Is it time for the English-speaking world to give the late Alain Resnais another chance?

The French film director Alain Resnais was largely neglected by English-speaking critics in his later years. But, as Oliver Farry argues, Resnais’ later work, is, in its own homely way, as formally and technically innovative, and as concerned with mortality as the earlier films.

By Oliver Farry

(Photo By Alain Resnais in Venice in 2006. The film director passed away on 1 March 2014. Photo: Getty)

At 37, Alain Resnais was not particularly young when his first feature Hiroshima mon amour came out in 1959. Nor was he particularly unknown, having already won the Prix Jean Vigo – France’s highest award for young filmmakers – twice, for his landmark holocaust documentary Night and Fog and for Statues Also Die, the anti-imperialist short film he made with Chris Marker in 1954. The international success of Hiroshima, which also marked Marguerite Duras’ cinematic debut, arrived at much the same moment as the careers of a slightly younger generation of filmmakers were being launched.

Resnais surfed on the coat-tails of the Nouvelle Vague but he maintained both a personal and cinematic distance from it for much of his career. Perhaps this is responsible for the relative obscurity he fell into in the English-speaking world from the 1970s on (though the similarly non-clubbable Louis Malle did not seem to suffer in the same way).