Fantastic Metropolis

Alain Resnais is a cult director whose capacity to irritate and enthral seems to spring from the same source. Critics and reviewers have spent many sleepless nights struggling to unravel the enigma of some of his more experimental films. What seems more and more likely as time goes by is that the attempt will always be doomed to failure. Probably there is no great meaning to such creations as Last Year in Marienbad beyond their appeal to the geometrical eye. Resnais, it has been claimed, is a cynical director, a tailor who specialises in stitching Emperors’ New Clothes. It is as if the arty crowd, the demi-monde and weekend bohemians, are always willing to praise that which they do not understand for fear of being ostracised by their fashionable fellows. But it can also be argued that Resnais is genuine enough; that he is merely a lunatic who, if he succeeds in fooling his public, also fools himself.

Born in 1922, Resnais was fascinated by the medium of film from an early age. He began shooting 8mm home-movies while still at school, and at the age of 14 produced an ambitious, though creaking, short entitled L’Aventure de Guy. Shorts were to form his staple diet right from the mid 1930’s up to the late 1950’s. At the end of the war, he released Le Sommeil d’Albertine and then Ouvert pour cause d’inventaire, rather drab affairs which scarcely hinted at the delights, and miseries, to come. It was in the field of documentaries that he found his true vocation, starting with a series of personal portraits in 1947. This year was to see no less than six brief features of famous, and not so famous, personages including Henri Goetz, Hans Hartnung and Oscar Dominguez. His first real success, however, came the following year with his treatment of Van Gogh. This was a thoughtful study of an over-exposed artist, which showed that at least some talent lay behind Resnais’ enthusiasm. Even better was his feature on Gauguin in 1950. It was at this point that he decided to branch out into an examination of contemporary horrors and picked the troubled Basque city of Guernica, that favourite subject of Surrealists, as a more pithy subject for his battered lens.

In 1955, his best documentary of all, Nuit et brouillard, was released to favourable reviews and general acclaim. It is still, in many ways, his most moving film. Released in the U.K. and U.S. as Night and Fog, it is a grim length of celluloid that charts the rise and function of the Nazi concentration camps. Although this was hardly a novel theme, and western audiences were already too numbed by the sight of dead bodies to feel much repulsion or shock at the prospect, Resnais still managed to provoke a reaction by his oblique approach to the subject matter. Thus piles of dead bodies were not shown. Instead, he directed his attention to the minor details, the overlooked aspects of the Holocaust. He showed Himmler’s greenhouse and Hitler’s zoo and Hoess’ symphony orchestra, which was expected to accompany the march of prisoners into the gas chambers with strains of Mozart. Resnais managed to sum up a disturbing atmosphere that was more informative than the presentation of simple facts. Nuit et brouillard established his reputation as a film-maker of tact and humanity; a reputation he seemed eager to demolish in the following decades with a vision altogether cooler and more cerebral.

Two more quasi-memorable documentaries followed, Tout la memoire du monde in 1956, and Le chant du styrone in 1958. These dealt with subjects that were so dry as to be completely desiccated, but they were inventive enough to engage the attention for at least a while. It was obvious that Resnais needed to branch out into new areas and in 1959, with the aid of Marguerite Duras, this is precisely what he proceeded to do, with a film that mixed documentary and fiction, and which won awards from both the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Critics.

Hiroshima mon amour was Resnais’ first feature-film, a complex tour de force with Proustian allusions and an intricate mosaic of images. As well as directing, Resnais also produced the film, with co-producer Samy Halfon. Halfon wanted to commission a script from gentile erotic novelist Francoise Sagan, but she rejected the project. Resnais persuaded Halfon to approach Marguerite Duras with the offer, and Duras accepted. Duras was also a writer of erotic stories, but her writing had a much harder edge to it than Sagan’s and a disturbing affinity with surrealism that made her work reminiscent of Bataille. Moreover, she was a much more visual sort of writer, and eminently suited to the task.