Resnais, Alain

views updated May 11 2018

RESNAIS, Alain

Nationality: French. Born: Vannes, Brittany, 3 June 1922. Education: St.-François-Xavier, Vannes; studied acting under René Simon, Paris, 1940–42; attended Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques (IDHEC), Paris, 1943–45. Military Service: Served with occupation army in Germany and Austria. Family: Married Florence Malraux, 1969. Career: Member of travelling theatrical company, Les Arlequins, 1945; directed first feature, Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, in 16mm, 1946; worked as film editor, 1947–58; worked in New York City, 1970–72; directed first film in English, Providence, 1977. Address: 70 rue des Plantes, 75014 Paris, France.

Films as Director:

1946: Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (short); Schéma d'une identification (short)
1947: Visite à Lucien Coutaud (short); Visite à Félix Labisse (short); Visite à Hans Hartung (short); Visite à César Domela (short); Visite à Oscar Dominguez (short); Portrait d'HenriGoetz (short); La Bague (short); Journée naturelle (short); L'Alcool tue (short) (+ ph, ed)
1948: Les Jardins de Paris (short) (+ ph, ed); Châteaux de France (short) (+ sc, ph, ed); Van Gogh (short); Malfray (short) (co-d); Van Gogh (+ ed)
1950: Gauguin (short) (+ ed); Guernica (short) (co-d, ed)
1953: Les Statues meurent aussi (short) (co-d, co-sc, ed)
1955: Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) (short)
1956: Toute la mémoire du monde (short) (+ ed)
1957: Le Mystère de l'Atelier Quinze (short) (co-d)
1958: Le Chant de Styrène (short) (+ ed)
1959: Hiroshima mon amour
1961: L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)
1963: Muriel, ou le temps d'un retour

1966: La Guerre est finie (The War Is Over)
1967: Loin du Viêt-Nam (Far from Vietnam) (co-d)
1968: Je t'aime, je t'aime (+ co-sc)
1974: Stavisky
1977: Providence
1980: Mon Oncle d'Amérique
1983: La Vie est un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses)
1984: L'Amour à mort
1986: Mélo
1989: I Want to Go Home
1992: Gershwin (video)
1993: Smoking; No Smoking
1997: On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song)

Other Films:

1945: Le Sommeil d'Albertine (ed)
1947: Paris 1900 (ed)
1948: Jean Effel (ed)

1952: Saint-Tropez, devoir de vacances (ed)
1955: La Pointe courte (ed)
1957: L'Oeil du maître (ed); Broadway by Light (ed)
1958: Paris à l'automne (ed)

Publications

By RESNAIS: books—

Repérages, Paris, 1974.

Hiroshima, Mon Amor, with Marguerite Duras and Richard Seaver, New York, 1987.

By RESNAIS: articles—

Interview with François Truffaut, in Arts (Paris), 20 February 1956.

"A Conversation with Alain Resnais," with Noël Burch, in FilmQuarterly (Berkeley), Spring 1960.

Interview with André Labarthe and Jacques Rivette, in Cahiers duCinéma (Paris), September 1961; reprinted in English in Filmsand Filming (London), February 1962.

Interview with Penelope Houston, in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1961/62.

"Trying to Understand My Own Film," in Films and Filming (London), February 1962.

Interview with Marcel Martin, in Cinéma (Paris), December 1964 and January 1965.

Interview with Adrian Maben, in Films and Filming (London), October 1966.

"Last Words on Last Year: Discussion with Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet," in Films and Filming (London), March 1969.

Interview with Win Sharples Jr., in Filmmaker's Newsletter (Ward Hill, Massachusetts), December 1974.

"Conversations with Alan Resnais," with James Monaco, in FilmComment (New York), July/August 1975.

Interview with S. Daney and others, in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), May 1983.

Interview with A. Finnane, in Cinema Papers (Melbourne), December 1984.

Interview with Robert Benayoun, and others, in Positif (Paris), September 1986.

"Smoking/No Smoking: Entretien avec Alain Resnais," with Marie-Claude Loiselle and Thierry Horguelin," in 24 Images (Montreal), Spring 1994.

