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Alain Resnais: Night Fog
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Alain Resnais (born June 3, 1922 ) is a French film director whose early works are often grouped within the New Wave or Nouvelle Vague film movement. Although he has had a long and fruitful career, Resnais is best known internationally for three of his early works: Night and Fog (1955), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), and L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961).
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
Alain Resnais showed an interest in filmmaking from an early age, making amateur 8mm films in his youth before attending the Institut des Hautes Études Cinémato- graphiques in Paris. His professional career followed World War Two, making mainly art documentaries including famous painters like Van Gogh and Gauguin. However, two other documentaries would point to influences that would lead to Marienbad. Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1955) depicted the holocaust and was a massive departure from his previous documentary work. Filmed in Auschwitz, the film uses narration and colour footage directed by Resnais alongside black and white archive newsreels and stills to recount not only a requiem for the holocaust victims, but ... to depict man's evil and inhumanity.
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Ten years after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet, empty buildings with haunting wartime footage. With Night and Fog, Resnais investigates the cyclical nature of man’s violence toward man and presents the unsettling suggestion that such horrors could come again.
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Alain Resnais was born in Vannes on June 3rd, 1922. His short-films, acclaimed for their creativity, won him the encouragement of producer Anatole Dauman. ''Guernica'' (1950), ''Night and Fog'' (1955), ''Toute la mémoire du monde'' or ''Le chant du styrène'' (1957) all testify to his ingenuity, and despite his personal modesty, New Wave friends, like Truffaut and Rivette, considered him already a master. With his first features ''Hiroshima mon amour'' in 1959 and ''Last Year at Marienbad'' in 1960, he gained international renown. Resnais surrounded himself with peerless screenwriters: after Duras and Robbe-Grillet, he collaborated with Cayrol on ''Muriel'', Semprun on ''La guerre est finie'', Sternberg on ''Je t'aime, je t'aime'' (1968), David Mercer on ''Providence'' (1977), Henri Laborit on ''Mon Oncle d'Amérique'' (1978), and Bernstein for ''Mélo'' (1986). In 1993, he co-wrote, winner of numerous Césars, ''Smoking/No Smoking'' with Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri.
Alain Resnais is considered one of the most influential directors associated with French New Wave cinema. His works include "Night and Fog" and "Hiroshima Mon Amour", both put out by Criterion in 2003.
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