Alain Resnais (b. 1922), the French New Wave director whose distinctive films explore themes of time, memory, history, and desire, will be the subject of a major retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image, closing March 20, 2011. The series-the most complete retrospective of Resnais's films ever shown in New York-will include all eighteen of his feature films, from the landmark works Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad to his most recent, Wild Grass; rarely seen documentary shorts (Night and Fog, Guernica, Statues Also Die (with Chris Marker), The Song of Styrene); and Memories of Last Year at Marienbad, the 2010 behind-the-scenes documentary about Marienbad, narrated by Volker Schlondorff who served as assistant director on Resnais's film.
Most films will be shown in imported 35mm prints that are not in distribution in the United States, and on Saturday, March 5, satirist/cartoonist Jules Feiffer will introduce the screening of I Want to Go Home, for which he won a best screenplay prize at the Venice Film Festival.
Alain Resnais is made possible with generous support by the Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York.
Alain Resnais's films often explore connections between historical and personal events, placing romantic dramas against the backdrop of war and political turmoil. His intellectual concerns are capacious, ranging from art history to literature to philosophy to science. Yet as intellectually rigorous as Resnais's films are, they are also both deeply human and deeply playful. Profoundly interested in theatricality, and keenly attuned to psychological nuance, Resnais is one of cinema's great directors of actors. And as evidenced by the joyful whimsicality of his latest film, Wild Grass, the seriousness of Resnais's films goes hand in hand with a wondrous sense of enchantment, of the idea of cinema-and life-as a kind of game.
Schedule for Alain Resnais (February 25-March 20, 2011)
All films directed by Alain Resnais unless otherwise noted. All films will be shown in either the Main Theater or the Bartos Screening Room at Museum of the Moving Image, 35 Avenue at 37 Street, Astoria, and are included with paid Museum admission.
Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Hiroshima mon amour)
Friday, February 25, 7:30 p.m.
1959, 90 mins. Imported 35mm print. Written by Marguerite Duras. With Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada. A French actress and Japanese architect meet in Hiroshima; their passionate affair is haunted by personal and historical memories. Jean-Luc Godard wrote of this modernist masterpiece, which is at once sensuous and rigorously cerebral, that "seeing Hiroshima gives you the impression of watching a film that would have been absolutely inconceivable in terms of what you already know of cinema."
Night and Fog and other Short Documentaries
Saturday, February 26, 2:00 p.m.
Imported 35mm prints from the French Foreign Ministry.
Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard)
1955, 32 mins. Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet. Resnais contrasts haunting tracking shots through present-day Auschwitz with devastating archival footage filmed just after liberation, to create one of the most powerful documentaries ever made.
Guernica
1950, 12 mins. Fragmented images of paintings and sculptures by Picasso from 1906 to the creation of his famous anti-war painting Guernica are set against an ode by surrealist poet Paul Eluard, in a cubist study that comments on Spain's ongoing struggles against fascism.
Statues Also Die (Les Statues meurent aussi)
1953, 27 mins. Dir. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. Written by Marker. Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet. Rarely screened, this rich essay film about art, mortality, and history that looks at the place of African culture within European civilization, is a remarkable collaboration between Resnais and Chris Marker, filled with themes of their work to come. "If you come across it in any venue that's showing a Resnais retrospective, you should drop everything to go and see it," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum.
All the Memory of the World (Toute la mémoire du monde)
1956, 22 mins. Music by Maurice Jarre. Foretelling the visual style of Last Year at Marienbad, this meditation on knowledge is comprised of a series of haunting tracking shots through endless shelves of newspapers and books at the French National Library. "Confronted with these bulging repositories," intones the narrator, "man is assailed by fear of being engulfed by this mass of words."
