Alain Resnais

[TechnicolorAcid]

I updated to include that and the Early Short Films of the French New Wave Blus

Thanks! Also I’m curious as to why Van Gogh is listed twice under two separate years, did he make two Van Gogh movies or was that just an error?

[domino harvey]

I carried this over from the original list but Wikipedia says there were two versions shot on different stock. I always kinda skipped over the shorts sections in the Resnais books

[spectre]

I have fully updated and refreshed the first post, which had not been revised for almost twenty years. If I missed any board discussions or threads or releases for the shorts etc, please let me know

I’ve included info about all the Resnais books I’m aware of in English as well - quite surprising that, discounting the Interviews book, it appears no English-friendly work on Resnais covers his films past 2003 (and only one even does that, with the rest stopping at Providence or earlier). Potential opportunity here for some ambitious academic, perhaps

Awesome work, Domino. In case it helps, here's the full list of Australian R4 Resnais DVDs, as far as I'm aware (all OOP with the exception of Wild Grass, which is still listed for sale on the Sony website and EzyDVD):

Night and Fog: R4 Umbrella (2008)
Hiroshima Mon Amour: R4 Umbrella (2008)
Last Year at Marienbad: R4 Universal/StudioCanal (2010) / R4 Umbrella (2018)
Stavisky: R4 Universal/StudioCanal (2008)
My American Uncle: R4 Umbrella (2008)
Coeurs: R4 Madman (2008)
Wild Grass: R4 Sony (2010)

[Peacock]

Thank you Domino, these are some of the most helpful posts, may it be useful for the next 20 years!

La Guerre est Finie was also released by Gaumont on English friendly BD. Not sure how it compares to the US release as I only have the French one.

[Stefan]

What is most needed regarding Resnais today are VIEWABLE versions of his "funny" (with or without inverted commas) films. Killer stuff. If you haven't seen "On Connait la Chanson" or "Coeurs" you have no idea of what he was capable of (aside from the "serious films").

[GaryC]

Just to add, there was a R0 DVD of Muriel from Eureka/Masters of Cinema, released 2009 and now OOP.

[domino harvey]

Thanks everyone, I’ve updated the first post. Can’t believe I forgot the MoC of Muriel. In case anyone is trying to decipher what gets included, generally if an English friendly Blu exists, I won’t list DVDs for that title, the exception being if there is an existing thread here for it with discussion that may be valuable. If DVD is as good as it gets, I’ll list all the English friendly releases I’m aware of. There are some that are better options than others, though-- for instance, the Artificial Eye DVD of Coeurs has over an hour and a half of bonus interviews and features, while the IFC DVD is barebones (not sure about the Madman edition, maybe spectre can weigh in?)

[Maltic]

The most recent episode of the very good podcast Every Single Sci-Fi Film Ever by Ayesha Khan is about Je t'aime, je t'aime.

[spectre]

There are some that are better options than others, though-- for instance, the Artificial Eye DVD of Coeurs has over an hour and a half of bonus interviews and features, while the IFC DVD is barebones (not sure about the Madman edition, maybe spectre can weigh in?)

Can do (I have the Madman DVD on my shelf)! Besides an original theatrical trailer, there are two special features: one seems to be a 28-minute extended cut of the imaginary French TV show “The Songs That Changed My Life” that appears in the film, and the other (simply labelled “Behind the scenes” on the disc) is an 18-minute audio interview with Resnais about the film accompanied by behind-the-scenes production stills.

[domino harvey]

Thanks! Looks like the Resnais interview/behind the scenes may only be on the Australian edition. According to DVDCompare the Artificial Eye also has the Songs That Changed My Life episode plus

Interview with Lambert Wilson (21:29)
Interview with Sabine Azema (19:46)
Interview with Alan Ayckbourn (24:41)

My copy is on its way to me so I’ll be able to confirm when it arrives

[domino harvey]

Revisited Pas sur la bouche and it’s as awful as I recalled. There’s something deeply smug about a project like this, where fidelity to the source (here a 1925 comic operetta allegedly presented in full as it was first performed) somehow excuses the end result. If you pick a bad text to adapt faithfully, all you’ve done is bring something best kept forgotten into focus. A project like this that not only calls for hamminess but necessitates it is brutal when Resnais regulars like Sabine Azema are on board, but if I could single out just one cast member for special derision, it’s Lambert Wilson’s deeeeeeeply annoying perf as an American singing French in a fake, loud, tycoon-type Yank accent for the whole movie. Absolutely brutal, even if he gets the only good song in the entire project (the titular one). On the other end though, the only perf here that works is the shock appearance in the third act of Darry Cowl (in drag!), not just because who knew he was still around 40+ years after his heyday, but because Cowl’s patented soft spoken, shuffling timidity is of course at direct odds with everyone and everything else in this film. I was very glad to see him, and would have been even happier if he’d had anything funny to do.

