Alain Resnais

Alain Resnais

From the Left Bank directors - dressed actress in Channel

1)Begins his career as a documentary filmmaker
2)Directed film Night and Fog (1955) A documentary about Nazi's
3)Unlike Godard, his films are neither Improvised nor spontaneous
4)They typically address the nature of time and memory or the 
    interrelation of past, present and future
5)His narratives are frequently elliptical (cutting in time and space)
    even more freely than Godard or Truffaut.

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
1)Every event is ambiguous
2)A man called X meets a woman called A
3)At what may or may not be a resort near the town of Marienbad
4)He may or ma not have met her there the year before
5)The year in question is ambiguous
6)The woman's photographs of the past in the film appear to be of the present(?)
7)There is a scene in which a drink spills - 45 minutes pass - then Resnais returns to the sequence.

Film clip

Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961): B&W

The outside of the hotel and it's grounds. The men are playing a parlor game. A strange sort of dominoes. I think it's her husband and I'm not sure if it's the man chasing her.  She's in her bedroom dressed up in feathers. The guy chasing her is going up to her bedroom. She looks afraid, I think it was the rape scene. Narrative going down the corridors scarily and then re-envisioning the scene like she is hugging him instead of a rape? Back to the outside of the mansion in a landscape scene. 

Trailer: Click Here 

 Official Trailer - 55th Anniversary Edition - Gorgeous Trailer

 

Has the ornate look of Cocteau or Ophlus and the ambivilance of L'Avventura
(My notes) 

Criterion Review Click Here

A review I found Click Here

Another major film that he did was Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
I can't wait to see that - but I watched about 8 French films this week and can't watch anymore.