"Drags to Riches," an interview with Trevor Johnson, in Time Out (London), 14 September 1994.

Interview with F. Thomas, in Positif (Paris) December 1997.

Interview with Patrick Duynslaegher and Philip Kemp, in Sight andSound (London), December 1998.

On RESNAIS: books—

Cordier, Stéphane, editor, Alain Resnais, ou la création au cinéma, Paris, 1961.

Pinguad, Bernard, Alain Resnais, Lyon, 1961.

Alain Resnais, Premier Plan no. 18, October 1961.

Bournoure, Gaston, Alain Resnais, Paris, 1962.

Cowie, Peter, Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais, London, 1963.

Armes, Roy, The Cinema of Alain Resnais, London, 1968.

Ward, John, Alain Resnais, or the Theme of Time, New York, 1968.

Bertetto, Paolo, Resnais: Alain Resnais, Italy, 1976.

Kreidl, John Francis, Alain Resnais, Boston, 1977.

Monaco, James, Alain Resnais: The Role of Imagination, New York, 1978.

Benayoun, Robert, Alain Resnais: Arpenteur de l'imaginaire, Paris, 1980; revised edition, 1986.

Sweet, Freddy, The Film Narratives of Alain Resnais, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1981.

Vergerio, Flavio, I film di Alain Resnais, Rome, 1984.

Roob, Jean-Daniel, Alain Resnais: Qui êtes-vous?, Lyons, 1986.

Oms, Marcel, Alain Resnais, Paris, 1988.

Riambau, Esteve, La ciencie y la ficcion: El cine de Alain Resnais, Barcelona, 1988.

Thomas, François, L'Atelier de Alain Resnais, Paris, 1989. Callev, Haim, The Stream of Consciousness in the Films of Alain

Resnais, McGruer Publishing, 1997.

On RESNAIS: articles—

Marcorelles, Louis, "Rebel with a Camera," in Sight and Sound (London), Winter 1960.

"Nuit et brouillard Issue" of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), February 1961.

Kael, Pauline, "Fantasies of the Art House Audience," in Sight andSound (London), Winter 1961/62.

Taylor, John Russell, "Alain Resnais" in Cinema Eye, Cinema Ear, New York, 1964.

Stanbrook, Alan, "The Time and Space of Alain Resnais," in Filmsand Filming (London), January 1964.

"Guernica Issue" of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), June 1964.

"Toute la mémoire du monde Issue" of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), October 1965.

"Resnais Issue" of L'Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), Summer 1966.

Roud, Richard, "Memories of Resnais," in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1969.

Armes, Roy, "Resnais and Reality," in Films and Filming (London), May 1970.

Harcourt, Peter, "Memory Is Kept Alive with Dream," in FilmComment (New York), November/December 1973.

Harcourt, Peter, "Toward a Certainty of Doubt," in Film Comment (New York), January/February 1974.

"Resnais Issue" of Cinéma (Paris), July/August 1980.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan, "In Search of the American Uncle," in American Film (Washington, D.C.), May 1981.

Dossier on Resnais, in Cinématographe (Paris), April 1982.

Brown, R., "Everyone Has His Reasons," in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), May 1984.

Parra, D., "Alain Resnais, cinéaste de la limpidité," in Revue duCinéma (Paris), September 1984.

Moses, John W., "Vision Denied in Night and Fog and HiroshimaMon Amour," in Literature/Film Quarterly (Salisbury, Maryland), vol. 15, no.3, 1987.

"Mélo Issue" of Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), April 1987.

Durgnat, Raymond, "Resnais & Co.: Back to the Avant-Garde," in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), May 1987.

Forbes, Jill, "Resnais in the '80s," in Sight and Sound (London), Summer 1987.

Tomasulo, Frank P., "The Intentionality of Consciousness: Subjectivity in Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad," in Post Script (Jacksonville, Florida), vol. 7, no. 2, 1988.

Prédal, René, "L'oeuvre de Alain Resnais: Regard du cinéaste et place du spectateur," in Jeune Cinéma (Paris), April/May 1989.

McGilligan, Patrick, article in Sight and Sound (London), vol. 59, no. 3, 1990.

