethnic, religious and political groupings who perished alongside the Jews, while others still dismissed the film's conclusion that such atrocities have always happened and will continue to do so unless we exercises constant vigilance as a feeble lesson to draw from such unprecedented barbarism.

But while Night and Fog all too evidently reflected the failings of imperfect humanity, it remains a powerful and profoundly moving memoir to the dead. Moreover, it encouraged others to explore the Shoah in greater depth. Steeped in modernist and literary influences, Resnais emerged as a key figure in the Left Bank group with Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), which along with Truffaut's Les 400 Coups and Jean-Luc Godard's A Bout de Souffle brought the nouvelle vague to international attention.

In 1957, Resnais had been approached by some Franco-Japanese producers to make a film exploring life in Hiroshima since the catastrophe of August 1945. Unwilling to repeat the formula employed in his Holocaust masterpiece, Night and Fog, Resnais asked novelist Marguerite Duras to collaborate on a piece in which the `atomic agony' was a facet of the action rather than its fulcrum. What resulted was the first truly modernist feature. But while its release in 1959 coincided with the launch of auteur cinema, this was very much a collaborative effort, with Sacha Vierny and Michio Takahashi's location photography being intricately linked by Henri Colpi's editorial team and sensitively complemented by Giovanni Fusco and Georges Delerue's contrasting musical contributions.

The action centres on a French actress in Hiroshima to make a film about peace, whose affair with a married Japanese architect reawakens memories of her romance in wartime Nevers with a German soldier. But the storyline is almost immaterial. This is a film about memory, experience and representation. But rather than tackle their themes in a traditionally linear manner, Resnais and Duras borrowed the Proustian idea of involuntary association to create what Resnais called `a sort of poem in which the images would act as counterpoint to the text'. Thus, Emmanuelle Riva is able to recall her past via a subliminal flash cut between the hands of her sleeping Japanese lover and his dying German counterpart and similar instances of metaphoric logic dictate that her recollections continue to intrude upon her present for the remainder of her stay.

In order to achieve this temporal and spatial dislocation, Resnais had to devise a new film grammar and the viewer has to concentrate throughout to make the links between events in occupied France and liberated Japan. Thus, he juxtaposed scenes of her post-collaborationist suffering with the tragedies that befell Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, in the process, he succeeded in questioning both the nature of narrative truth and the reliability of remembrance. In this regard, his use of clips from Hideo Sekigawa's dramatic reconstruction  Hiroshima are particularly contentious, as rather than urging us to learn from the lessons of history, Resnais seems to be suggesting that the only way in which humanity can cope with the atrocities it has perpetrated and endured is continuously to forget.

Influenced by Henri Bergson's theories of time and `creative evolution', Resnais sought to find the visual equivalent of literary syntax and further experimented with elliptical transitions between objective and subjective narrative modes in L'Année dernière à Marienbad/Last Year at Marienbad (1961). However, he also attempted to explore the correlation between the past, present and future upon the same spatial and temporal plane and, consequently, this landmark picture has divided critics and baffled audiences ever since.

While holidaying at a spa with M (Sacha Pitoëff), A (Delphine Seyrig) is approached by X (Giorgio Albertazzi), who tries to convince her that they have a prior assignation, which they arranged at a similar resort the previous year.

Breaking with traditional conventions of screen narrative, this modernist masterpiece explores the interaction of time, memory and imagination. For many it's an infuriating experience whose intellectual obscurantism rapidly wears the patience. But for others, it's an intriguing treatise on art, romance, gender politics or myth, while others still see its exploitation of temporal and spatial relationships as a signifier of how little film's potential has been tapped.

Working from a screenplay written by nouveau roman pioneer, Alain Robbe-Grille, Alain Resnais clearly sought to further the cinematic experiment begun with Hiroshima, Mon Amour. Consequently, he allows Jacques Saulnier's art direction and Giorgio Albertazzi's narration to set the scene and mood, while he guides Sacha Vierny's camera through the chateau's baroque corridors and manicured gardens in a bid to reproduce on celluloid the abstract process of thought.

Thus, Resnais is scarcely interested in diegetic logic or the questions thrown up by Albertazzi's recollections, inconsistencies and embellishments - hence his reliance on sequences whose content is repeated, distorted or contradicted without us ever learning whether the action is real or imagined or is taking place in the past, present or future. He is more concerned with achieving a cinematic texture in which the stylised locales, somnambulistic performances, classical tableaux and non-linear structuring provoke the same response in the viewer as the supposedly symbolic Greek statue does in the spa guests.

