Tribute to Alain Resnais

ETHAL in collaboration with the Alliance Française Limassol organizes a tribute to the famous French director Alain Resnais on Tuesday, December 18 at 8.00pm.

Alain Resnais (born 3 June 1922) is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.

He began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. These films were contemporary with, and associated with, the French New Wave or nouvelle vague, though Resnais did not regard himself as being fully part of that movement. He had closer links to the 'Left Bank group' of authors and filmmakers who shared a commitment to modernism and an interest in left-wing politics. He also established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers usually unconnected with the cinema, such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Semprún.

In later films Resnais moved away from the overtly political topics of some previous works and developed his interests in an interaction between cinema and other cultural forms, including theatre, music, and comic books. This led to imaginative adaptations of two plays by Alan Ayckbourn, and two different styles of musical in On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song) (1997) and Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips) (2003).

His films have frequently explored the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he is noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives. Throughout his career he has won many awards from international film festivals and academies.

The tribute includes screenings of known short films:

Guernica
(by Alain Resnais and Robert Hessens) 1950

On April 26 1937 the small Basque town of Guernica was bombed without warning by the German aviation. Two thousand people, all civilians, got killed. Like millions all over the world, Pablo Picasso was shocked and he translated his emotion into a magnificent but terrifying picture bearing the name of the martyred city. This film does not only comment on the painting, it also gives it a new life through frantic camera and sound effects.

Les statues meurent aussi - Statues Also Die
(by Alain Resnais and Chris Marker) 1953

Statues Also Die is a 1953 French essay film about historical African art and the effects colonialism has had on how it is perceived. The film exhibits a series of sculptures, masks and other traditional art from Sub-Saharan Africa. The images are frequently set to music and cut to the music's pace. The narrator focuses on the emotional qualities of the objects, and discusses the perception of African sculptures from a historical and contemporary European perspective. Only occasionally does the film provide the geographical origin, time period or other contextual information about the objects. The idea of a dead statue is explained as a statue which has lost its original significance and become reduced to a museum object, similarly to a dead person who can be found in history books.

Nuit et brouillard - Night and Fog 1955

One of the most vivid depictions of the horrors of Nazi Concentration Camps. Filmed in 1955 at several concentration camps in Poland, the film combines new color and black and white footage with black and white newsreels, footage shot by the victorious allies, and stills, to tell the story not only of the camps, but to portray the horror of man's brutal inhumanity.

Toute la mémoire du monde 1956

Alain Resnais' short essay film Toute la mémoire du monde imagines the Bibliothèque Nationale as a forbiddingly inhuman landscape in which man attempts to imprison "knowledge" in an effort to counter the limits of his own memory. Only in the act of individual selection - a single patron choosing a specific text - is there hope that this undifferentiated mass of knowledge can be redeemed, as the reader makes discriminating use of the collective national memory for the fulfillment of a constructive individual purpose.

Le chant du Styrène 1958

Alain Resnais' Le chant du styrene is in form a simple industrial documentary, commissioned by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics. Resnais, though, was clearly not content to produce the kind of author-less hack work that such a bills-paying project would normally call for. He dedicates the same artistry, intelligence, and depth to this as he had to his Holocaust documentary Night and Fog two years earlier. The film's close-up examination of the industrial processes behind plastics manufacturing is as abstract in its way as the best of avant-garde film.

* All films will be shown with English subtitles