Youri messen-jaschin biography graphic organizer

'Perhaps more than those of any other modern director, the films of Alain Resnais are synonymous with European art cinema. Hailed as groundbreakingly innovative and intellectual, his films are also lampooned as elliptical, poetic, and populated with impeccably dressed characters adrift in inexplicable existential dilemmas. In truth, Resnais’s legacy – soon to be displayed in a traveling retrospective – remains intact.

'Often crowned the theoretician of the French New Wave, Resnais was in fact the most schooled in actual film production. While his cohorts – Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, et al. – were busy raving about their favorite directors for Cahiers du Cinema, Resnais had been working as an actor, editor, screenwriter and assistant director on industrials and occasional features throughout the ’40s and ’50s. And his early films were odd 16mm, black-and-white documentary shorts focusing on art and artists, such as Van Gogh, Guernica and Gauguin.

'Rarely revisited, these shorts, Resnais scholar James Monaco suggests, "strangely mirror the features he was later to shoot in the ’60s," foreshadowing his complex treatment of documentary, time, memory, postcapitalist imperialism and, most importantly, the role of the artist. T

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