This blurring of subjective and objective reality explains the minimalism and studied artificiality of the film's composition and enactment. However, by consistently contrasting art and actuality, Resnais was also inviting the viewer to impose their own interpretation upon the scenario and, thus, become an active intellectual participant in its proceedings.

Last Year at Marienbad won the Golden Lion at Venice and proved to be a surprising commercial success. Its stream of consciousness technique has since been much imitated, but it remains a uniquely beautiful, challenging and mesmerising artwork. Resnais followed it with Muriel (1963).

Every person is a private world,' Jean-Pierre Kérien declares during his reunion with old flame Delphine Seyrig. And rarely have persons in such close proximity been so detached or heard so little of what is being said than the protagonists in this disconcerting, mesmerising anti-drama. The spectre of conflict looms over the action. Kérien and Seyrig haven't seen each other since before the Second World War that decimated Boulogne, and it’s implied that dark Vichy deeds may now be haunting them as much as the torture and murder of the unseen Muriel is wracking Seyrig's stepson, Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, newly returned from fighting in Algeria.

But nothing here is as it seems, with the rapid-fire opening montage warning us not to expect anything by way of linearity or causality, as film is incapable of capturing real life. However, it does have a unique genius for conveying the fragmentary and unreliable nature of recollection and the chaotic and capricious essence of concurrence. Consequently, Resnais is able to present human interaction as a series of statements and suppressions, digressions and distractions, in which the mind so consistently goes off at tangents that concentration, let alone conversation, is a minor miracle.

In order to keep his images and ideas in flux, Resnais adopts a range of nouvelle vague tactics, including jump cuts, breaches of the 180° line and haphazard framing during dialogue passages. He also disregards audiovisual logic by showing footage of French soldiers helping Algerian children while Thiérrée is describing Muriel's ordeal and dissembling over what is actually being served for dinner, in order to alert us to the characters’ confusion (or even mendacity).

No wonder this neglected work of controlled brilliance required three editors. But Resnais climaxes his mosaical challenge to our senses with a coup de cinéma that sees Sacha Vierny's camera survey the room without interruption, forcing us to view the mise-en-scène and everything that may or may not have occurred within it from a fresh perspective.

In 1966, Resnais collaborated with the exiled Spanish author Jorge Semprun on La Guerre est finie/The War Is Over (1966). Despite being a comparatively simple linear narrative, the pair still overlapped past and present events, as revolutionary Yves Montand implores his comrades to let him lead a strike in Madrid. However, torn between loyal mistress Ingrid Thulin and student radical Geneviève Bujold, he has to endures three days of introspection before reaching the grim conclusion that, after risking his life for three decades, he no longer has the anger or energy to continue his fight against the Francoist regime.

Having spent so long investigating memory, it was perhaps unsurprising that Resnais decided to approach the subject from a science-fiction perspective. However, despite refining the screenplay over five years with novelist Jean Sternberg, Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) turned out to be one of his weakest pictures, as it resorted to a time machine experiment to allow failed suicide Claude Rich to relive a moment from his past in return for reporting back to scientist Van Doude about the physical and psychological sensations he experienced in transit. All goes well, as he revisits the moment that he emerged from the sea a year earlier to see girlfriend Olga Georges-Picot lying on the beach. But a mechanical malfunction traps Rich in a realm of repeating recollections that confront him with the very feelings of misery and despair that prompted him to shoot himself.

Notwithstanding the odd poetic image and the sombre realisation of the insignificance of human existence, this rare lapse presaged a more definitive return to the past in Stavisky (1974). Scripted by Jorge Semprun, scored by Stephen Sondheim and photographed by Sacha Vierny, this is less a recreation of the events following the arrest of the Russian Jewish émigré whose swindles nearly brought down the Third Republic than a treatise on the response of a frightened government to crisis it had helped precipitate. Jean-Paul Belmondo plays Alexandre Stavisky, a financier whose exposure as a crook caused a riot in March 1934 that left 17 dead and so unnerved the right-leaning politicians who had associated with him that they turned their ire on Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky to distract the masses. However, as Resnais muses on fact and fallacy, memory and make-believe, he expertly conjures up the mood of paranoia that the scandal exposed at the heart of a French establishment already fearing another war with Germany. With Charles Boyer excelling as a nobleman who remains loyal to Belmondo, this is not only a compelling snapshot of a dangerously decadent time, but it also demonstrates Resnais's often overlooked technically mastery.