Fischer, Robert, "Buchbesprechung: Alain Resnais," in EPD Film (Frankfurt), December 1992.

Philippon, Alain, and others, "Le petit théâtre d'Alain Resnais," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), December 1993.

Nacache, Jacqueline, Danièle Parra, and Guy Gauthier, "Smoking/NoSmoking," in Mensuel du Cinéma, December 1993.

Lalanne, Jean-Marc, "Trois formes du temps," in Mensuel duCinéma, February 1994.

Leutrat, Jean-Louis, and others, "Smoking et No Smoking," in Positif (Paris), January 1994.

Scorsese, Martin, "Cinq questions posées par Martin Scorsese," in Cahiers du Cinéma (Paris), March 1996.

Cremonini, Giorgio, "30 ragioni per amare Resnais," in Cineforum (Bergamo), July-August 1996.

Masson, Alain, and others, in Positif (Paris), 1997.

* * *

Alain Resnais is a prominent figure in the modernist narrative film tradition. His emergence as a feature director of international repute is affiliated with the eruption of the French New Wave in the late 1950s. This association was signaled by the fact that his first feature, Hiroshima mon amour, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival at the same time as François Truffaut's Les 400 coups. However, Resnais had less to do with the group of directors emerging from the context of the Cahiers du cinéma than he did with the so-called Left Bank group, including Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, Chris Marker, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. This group provided an intellectual and creative context of shared interest. In the course of his film career Resnais frequently collaborated with members of this group. Marker worked with him on several short films in the 1950s; Cayrol wrote the narration for Nuit et brouillard and the script for Muriel; Duras scripted Hiroshima mon amour; and Robbe-Grillet wrote L'Année dernière à Marienbad. All of these people are known as writers and/or filmmakers in their own right; their association with Resnais is indicative of his talent for fruitful creative collaboration.

Resnais began making films as a youth in 8 and 16mm. In the early 1940s he studied acting and filmmaking, and after the war made a number of 16mm films, including a series about artists. His first film in 35mm was the 1948 short, Van Gogh, which won a number of international awards. It was produced by Pierre Braunberger, an active supporter of new talent, who continued to finance his work in the short film format through the 1950s. From 1948–58 Resnais made eight short films, of which Nuit et brouillard is probably the best known. The film deals with German concentration camps, juxtaposing past and present, exploring the nature of memory and history. To some extent the film's reputation and the sustained interest it has enjoyed is due to its subject matter. However, many of the film's formal strategies and thematic concerns are characteristic of Resnais's work more generally. In particular, the relationship between past and present, and the function of memory as the mechanism of traversing temporal distance, are persistent preoccupations of Resnais's films. Other films from this period similarly reveal familiar themes and traits of Resnais's subsequent work. Toute la memoire du monde is a documentary about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It presents the building, with its processes of cataloguing and preserving all sorts of printed material, as both a monument of cultural memory and as a monstrous, alien being. The film almost succeeds in transforming the documentary film into a branch of science fiction.

Indeed, Resnais has always been interested in science fiction, the fantastic, and pulp adventure stories. If this interest is most overtly expressed in the narrative of Je t'aime, je t'aime (in which a human serves as a guinea pig for scientists experimenting with time travel), it also emerges in the play of fantasy/imagination/reality pervading his work, and in many of his unachieved projects (including a remake of Fantômas and The Adventure of Harry Dickson).

Through editing and an emphasis on formal repetition, Resnais uses the medium to construct the conjunctions of past and present, fantasy and reality, insisting on the convergence of what are usually considered distinct domains of experience. In Hiroshima mon amour the quivering hand of the woman's sleeping Japanese lover in the film's present is directly followed by an almost identical image of her nearly dead German lover during World War II. Tracking shots through the streets of Hiroshima merge with similar shots of Nevers, where the woman lived during the war. In Stavisky, the cutting between events in 1933 and a 1934 investigation of those events presents numerous, often conflicting versions of the same thing; one is finally convinced, above all else, of the indeterminacy and contingency of major historical events. And in Providence, the central character is an aged writer who spends a troubled night weaving stories about his family, conjoining memory and fantasy, past, present, and future, in an unstable mix.

