Four Reasons to Discover Alain Resnais

Copernican revolution

“In 1959, when I was 21 years old, I saw the first films of the French New Wave: Les 400 coups, A bout de souffle and the films of Claude Chabrol. I thought that they were very nice films. But then I saw Hiroshima mon amour and that was a completely different experience. I felt like I was seeing life, directly, as it happens. It was totally unlike anything I had ever seen in cinema. It was so stupendous, like a Copernican revolution. It was probably the same kind of shock people had in 1925 when they saw Battleship Potemkin, or America’s shock when they saw Citizen Kane in 1941. Resnais was already the best documentary filmmaker of the 1950s with extremely experimental work like Night and Fog and All the Memory of the World.”

Lasting cinema

“I have seen Hiroshima mon amour maybe ten times since 1959 and recently again with an audience. Fifty years later, the film is just as surprising to people. The film was ahead of its time then, but it is also ahead of its time now, as contemporary cinema is so conventional. Resnais’ film was unique compared to the first films of the French New Wave, similar to nothing. Godard was a great admirer of Resnais. He said that he was the greatest editor since Eisenstein.”

Evolution and reinvention

“What always surprised me in Resnais was his capacity to renew himself. I think the plague of modern art is that every artist has to have a signature, and to repeat himself so everybody is sure to recognise him. Sometimes I say that Resnais is the Stanley Kubrick of the art house, he changes and tries something new all the time. His evolution has been from very politically minded works to smaller and more personal themes. Also because he was originally an editor his work was very formally experimental in the beginning. But little by little he gave more attention to actors and acting. As he gets older he is more fascinated by human beings and less perhaps by stylistic inventions. He was an inventor and he realized that he had done a lot of experiments in terms of style. But in his maturity he leans more towards personal intimacy and watching actors have real feelings. ”

Independence

“Part of an artist is like a child, children take risks, they do not know how to be careful or worry about what people will think of them. Resnais does not pay much attention to what critics or the audience expect. He makes the films that he wants to make from a pure curiosity, like a child. For me the definition of a true artist is someone who makes the films that he himself would like to see. Or write the book you would want to read or paint the picture you want look at. Because you can only rely on that judgment, you can not know if the critics or the audience are going to like it.”

Eva Sancho Rodríguez