Direction: Alain Resnais

Direction Alain Resnais

Synopsis This lyrical and graphic documentary--one of the first cinematic reflections on the Holocaust's horror--has deeply affected film's treatment of the Holocaust ever since, including Spielberg's "Schindler's List". Documentarian Alain Resnais contrasts 1955 footage of abandoned concentration camps' quiet, empty buildings...

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Emmanuelle Riva · Eiji Okada · Bernard Fresson · Stella Dassas

Synopsis A young French actress is making an anti-war film in the rebuilt Japanese city of Hiroshima, which was devastated in a nuclear bomb blast at the end of the Second World War. Here, she has an affair with a Japanese...

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Delphine Seyrig · Giorgio Albertazzi · Sacha Pitoeff · Françoise Bertin

Synopsis A cinematic puzzle, Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad is a radical exploration of the formal possibilities of film. Beautifully shot in Cinemascope by Sacha Vierny, the movie is a riddle of seduction, a mercurial enigma darting between a present...

Direction Chris Marker · Alain Resnais

Synopsis Statues Also Die traces the devastating impact of French colonialism on African art. As Resnais' co-director, Chris Marker, stated, "We want to see their suffering, serenity, humor, even though we don't know anything about them." Their film shows what happens...

Direction Claude Lelouch · Agnès Varda · Jean-Luc Godard · Chris Marker

Cast Anne Bellec · Karen Blanguernon · Bernard Fresson · Maurice Garrel

Synopsis Seven directors combine efforts for this documentary, a searing anti-American indictment of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, William Klein, Joris Ivens, Agnes Varda, Claude Lelouch, and Jean-Luc Goddard all direct segments. They are quick to point out...

Direction Alain Resnais

Synopsis Toute la mémoire du monde is a documentary about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It presents the building, with its processes of cataloguing and preserving all sorts of printed material, as both a monument of cultural memory and as a...

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Gérard Depardieu · Nicole García · Roger Pierre · Marie Dubois

Synopsis Prof. Henri Laborit uses the stories of the lives of three people to discuss behaviorist theories of survival, combat, rewards and punishment, and anxiety. René is a technical manager at a textile factory and must face the anxiety caused by...

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Yves Montand · Ingrid Thulin · Geneviève Bujold · Jean Bouise

Synopsis For some soldiers, the war is never over... Legendary "New Wave" director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) helms this emotionally-charged suspense-drama set in France and on the streets of fascist Spain, starring European film icon Yves Montand (Jean de...

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast André Dussollier · Agnès Jaoui · Lambert Wilson · Jean-Pierre Bacri

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Claude Rich · Olga Georges-Picot · Anouk Ferjac · Annie Fargue

Synopsis A man recovering from an attempted suicide is recruited to be the first human guinea pig in a time travel experiment. The organizers intend to send the man exactly one year into the past for one minute before returning him...

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Mathieu Amalric · Lambert Wilson · Michel Piccoli · Anne Consigny

Synopsis From beyond the grave, celebrated playwright Antoine d’Anthac gathers together all his friends who have appeared over the years in his play "Eurydice". These actors watch a recording of the work performed by a young acting company, La Compagnie de...

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Sabine Azéma · Fanny Ardant · Pierre Arditi · André Dussollier

Synopsis In Paris in the 1920s, a concert violinist meets and falls in love with a stylish young flapper who's the wife of an old friend. Romaine instigates the affair with Marcel, and carries it forward even as her husband, Pierre,...

Direction Chris Marker · Philippe Garrel · Jean-Luc Godard · Jean-Denis Bonan

Synopsis A series of 41 documentary shorts, directed (without credit) by several famous French filmmakers and each running between two and four minutes. Each "tract" espouses a leftist political viewpoint through the filmed depiction of real-life events, including workers' strikes and...

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast John Gielgud · Dirk Bogarde · Ellen Burstyn · David Warner

Synopsis Clive Langham (Sir John Gielgud) spends one tormenting night in his bed suffering from health problems and thinking up a story based on his relatives. He is a bitter man and he shows, through flashbacks, how spiteful, conniving and treacherous...

Direction Alain Resnais · Robert Hessens

Cast María Casares · Jacques Pruvost

Synopsis On April 26 1937 the small Basque town of Guernica was bombed without warning by the German aviation. Two thousand people, all civilians, got killed. Like millions all over the world, Pablo Picasso was shocked and he translated his emotion...

Direction Jacques Doillon · Alain Resnais · Jean Rouch

Cast Gérard Depardieu · Miou-Miou · Gérard Jugnot · Coluche

Synopsis "Stop everything and reflect!". Built starting from this slogan, three accounts of political fiction imagined and filmed in the United States, in France and Africa. A merry utopia on the dream of the children of abundance, the imagined future of...

Direction Alain Resnais

Synopsis The biography of Dutch artist Van Gogh, illustrated only with images of his paintings and drawings, or details of those, and according dramatic musical score.

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Sabine Azéma · Fanny Ardant · Pierre Arditi · André Dussollier

Synopsis Elisabeth and Simon have been deeply in love for two months when Simon momentarily dies, but comes back to life. Simon does not want any further medical tests, but the couple are forced to grapple with the possibility of his...

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Sacha Vierny

Synopsis Poetic and aesthetic visit of a large polystyrene factory. The film was an order by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics.

Direction Alain Resnais

Cast Sabine Azéma · Pierre Arditi

Synopsis Smoking - 146 minutes. No Smoking - 147 minutes. Two films designed to be seen side by side, in either order, are completely unlike 'filmed theatre' in the usual sense of stage drama artificially opened up through exterior locations. The...