Last Year in Marienbad by Alain Resnais
In the L.A. Weekly, Scott Foundas on Alain Resnais, the subject of a month-long retrospective at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art:
"'They say that a director always makes the same film,' says Resnais when I meet him on a damp Paris morning earlier this month, his beige overcoat the same one he seems to be wearing in every photograph ever taken of him turned up at the collar, his gleaming sneakers nearly the same shade of white as his swept-back hair. 'I try to make, as François Truffaut said, the next film in opposition to the one that came before. I’m not sure if I succeed. To put it another way, I agree with the auteur theory but I don’t consider myself an auteur. I’m more of an artisan, a craftsman.' Such self-effacement is par for the course with Resnais, who has always eschewed the 'a film by' credit and has never taken formal screenplay credit, though he is said to collaborate closely with his screenwriters (who have also included the cartoonist Jules Feiffer and playwright David Mercer).
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"… He is happy to engage on almost any subject, from the strict Catholic schools he attended as a child in Brittany (where 'cinema wasn’t considered an art; it was a distraction') to his early inclination that 'there was something important in cinema, which was the manipulation of time through editing.' It is an idea Resnais, who had been teaching himself filmmaking since receiving an 8mm camera at the age of 12, was able to explore further when he moved to Nazi-occupied Paris and enrolled in one of the first classes of the French national film school (IDHEC). 'Maybe a single image wasn’t anything, but the three following images could provoke a style that was similar to literature,' he says."
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Among the Alain Resnais films screening at LACMA are Last Year in Marienbad, La Guerre est finie, Stavisky, Mon oncle d'Amérique, and the Holocaust short Night and Fog.