The past's insistent invasion of the present is expressed in many different ways in Resnais's films. In Nuit et brouillard, where the death camps are both present structures and repressed institutions, it is a question of social memory and history; it is an individual and cultural phenomenon in Hiroshima mon amour, as a French woman simultaneously confronts her experiences in occupied France and the Japanese experience of the atomic bomb; it is construed in terms of science fiction in Je t'aime, je t'aime when the hero is trapped in a broken time-machine and continuously relives moments from his past; and it is a profoundly ambiguous mixture of an individual's real and imagined past in L'Année dernière à Marienbad (often considered Resnais's most avant-garde film) as X pursues A with insistence, recalling their love affair and promises of the previous year, in spite of A's denials. In all of these films, as well as Resnais's other work, the past is fraught with uncertainty, anxiety, even terror. If it is more comfortable to ignore, it inevitably erupts in the present through the workings of the psyche, memory traces, or in the form of documentation and artifacts.

In recent years, Resnais's presence on the international film scene barely has been noticed. While serious and provocative in intention, none of his films have measured up to his earlier work. However, in the early 1980s, he did direct two strikingly original films which are outstanding additions to his filmography.

In Mon Oncle d'Amerique, Resnais probes human responses and relations by illustrating the theories of Henri Laborit, a French research biologist. The scenario's focus is on the intertwined relationship between three everyday characters: a Catholic farm boy who has become a textile plant manager (Gerard Depardieu); a former young communist who now is an actress (Nicole Garcia); and a conformist (Roger Pierre) who is married to his childhood sweetheart. La vie est un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses) is a bewitching allegory contrasting the accounts of a rich man (Ruggero Raimondi) constructing a "temple of happiness" around the time of World War I, and a seminar on education being held at that location decades later. Resnais's points are that there are no easy answers to complex dilemmas and, most tellingly, that individuals who attempt to dictate to others their concepts of perfection are as equally destructive as those whose actions result in outright chaos.

Resnais's filmic output has been relatively small. He nonetheless stands as a significant figure in modernist cinema. His strategies of fragmented point-of-view and multiple temporality, as well as his use of the medium to convey past/present and fantasy/imagination/reality as equivocal and equivalent modes of experience have amplified our understanding of film's capacity for expression.

—M. B. White, updated by Rob Edelman

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers White, M. B.

Alain Resnais

views updated May 23 2018

Alain Resnais

French film director Alain Resnais (born 1922) was one of the most noted innovators in the history of twentieth-century film. His many film credits include Night and Fog, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Marienbad.

After paying his dues as an actor, editor, screen-writer, and assistant director in the 1940s and 1950s, Resnais emerged as a leading member of the French cinema's New Wave. His themes, which frequently involve memory, history, and time, revolutionized film conventions. Resnais's films typically involve characters who, though their outward appearances seem conventional, inevitably find themselves caught up in existential dilemmas. In the course of his career Resnais has collaborated with many top writers, among them Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jean Gruault, Jorge Semprun, and Jean Cayrol. As one of the foremost proponents European art cinema, Resnais has profoundly influenced other film makers, if only by forcing them to examine their own assumptions about their craft.

Early Life

Resnais was born on June 3, 1922, in Vannes, Morbihan, Bretagne, France. Like his hero, French novelist Marcel Proust, the young Resnais was educated at home because he suffered from asthma. By most accounts Resnais became interested in film-making at an early age, and his first work, titled "Fantomas," was filmed with the help of friends when he was 14. The 8mm film, which runs only three minutes, employed several cinematic "tricks" designed to vary the appearance of the characters.

Despite this early effort, Resnais had no youthful aspirations toward a career in cinema. As he told Joan Dupont in Interview: "I never had any special appetite for filmmaking, but you have to make a living and it is miraculous to earn a living working in film. My father and grandfather were pharmacists, but I couldn't become one because you needed the baccalaureate [high school diploma] and because my health was bad, I failed." In any case, after finishing his preparatory studies, Resnais entered the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques in Paris, where he became thoroughly immersed in the world of film.

