Early Work of Alain Resnais
Mar 16 - Mar 17, 2010
(Alain Resnais, France, 1950-56, various formats, 86 min)
Sponsored by JTNews and Alliance Francaise de Seattle
Discover director Alain Resnais’s hard-to-find documentary shorts of the 1950s! Resnais’ early work established him as a filmmaker of inimitable sensibility.
Set to a text by poet Paul Éluard and details of Picasso’s epic antiwar painting, Guernica (Robert Hessens and Alain Resnais, 1950, 35mm, 13 min) is an oddly lyrical call for peace.
Le Chant du Styrène (Chris Marker and Alain Resnais, 1958, DVD, 19 min), a commission from Péchiney Plastics, depicts the making of polystyrene as “a noble material…demanding a great deal of knowledge."
Chris Marker also assisted on Night and Fog (1955, 35mm, 32 mins), one of the first and most haunting film commentaries on the Holocaust.
Toute la mémoire du monde (1956, 16mm, 22 min) is an elegant “portrait” of France’s Bibliothèque Nationale.