Three years later, Resnais made his first English-language film. Written by David Mercer and again blending memory and experience, Providence (1977) starred John Gielgud as a dying writer who decides to base the characters in his last novel on the members of his detested family. Drinking steadily, he concocts a scenario in which lawyer Dirk Bogarde prosecutes soldier David Warner for killing an old man while out on patrol. However, the jury accepts Warner's defence that he only acted at the victim's express wish because he was in agony and believed he was turning into a werewolf. Bogarde's wife, Ellen Burstyn, is also taken with Warner and invites him to lunch in the hope of seducing him. But Bogarde is unconcerned by her flirtatiousness, as he is having an affair with journalist Elaine Strich, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the mother who committed suicide.

The twist that sees Gielgud's sons turn out to be very different from the monsters he had envisaged gives this scathing assault on bourgeois mores a rather cosy ending. But, as everyone celebrates the ailing author's 78th birthday, one is left to ponder the Freudian significance of the fetid figments his imagination had fomented. Impeccably played by a superlative cast and full of amusingly florid dialogue, the film scooped seven Césars and was voted the best film of the 1970s by a distinguished panel of international film-makers and critics.

A further six Césars were awarded to Resnais's follow-up feature, Mon Oncle d'Amérique/My American Uncle (1980). But opinion was much more divided on this cod documentary based on the behaviourist theories of Henri Laborit, who acts as the film's dour narrator. However, this Jean Gruault-scripted mix of thesis and soap opera is very much a treat for cineastes, as Gérard Depardieu's farmboy-turned-textile factory manager models himself on legendary 1930s screen everyman Jean Gabin, ambitious politician Roger Pierre is in thrall to the luminous Danielle Darrieux and actress Nicole Garcia is guided by the spirit of Jean Marais.

As Laborit conducts his experiment, Garcia embarks upon an affair with Pierre and finds herself working for Depardieu's company. But each choice takes her further away from the goal for which she detached herself from her working-class family. Similarly, Depardieu is forced to rethink his Catholic faith, while Pierre has to weigh up whether to stick to his principles or exploit the opportunities provided by his position at the head of the state radio network. But while they stumble about in search of purpose and direction, Laborit reveals how similar their responses are to those of laboratory rats, while Resnais sprinkles the action with clips from classic films.

In 1948, Resnais made the romantic musical short Les Jardins de Paris, with Eddie Gaillard and Paul Hammond. Thirty-five years later, he returned to the genre with in typically experimental style in La Vie est un roman/Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), as past, present and imagined incidents coincide at chateau in the Ardennes that is now a school, but formerly belonged to Ruggero Raimondi, a count who, in 1919, invited his guests to sample a drug that would help them forget and achieve perfect happiness. Music, fantasy, drama and satire punctuate this utopian curio which also brilliantly comments on the nature of the intellect and the imagination.

With characters occasionally bursting into song, this offers a very different insight into life-changing experiences to L'Amour à mort/Love Unto Death (1984), an exacting exercise in dualism that sees Lutheran clerics André Dussollier and Fanny Ardant attempt to revise atheists Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma's attitudes to existence and the afterlife.

Using compositions by Hans Werner Henze as contemplative entr'actes, Resnais refuses to provide easy answers to the anguished questions raised in the sombre meditations. But he succeeds in making philosophical speculation seem visually dynamic by employing a form of filmic theatricality that is more pronounced in Mélo (1986), as Resnais utilises enclosed sets, stage lighting and interval curtains to distance the viewer from action that chronicles Sabine Azéma's intensifying feelings for womanising violinist André Dussollier, after husband Pierre Arditi invites him to dinner. Once again exploring the links between love and death, this is a superbly played boulevard drama whose emotionality is reinforced by the long takes and the meticulously designed mise-en-scène.

By contrast, I Want to Go Home (1989) is something of a curio, as Resnais ventures into territory more usually associated with Robert Altman and Woody Allen. However, cartoonist Adolph Green's Parisian sojourn with embarrassed daughter Laura Benson is not without its moments, most notably the animated interventions of Hep Cat and his companion Sally and a costume ball sequence that includes Sorbonne academic Gérard Depardieu dressed as Popeye. Confirming that the only thing to expect from a Resnais picture is the unexpected, this is a teasing sketch on artistic value and middlebrow pretension that just about surmounts its transatlantic tribulations.