+++

I finished my reread of Monaco’s Resnais book and it’s a mixed bag. Monaco is a fantastic and literate critic and it’s a genuine joy to read his prose in this book. However, he does not like Hiroshima mon amour or Marienbad and while this unpopular opinion would be hard to swallow from any critic of this period, it is perhaps insurmountable to have it come from the man who’s devoting an entire book to Resnais. There’s also a dismissive streak running throughout the book insisting that the more difficult Resnais films are in fact super easy to understand and simply at that. This is yet another contrarianism too many. What’s amusing is, after finishing the book, I realized that it’s quite likely that Monaco enjoys a few Resnais films but only really cares about Muriel and Je t’aime je t’aime and still wrote a book about everything else (including a fascinating, if ineligible, chapter on Resnais’ unrealized projects, which treats two scripts in particular to analyses as though they were produced). Was not surprised to see that his book released just a few years after this highlighting 39 (mistakenly labeled as 36 on the back cover) masterpieces of film has no Resnais in the tally. If I’m going to read a book devoted to a director, I think it’s not asking much for that author to at least consider one of said director’s films worthy of a top 39 placement (esp considering stuff like Un homme et une femme places)!

Hopefully some of the other Resnais books I have on hand provide me with a better balance of insights and appreciation

[domino harvey]

In my revisiting project for Resnais, I realized I mistakenly thought I had seen I Want to Go Home. Having now certifiably seen it, let me assure you: all of you have seen this and just forgot about it. No need to watch it, you’ve already seen it and realized it’s one of the most incompetent films ever made by a filmmaker who knows better. You remembered that the film is anchored by two astonishingly inept performances by Adolph Green and Laura Benson, and that somehow in a film with Gerard Depardieu in it, it’s Linda Lavin of all people who delivers the only passable perf. I can remind you that the premise of skewering French intellectual investment in American low art is a good foundation, but Jules Feiffer doesn’t actually have anything to say about this in his script and it shows. This all devolves into the flattest farce you’ve ever witnessed, and then has the temerity to end with sincere affection for France after 105 minutes of non stop whining. Mostly, remember that you, like me, would have given this film an exceedingly rare eject before it finished if Resnais’ name were not on it. Indeed, we were, you and I, ready to tap out like 18 minutes in and then we didn’t and there was so, so much more movie left and the only reward was in warning others: you saw this and it sucked

[GaryC]

I haven't seen it, but I do remember it being shown at the London Film Festival and then going to be the first Resnais feature not to have a UK theatrical release, despite its being in English. It has had odd screenings from time to time, such as in Resnais retrospectives, and it seems Artificial Eye (who might have put it out in cinemas but presumably passed on it) released it on DVD around 2010.

[Aunt Peg]

I remember when it was released it Australia it got some of the worst reviews I've ever seen, and of course the film tanked at the box office. Though I liked it myself I really don't have much desire to revisit it.

[Stefan]

"Pas sur la bouche" sits in two copies in my library. After I had watched the first some years before I could remember so little of it that I ordered it again. Not the best reference. When I saw it the second time I pushed the "stop"-button after 30 min. Terrible film. Resnais could be narcissistic like hell at times.
I wonder what Dom will have to say about "Vous n’avez encore rien vu" once he has rewatched it.

[spectre]

I’ll be the first to speak up for some of Resnais’s less-popular films (e.g. Providence!), but I have nothing to say in defence of I Want to Go Home – watched it once when I was working my way through his filmography, didn’t enjoy it at all, have promptly forgotten most of what actually happens in the film.

One I have never seen but always meant to is Smoking/No Smoking – would be curious to hear people’s thoughts on that one and whether it bucks the 80s/90s Resnais malaise.

[GaryC]

I saw Smoking/No Smoking at the time at press showings, not since, though I'd like to. I did like it a lot, though I seem to be attuned to Resnais's formalism/narrative gameplaying (delete as appropriate) that seems to be central to a lot of his work, or at least I was attuned to that one. I've not seen the Alan Ayckbourn play(s) it's based on, and it did feel a little strange for something set in Scarborough, Yorkshire (Ayckbourn's base) being spoken in French. I do know other people have hated it - not least the well-known and still-active critic who was at least one of the showings I went to, and said so in no uncertain terms in the review I later read.