Resnais's early films, which were shot in black and white on 16mm film, are short documentaries dealing with art and artists. In 1948, for example, he made the film Van Gogh, which was followed by another filmed in 1950 and titled Gauguin. During the 1950s he also shot and edited scenes for other directors. Resnais's own early films fore-shadow certain themes that the filmmaker would take up in the 1960s: including time, memory, post-capitalist imperialism, and the role of the artist. He remained concerned with the role of the artist in society throughout much of his career.

Three Masterpieces

In 1955 Resnais made the 30-minute documentarystyle film Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), which presents a riveting look at German concentration camps. The film juxtaposes grainy black-and-white historical footage of the Nazi-run concentration camps during operation with color footage of the same camps as they appeared a decade after they were abandoned. Archival footage from Bergen Belsen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz, and Einstanz Grüppe was used by Resnais to create this collage of atrocities, and the film's script was written by poet and former prison-camp inmate Jean Cayrol. In Night and Fog, Resnais explores the ambiguities between cinematic and real time, as well as between memory and conscience. The film expresses the message that although individual people would like to evade responsibility, ultimately it is collective humanity that must bear the responsibility for the Nazi horrors.

Discussing Night and Fog, Resnais told Dupont that with "little money and few documents, we had nothing. So I used formal techniques to make the film more perceptive emotionally. For the first time, I used a mix of black and white with color In the editing room, I asked myself, 'What are you doing manipulating corpses this way?' It was repugnant, but it was the only way to communicate."

American film director Errol Morris commented in Filmmaker that many people's beliefs about the Holocaust were influenced by Night and Fog. According to Morris, although the film was successful in bringing the Nazi atrocities into popular consciousness, it also had the effect of muddling history. For example, Morris noted that there is no mention in the film of the role French gendarmes played in the Holocaust. According to James Monaco, writing in his Alain Resnais, in the original film a French gendarme is clearly visible in one of the photographs. Because this version was unacceptable to French censors, the gendarme's uniform was edited out of the film before it was screened publically.

Resnais followed Night and Fog with Le Chant du styrene (1958), in which he attempts to capture a plastics factory in cinematographic poetry. The film traces the manufacture of polystyrene from the finished product back through the industrial pipelines to the raw starting materials. Monaco dubbed Le Chant due styrene the most remarkable "industrial" film ever made.

In 1959 Renais filmed the full-length 35mm black-and-white feature Hiroshima, Mon Amour, based on a script by novelist Marguerite Duras. The film, which explores the relationship between history and memory, was awarded the Cannes Film Festival's International Critics Prize. In the film a French actress on assignment in Japan and a Japanese architect have a brief, adulterous affair. The actress is haunted by her past in occupied France, where she had an affair with a German soldier, and the architect is haunted by his family's sufferings during the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima. In Hiroshima, Mon Amour Resnais uses the medium of film to break down the linearity that encapsulates time and memory and creates a dream state. The clean, modern lines of the hotel where the affair takes place are contrasted in the film with the natural curves of the lovers, the rivers that wind through the town, and the memories in the protagonists' pasts.

In discussing Hiroshima, Mon Amour with Dupont, Resnais explained that he and Duras "had this idea of working in two tenses: The present and the past coexist, but the past shouldn't be in flashback. The heroine's memory, her affair with the German soldier, was the past, but the sound was in the present; we hear the sounds of Tokyo." Film critic John Francis Kreidl, writing in Alain Resnais, agreed with Monaco that the film ultimately turns out to be about the impossibility of making a documentary about Hiroshima.

In Resnais's 1961 work Last Year at Marienbad, a man and woman meet in a palatial home. The man insists that the two have met before and, further, that they had an affair the year before at a spa in Marienbad. Resnais uses the couple's encounter to examine memory, imagination, desire, and fulfillment. Of Last Year in Marienbad Resnais told Dupont, "I never thought of Proust; I thought of Andre Breton. [The film's screenwriter] Alain Robbe-Grillet and I were very impressed by surrealism… . Most of what hap pens is in the characters' imaginations, so the memory of silent film was a big influence." Monaco found the film to be essentially a story about storytelling.