After four years of feature inactivity, Resnais returned to traditional musical territory for On connaît le chanson/The Same Old Song (1997) and Pas sur la Bouche/Not on the Lips (2003). The first is a relaxed assault on bourgeois mores, in which Bacri's apartment-hunting hypochondriac renews acquaintance with old friend Sabine Azéma, who is contemplating divorce from dullard husband, Pierre Arditi, and whose sister (Agnès Jaoui) is a Parisian tour guide who has just started dating estate agent Lambert Wilson, unaware that his junior, André Dussollier, also has a crush on her. The second revisited Maurice Yvain and André Barde's 1925 musical comedy, in which Azéma's bid to prevent husband Arditi from discovering that she was once married to Lambert's American visitor is complicated by her devoted sister Isabelle Nanty, irksome house guest Daniel Prévost, Coocooist artist Jalil Lespert and lovesick ingénue, Audrey Tautou.

In 2006, Resnais demonstrated again in Couers/Private Fears in Public Places his mastery of exploring character emotion through their environment. Beautifully photographed by Eric Gautier and designed by Jacques Saulnier, this adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn's stage play may lack the cinematic ingenuity of Last Year at Marienbad, but its discussion of memory, time and solitude remains as acute and hypnotic as ever. Resnais links over 50 short scenes to reveal how isolated people can be - even within supposedly close relationships. The ensemble playing is exemplary, with André Dussollier typically assured as the dapper estate agent whose guilty fascination with the graphic contents of a half-wiped videotape loaned to him by his religious assistant, Sabine Azèma, contrasts with younger sister Isabelle Carré's naive belief in true love. Elegantly designed and impeccably played, this melancholic treatise on memory, time and the barriers that keep people apart is a gem of formal and intellectual rigour.

Seventy-four years after he made his first short at the age of 14, Resnais remains one of France's most innovative and engaging film-makers. Adapted from Christian Gailly's novel L'Incident, Les Herbes folles/Wild Grass is his 17th feature and continues his fascination with causality and subjective truth.

As dentist Sabine Azéma leaves a Paris boutique after purchasing a pair of expensive shoes, her handbag is snatched by a thief and her discarded purse is discovered in an underground car park by by-passer André Dussollier. Intrigued by the fact that Azéma has a pilot's licence, he decides to contact her about her lost property and daydreams about the ways in which she might express her gratitude. But Azéma restricts herself to curt thanks over the telephone and the disillusioned Dussollier decides to hand the purse to the police.

With Resnais hinting that Dussollier is hiding a guilty secret from his past, the interview with detective Mathieu Amalric goes anything but smoothly. Indeed, he pays him a visit soon afterwards with partner Michel Vuillermoz to caution him after Azéma complains about being stalked. With wife Anne Consigny and children Sara Forestier and Vladimir Consigny unaware of Dussollier's increasingly erratic behaviour, he takes to prowling around Azéma's neighbourhood in the hope of bumping into her (much to the amusement of her colleague, Emmanuelle Devos). Eventually, they agree to meet. But Dussollier's hopes of taking a flight in Azéma's reconditioned combat plane are cruelly thwarted.

Narrated by the unseen Edouard Baer, this compelling picture manages to be both delightful and disconcerting. Born out of both childhood nostalgia and late-life curiosity, Dussollier's fixation feels both melancholic and morbid. Yet, even though it threatens to turn nasty after he vandalises Azéma's car, it remains rooted in courteous curiosity rather than immorality or malice. Ultimately, however, the storyline risks erring too much towards the kind of Hollywood melodrama to which Resnais alludes by having Azéma spy on Dussollier as he leaves a screening of Mark Robson's The Bridges of Toko-Ri (1954) and the denouement that follow will frustrate some as much as it fascinates.

As they seemingly always do, Dussollier and Azéma excel under Resnais's direction. But his choreography of Eric Gautier's roving camera is equally impressive, as is Jacques Saulnier's production design (which drolly contrasts the ditzy spinster's gaudy flat with the family man's stolidly comfortable home) and Mark Snow's score, which teasingly flits between genres with the same finesse with which Resnais references a range of Franco-American screen classics. Very much the work of a master and one who has mellowed without losing his ability to challenge the viewer, this has an elegance and a simplicity that match the deceptive depth suggested in the opening shot of a tuft of grass growing through a crack in the pavement.