Collaboration with the architects of the French nouveau roman - Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet - made Resnais a kind of precursor to the New Wave, although he was never officially regarded as part of it…
 


Following the three other big 'Rs' of French cinema - Renoir, Rivette and Rohmer - whose retrospectives we have already seen during other seasons of the Tuškanac cinema, it is Resnais's turn. "After the movie, nothing can surprise us any more. Anything is possible," said Andre Dussollier in one of Resnais's more recent films (code: Les Herbes sauvages). Indeed, anything is possible; including the fact that, regardless of the so-called third age of life, Resnais is still going strong. This year, at the 65th Cannes Festival, a few months before his 90th birthday, the author's latest film You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (Vous n'avez ancore rien vu) was premiered, in which, to fulfil the famous playwright's last will and testament, all the actors who participated in his old cast of Anoulih's 'Eurydice' had to watch the video of its new performance, now with all new young performers from 'La Compagnie de la Colombe'. Like the chateau with mirrored salons from Resnais's seminal film Last Year at Marienbad (L'année dernière à Marienbad), the author's latest film becomes a sort of game of mirrors, though not as enigmatic, but no less bizarre. Once again, bodies become puppets in an isolated space, while outside the train whistles and the wind roars. It is as if Resnais does not want to abandon theatre, just as the theatre does not want to abandon him. Cinema becomes Orpheus and theatre Eurydice. 

It all began in early childhood, when as a boy he attended a Catholic school in Brittany, a place where “film was not considered art, but entertainment,” although besides comics, he was most interested in Andre Breton. Resnais has long been a great erudite of French cinema, so his short film Toute la mémoire du monde, which deals with the French National Library and its encyclopaedic collection, is closer in genre to an autobiographical film than a documentary. For his twentieth birthday his parents gave him a Kodak 8mm camera which he used to film his own three-minute version of Fantômas. Later, his love of comic books was finally to be realised in the form of film collaboration with Marvel's genius Stan Lee; however Resnais's adaptation of his comic 'The Monster Maker', which they wanted to film long before the comic book adaptation mania gripped Hollywood, was unfortunately never made. Instead, he collaborated with the architects of the French nouveau novel - Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet - which made him a kind of precursor to the new wave, although he was never officially regarded as part of it, just like he never thought of himself as an 'auteur', but merely an 'artisan'.

Considered to be 'the most artistic' of all European 'art' films, Resnais's 'arabesque' piece Last year in Marienbad was often compared to Picasso's 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', and after its Paris premiere in a fancy theatre on the Champs-Élysées, it became an unexpected hit. After its New York premiere, Jonas Mekas was not too thrilled. He told the critics that if they wanted to acquaint themselves with the most radical offshoots of avant-garde cinema, they should, for example, take a look at Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage. Be that as it may, Resnais's lucid and 'provocatively incomprehensible' piece, remained one of the most influential and most quoted films ever, whose abstract motif of erotic fixation could only measure up to Hitchcock's Vertigo (Resnais included Hitch in the draft version of his film, but his cameo appearance was later cut). This is an extremely dream-like film about elegant zombies that move like chess pieces through a geometric park and a haunted luxury hotel that Robbe-Grillet described as a “universe of marble and stucco, columns, mouldings, gilded ceilings, statues, motionless servants.” He is the polite and greedy Mr. X (Giorgio Albertazzi). She is the mysteriously modest Mrs. A (Delphine Seyrig, wearing Chanel (who was not listed in the end credits); a character that was the total fashion and acting opposite of her previous role as a beatnik's wife in the demented Pull My Daisy, (although she later admitted that her performance was largely improvised on the set). Is she married to Death? Or maybe it is Death who seduces her. The dilemma remains practically unresolved.

Anyway, time for Resnais has always been and remains reduced to manipulation that takes place on the editing table. That is why the temporal categories of present, future and past in this film are completely meaningless. The persistence of time rises to the surface again in juxtapositions in Resnais's magnificent short film Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), next to Lantzman's Shoah perhaps the greatest and most emotional film ever made ​​about the Holocaust. This just proves that Resnais is not always a distant, cerebral and cool formalist. That Resnais was very much able to demonstrate complex human emotions is also evident in his second most famous film, the melancholic Hiroshima mon amour, whose modernism Godard succinctly described using the literary-musical correlation 'Faulkner meets Stravinsky', remarking that this was his first film without movie references. This is also a film about two lonely lost souls separated by the burden of their memories, a great and melancholic anti-war film about memories and the complex interweaving of the personal and the political, the past and the future.

He continues to deal with the subject of memories in Muriel, which actually shows how memories must be fed by reality and vice versa, although the heroine's love becomes completely removed from that same reality (at the press conference held after the film premiere at the Venice Mostra, Resnais said that his film depicted “the malaise of a so-called happy society”). However, the cold precision of Raisnais's (political) images and the implications of what they convey (in Muriel these are references to the horrors of the Algerian war whose victim is the girl from the film's title), makes another devastating appearance in the form of the financial advisor and con artist played by Jean-Paul Belmondo (Stavisky...) whose fate coincides with Trotsky's stay in Paris, and his exile in the era of political machinations as overture to the collapse of the left and the turn towards fascism.

However Stavisky did not do so well with critics, but the author redeemed himself with My American Uncle (Mon oncle d'Amérique) which masterfully leads the heroes through a labyrinth of 'stressful' situations in the company of a young Gerard Depardieu, in order to create a new kind of fiction which not only leaves room for contemplation but also creates a sort of cracks that catch our thoughts, whether opened by his behavioural scientist, personal reflections or Lynchian dreams, people with heads of white mice included.

At a later period, Resnais's mise-en-scène is mostly confined to the stage, in the company of his muse Sabine Azéma, where pain and cruelty are interrupted by Brahms’s duets (Mélo). Each new film is more lilting, casual and playful, like On connaît la chanson and another theatrical adaptation of Alan Ayckburn's text (Coeurs), as gentle as a snowflake drifting into the rooms of his protagonists; a real winter film about lovers for lovers, where sorrow is drowned in at the bottom of a glass in a hotel bar. (Dragan Rubeša)