Of Time and Remembrance

Resnais's next film, Muriel (1963), concerns a middle-aged woman who invites an old lover to visit her and her stepson, who has just returned from the war in the Algiers. The soldier is troubled by memories of a young girl who had been tortured to death in his presence, while the two former lovers suffer from their own painful memories. In the film Resnais uses time to explore the ways the past influences present experiences. Relating also to the historical present, Muriel captures the constraints placed on freedom in France by the Algerian war in 1962, and the mood associated with that period. To the director's disappointment, many critics disliked this film.

After creating what are considered to be Resnais's three masterpieces— Night and Fog, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and Marienbad —Resnais gained a reputation as one of the leading New Wave film directors. However, as he later explained to Dupont, Resnais did not consider himself "part of the New Wave, but thanks to [the impact made by its directors], I made movies… . Before, you had to be an assistant on nine films, and you couldn't just go from making a short to a feature. Finally, a producer asked me to make a feature, and I made three in a row, but after Muriel, which wasn't a success, I stopped for a while."

When he returned to his position behind the camera, Resnais again chose to dwell on time and remembrance. His richly emotional 1966 work La Guerre est finie concerns an aging Leftist, while Stavisky (1974) tells the story of a Russian-Jewish swindler in 1930s France. Providence, filmed in 1977 and Resnais's first English-language effort, deals with a dying novelist.

In Mon Oncle d'Amerique (1980) Resnais examines the interconnections in the lives of three individuals and interprets these connections using the biochemical theories of French biologist Henri Laborit about the workings of the human brain. In the film contrasts—distance and emotion, surrealism and the natural—are used to force the audience to an awareness of new possibilities. By playing disparate moods, tones, and styles off against each other, Resnais attempted to draw the viewer into a closer relationship with the film's characters.

On one level, 1983's Life Is a Bed of Roses tells the story of a wealthy count who constructs his "temple of happiness" during the 1920s. On another level, it presents a symposium on alternative education held at the site of the former temple.

Resnais's later films, which have not always been as well received by critics as were his work of the late 1950s and early 1960s, include L'Amour e mort (1984), Melo (1986), I Want to Go Home (1989), and Smoking and No Smoking (1993). In 1992 he directed a one-hour tribute to U.S. composer George Gershwin.

Looking Back

It has been reported that Resnais refuses to view any of his early films. "I don't think about them and can't stand seeing them again," he told Dupont. "It's painful, either because the people onscreen have died, or because I don't think the direction is good. There's always something." The films of other directors are a different matter, however. "When I was twelve, the passage from silent film to the talkies had an impact on me—I still watch silent films. I don't think that there is any such thing as an old film; you don't say, 'I read an old book by Flaubert,' or 'I saw an old play by Moliere.' "

Resnais's obsession with time and memory reflects a French tradition that goes back to Henri Bergson and Proust. In Night and Fog, for example, he attempts to recapture the past through a combination of archival film footage and poetry, while in Hiroshima, Mon Amour he adopts an imitation documentary format to examine the repercussions of the atomic bomb attack on Japan. In Last Year at Marienbad the film's characters attempt to rewrite their own history at a European spa.

Resnais told Luc Honorez of Le Soir that his life could be summarized by listing the names of some of the most influential individuals of the twentieth century: Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso, Gershwin, Hergé, and Franz Kafka. Still, he added, in spite of his advanced age he wanted to move on to other passions. The director insists that becoming fixated on any one of his many influences would be equivalent to signing up to die. The introduction of video and DVD technologies has allowed Resnais to study the films of fellow directors Fritz Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood, Victor Minnelli, F. W. Murnau, Jean Renoir, Tati, Charles Laughton, and Martin Scorsese.

According to Resnais, of all the arts only cinema is an absolute mystery because of the juxtaposition of objects, the attitudes of the actors, and the use of music. However, he views much of modern cinematography as a failure because the promotion of a film has become more important than what the film ultimately is. His own approach to his art has been determined by memories, including loves and sorrows, many of which originated in films, books, or songs. Regarding the power of twentieth-century cinema, Resnais has cited that the most effective films are those able to connect with those instinctive emotions people attempt to mask in order to appear less "animal-like."