Alain Resnais
Alain Resnais
RANKED:
2. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)
After editing the film that started the French New Wave movement, Agnes Varda's "La Pointe Courte," Alain Resnais was inspired to make his first directorial feature film, "Hiroshima Mon Amour." In doing so, he not only helped bridge the New Wave Movement between Varda's 1955 film and the 1960s innovators like Godard and Truffaut, but he also created what French filmmaker Eric Rohmer considers 'the first modern film.' Despite having a seemingly linear story about two lovers in Hiroshima, "Hiroshima Mon Amour" manages to create a story held within the moments in between and outside of the linear narrative. Resnais fractures time in the film, fractures identity, and creates a visual freedom that enables time and space to bend to his creative will all together. The result is something unlike any other film seen before. It's a film that isn't a narrative story, but rather an emotion of modernity in the atomic age. The film's quiet desperation is a mirror of our modern world. Because of the fracturing of time in the film, the past becomes the present and the present becomes the future. The horrors of what has been are still with us. In fact, the horrors only await us. We do our best to forget what was and what's to come. We do our best to hide in the warm embrace of the now, just as the two lovers attempt to hide in the embrace of each other. However, there is no now. The past and future both exist within the now. The identities of others are simply our own identities. The things that have happened are happening to us now and will happen to us again. "Hiroshima Mon Amour" is a quiet, existential freeform view of our modern world, as well as a doorway into modern cinema.
1. Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
As if "Hiroshima Mon Amour" wasn't game changing enough, Alain Resnais decided to completely post-modernize cinema with his 1961 masterpiece "Last Year at Marienbad." The film certainly has a few critics that hail it as a garbled incoherent mess, but the true lovers of the cinematic artform would express to you the ultimately uncompromising masterwork that the film is. The premise is relatively simple: A man tries to convince a woman that they've met before. The woman resists, but the man persists. That's it. What's not simple is the construction of the film. Resnais creates a visual style that had never been done up until that point, in which there is an ambiguity in temporal space. Consecutive shots have incompatible information, impossible juxtapositions are held within a single shot, and repeated events occur in different settings. Ambiguities in visual contradictions create a sense of disorder and abstraction. All the while, we know what we are watching is an abstraction, a construction. However, the film (like the man convincing the woman) continues to convince us of this constructed reality. Like the woman, we resist this fabrication. And yet, through the film's sheer force of will (and its disorienting dreamscape or nightmare) is able to drag us into the depths of its constructed consciousness. We are seduced by this construction, despite its lack of coherence and its lurking danger and terror. We continue to fall into the depths of the dreamscape and into the depths of our lack of control over ourselves and our conscious mind. With "Last Year at Marienbad," Resnais completely destroys temporal continuity and creates a new 'mental continuity' happening on screen. It challenges perception, alters consciousness, inspires thought, and creates a sense of dreamlike instability. This game-changing film would open the door to cinema forever that many filmmakers dared to bravely venture through.
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