Alain Resnais, 1922–2014

last updated 8 January 2015

As stubbornly inscrutable as his films could be, Alain Resnais had a soft spot for the directness of American pop culture. Best known for the art-house classics Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)and Last Year at Marienbad (1961), the French filmmaker adored Marvel Comics creator Stan Lee and such hit TV shows as Curb Your Enthusiasm, and he begged American friends not to tell him how The Sopranos ended.

The sickly only child of a rural pharmacist, Resnais got his first 8 mm camera on his 12th birthday and immediately began shooting. At 17 he moved to Paris to study acting and filmmaking, but Hitler’s troops occupied the city just a year later. How life in wartime is remembered became a running theme in many of his early films, starting with Night and Fog (1955), a documentary meditation on the concentration camps. Juxtaposing postwar color images with stark black-and-white photos shot while the Nazi death factories were operating, “the 30-minute film could not be more straightforward and harrowing,” said The Washington Post.

Much of his subsequent work was anything but straightforward. Marienbad was the story of “an obsessive romantic encounter that may or may not have happened, told by a man possibly deranged,” said WWD.com. It elicited “an international storm of praise and disapprobation.” Hiroshima, based on a sparse script he commissioned from avant-garde novelist Marguerite Duras, was no less challenging, exploring a strange romantic triangle involving characters identified only as A, M, and X. More than 20 other films would follow. “I make difficult films,” Resnais once said. “But not on purpose.”