[domino harvey]

These are my thoughts from my first watch:

Smoking / No Smoking (Alain Resnais 1993) An unusual two-hander in which Pierre Arditi and Sabine Azéma play all of the on-screen (stage) speaking roles, amounting to nine different characters, none ever occupying the stage with more than one other character. It’s easy to imagine the quick changes this must have required on the stage, with helpful wigs and color-coding of the characters transferring the helpful visual cues for the stage to the screen. But in the closer proximity that film gives us, these tools take on the form of comic strip affectations (the maid is always wearing neon green, the slutty wife is always in bright red, &c), matching the colorful animated intros each of these two films receive.

Running nearly five hours, the combined effect of the two films is simple but exhausting: various characters in a small British town interact in the “present,” then we get a flashforward to an event either five days, weeks, or months in the future and set at a new locale, and then finally we get a five year flashforward set in the courtyard of a church. Once one narrative strand plays out, the film doubles back and says, “Or maybe this happened” and rewinds back to turning points and changes the outcome. A character who turned down a date now instead accepts, &c. The basic narrative parts here are fairly innocuous, much of it broad farce (and Azema’s penchant for hammy overacting is equal parts beneficial and detrimental for much of this material), but the film’s conceptual structure rapidly becomes an annoying affectation once we realize that the film isn’t playing with questions of fate or chance but rather positing an utterly idiotic and pointless “What if” question. Unlike in Sliding Doors, where a minor event (catching a certain subway train in time) has massive repercussions for the protagonist, these films don’t ask how things could be different if small scale circumstance changed but rather how the story would be different if the characters had completely different internal motivations. This is to say, how the story would play out if the characters were not the characters they are. “Hey, did you ever think how different a situation would turn out if the person you were talking to began to act like someone else?” is not a dramatic question I find interesting in the slightest, and brother, we get five fucking hours of this.

Sitting through these two movies quickly became an endurance test and I was reminded of the (even worse) the Falls which also mercilessly beat the poor audience over the head with its unfunny one-joke premise for inhumanly long periods of time, the length becoming part of the gimmick. A film this long can not sustain itself without some kind of emotional investment in the characters— there’s a reason Godard’s political films are so short, after all— and hitting the reset button every fifteen minutes makes any attempts futile. And the larger points the material may be aiming for are nulled by the zero-impact any of the altered decisions have on the proceedings given that they’re all just a playwright's pawns in an unamusing series of emotional farces. A tiring failure.

[zedz]

In my revisiting project for Resnais, I realized I mistakenly thought I had seen I Want to Go Home. Having now certifiably seen it, let me assure you: all of you have seen this and just forgot about it. No need to watch it, you’ve already seen it and realized it’s one of the most incompetent films ever made by a filmmaker who knows better. You remembered that the film is anchored by two astonishingly inept performances by Adolph Green and Laura Benson, and that somehow in a film with Gerard Depardieu in it, it’s Linda Lavin of all people who delivers the only passable perf. I can remind you that the premise of skewering French intellectual investment in American low art is a good foundation, but Jules Feiffer doesn’t actually have anything to say about this in his script and it shows. This all devolves into the flattest farce you’ve ever witnessed, and then has the temerity to end with sincere affection for France after 105 minutes of non stop whining. Mostly, remember that you, like me, would have given this film an exceedingly rare eject before it finished if Resnais’ name were not on it. Indeed, we were, you and I, ready to tap out like 18 minutes in and then we didn’t and there was so, so much more movie left and the only reward was in warning others: you saw this and it sucked

Agree with you 100% on this unflushable turd of a film. It makes me relieved that all those other comic book movies Resnais wanted to make never happened.

[beamish14]

In my revisiting project for Resnais, I realized I mistakenly thought I had seen I Want to Go Home. Having now certifiably seen it, let me assure you: all of you have seen this and just forgot about it. No need to watch it, you’ve already seen it and realized it’s one of the most incompetent films ever made by a filmmaker who knows better. You remembered that the film is anchored by two astonishingly inept performances by Adolph Green and Laura Benson, and that somehow in a film with Gerard Depardieu in it, it’s Linda Lavin of all people who delivers the only passable perf. I can remind you that the premise of skewering French intellectual investment in American low art is a good foundation, but Jules Feiffer doesn’t actually have anything to say about this in his script and it shows. This all devolves into the flattest farce you’ve ever witnessed, and then has the temerity to end with sincere affection for France after 105 minutes of non stop whining. Mostly, remember that you, like me, would have given this film an exceedingly rare eject before it finished if Resnais’ name were not on it. Indeed, we were, you and I, ready to tap out like 18 minutes in and then we didn’t and there was so, so much more movie left and the only reward was in warning others: you saw this and it sucked

Agree with you 100% on this unflushable turd of a film. It makes me relieved that all those other comic book movies Resnais wanted to make never happened.

I would love to read Jules Feiffer’s original script, which is in his archives at the NY Public Library. Something clearly was lost in translation