Alain Resnais 1922-2014

Alain Resnais, one of most thought-provoking filmmakers of last sixty years, died at the age of 91. Resnais, along with fellow filmmakers Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, formed the vanguard of Cinema Verite which led to a string of films that broke down the conventional styles of studio filmmaking and lit the torch for a new generation of filmmakers to carry by disregarding the norms and status quo of what should be filmed versus what can be filmed. With 50 films to his credit, Resnais crafted some of the most time worthy gems in postmodern cinema, ranging from his harrowing look at the deserted concentration camps of World War II in Night and Fog to the politically conscious views of warfare in Hiroshima, Mon Amour and The War is Over.

If there was one film that cemented his career as being regarded as one of the most inspirational and revered filmmakers of his generation, it would be his surreal 1961 epic, Last Year at Marienbad. His tale of love lost and gained within the confines of a majestic hotel became, arguably, the source of inspiration for many filmmakers that succeeded him. It would be hard to imagine Stanley Kubrick to film The Shining without looking at Last Year at Marienbad and it's subtext involving memory and déjà vu. The same thing can be said for Lars Von Trier's Melancholia and it's opening sequences resembling the shadowed topiary from Resnais' masterpiece.

Resnais had an unflinching eye that would set the standard for other filmmakers to emulate. Actor/director Jean Claude Biette said that both Night and Fog and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo, or 120 Days of Sodom were films to be shown to "anyone interested in civics." Years before shocking periods of our time, like the Holocaust or slavery, were presented on film, Resnais was the first to film Night and Fog, a thirty minute documentary about the horrors that occurred at Auschwitz and Majdanek. When I was teaching summer film courses in New Hampshire, this was one of the films that I showed to my students and, suffice to say, it is emotionally draining and still packs a powerful punch about the horrors of World War II in the same sense that Hearts and Minds was an eye-opening documentary about the Vietnam War.

Resnais once said, "Luck, I never looked to make difficult films on purpose. You make the films you can make." For Resnais, he succeeded in making the films he wanted to make and as he is physically gone from this life, his films and philosophy on filmmaking live on for the next wave of curious visionaries struggling to make the films they can make.