Conversation With Resnais

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A Conversation with Alain ResnaisAuthor(s): Noel Burch and Alain ResnaisSource: Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Spring, 1960), pp. 27-29Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1210431

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NOEL BURCH

A Conversation with Alain ResnaisWriting about the work of Alain Resnais in previous issues ofFILM QUARTERLY,* Noel Burch suggested that he, is perhaps themost promising new talent to have appeared in the French cinema inrecent years. His shorts displayed a startling visual senseand his first feature, HIROSHIMA, MON AMOUR, s by all reports a film ofstunning verve and authority. It is to be hoped that it willsoon make an appearance in this country

We met for a drink in Harry's New York Bar,near the Opera. The place is always desertedat that time of the afternoon and is convenientfor conversation. Resnais is a shy, rather nerv-ous young man. I began by asking him abouthis short-subjects: how he felt about them andhow he felt about shorts in general. The chiefpoint he seemed to want to make was that,practically speaking, it is much harder to makea good short than a good feature. "Say I'mshooting a feature in this bar. If I want a tall,skinny barman and a dozen extras, somebody isimmediately sent to fetch them. But if I'm do-ing a short, the producer will hem and haw andI'll be lucky to have anyone in the shot at all.Shorts simply aren't worth the effort, eitheraesthetically or financially. Le Chant du Sty-rdne, for example, took five days longer to shootthan Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and of course Iwas paid infinitely less to direct it." Still andall, he does have serious consideration for hispast shorts, and distinct preferences amongthem. His best, he feels, was Nuit et Brouillard,and this independently of its subject matter(concentration-camp atrocities). In particular,he feels it was in this film that he came closestto solving the problem of commentary-a prob-

lem which we were to touch upon again inconnection with Hiroshima. Resnais does nolike the commentary for Toute la Mdmoire duMonde at all, on the other hand, and in factends to feel that both of his last shorts werestylistic exercises more than anything else:"Polysterene just happened to be the mosamusing subject proposed to me at a time whenI needed money."

As he did not seem especially anxious to discuss his shorts further, I went on to ask abouHiroshima: what, to his mind, is the meaning othe juxtaposition of the two main story-themein that film? He had obviously been asked thaquestion before, but I did not feel that I wagetting a stock answer when he told me, verysimply, that for him these themes had no rigorous relationship at all. He had chosen themquite intuitively, "the way a composer mighchoose two chords." "There are things in everyday life which arrest one's attention, which seemto go together, the way words rhyme in a poem."This wa? the first of many allusions to an abstract conception of films which seems constantly present in his mind. But then, as if to satisfyanother side of himself, he went on to talk abouthe importance of making people feel the hor

* "Four French Documentaries," Fall 1959; "Qu'est-ce que la Nouvelle Vague?" Winter 1959.


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28ror of war and the atom bomb by showing howthese phenomena can seep through into one'smost private existence. "People think they canlay low [se planquer] but they soon realize theycan't." Returning to a more formal vocabularyhe spoke of "a macrocosm and microcosm" ofsuffering, a "funnel-shape structure, movingfrom the infinitely vast to the infinitely small."When I asked him what the film's last linemeant-"You are Nevers, I am Hiroshima"-hewas even more vague; for him it was merely away of conveying the nostalgia of two loversdestined to be separated. "But then of courseMarguerite may have had something else inmind." When I suggested that here and else-where in the film there was an atmosphere of"significance" which seemed to bely this sim-plicity, he allowed I might be right and impliedhe had heard the criticism before. In connectionwith Marguerite Duras' much-discussed com-mentary, he felt that the critics and intellectualshad largely missed the point; they had comparedthe film's verbal style to Peguy's, whereas Res-nais feels that a comparison with Hemingway'sattitude towards words would have been closerto the mark. Again he speaks of music, of wordsbeing used as "emotional notes" rather thanfor their literal meaning; he feels that the film'ssuccess in general distribution in Paris is a signthat the ordinary spectator is better prepared toaccept this incantatory use of words than theChamps-Elys6es snob. A surprising observa-tion about Hiroshima came in respect to thepeace-parade sequence. I asked him whether,as some of my friends had felt, this sequencewas meant to be ironic. Misconstruing the ques-tion, he answered: "Yes, I suppose it was a bitmeagre. But we simply couldn't get people toturn out. I would call the sequence nostalgic-nostalgic with respect to the really grandiosefilm against the bomb that ought to be made.After all, that's the only thing that really counts,demonstrating against the H-Bomb," and wewent on whimsically to imagine a kind of Tri-umph of the Will shot around an anti-H-Bombdemonstration. This, I'm afraid, was as closeas we ever came to discusing Resnais' politics.I wanted to return at this point to a passing

remark he had made earlier. Referring to "thedirection in which he was striving to work," tohis "experiments" and "attempts," he said:"When one thinks of the stage of developmentthat painting has reached . .. !" Resnais, itturned out, has always been keenly interestedin painting. When he came to Paris, just afterthe Liberation in 1944, he was "just a countryboy" and the idea of meeting "areal-life painter"held a marvelous prestige for him. This waswhy he began making little 16mm films aboutthe works of modern painters, among them MaxErnst. A producer got wind of these films andwithout ever having seen one commissionedResnais to do his first real film: Van Gogh. Asin every artistic domain, Resnais' taste in paint-ing is highly eclectic: "I like what I call theatri-cal painting-Piero della Francesca, Felix Labisse, Paul Delvaux, etc. But then I also likeHartung. My favorite modern painter is Ernsthe satisfies me on both the theatrical and abstract levels. . . . There is nothing like looking at a painter's work through a camera view-finder to judge the cohesiveness of his paintingas such. That was how I came to see throughGauguin, for example-he just didn't stand up-but it's also how I came to appreciate the formavalues of Ernst." In connection with this synthesis of the theatrical and the abstract in thepaintings of Ernst, we finally came to what maywell be the most meaningful question one canask Alain Resnais: how does he propose toreconcile the highly abstract attitude displayedin his films-and confirmed in the course oour conversation-with the highly concrete emotional and intellectual communication for whichhe also expressed great concern? He is obviously aware how crucial this problem is, and knowsthat he is still a long way from the answer. Heis tempted by solutions involving extreme heterogeneity, films which would leap from puregraphic abstractions to documentary realism andwhich would even incorporate stretches of "noncinema." "One cannot do away with the imagecompletely-Gance tried this in the sound version of J'Accuse, but the spectator's mind begins to wander when a film is turned into a radiobroadcast for any length of time. Still, one can


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29reduce the image to a mere focal point for theaudience's eye, for example the clouds and otherabstract patterns in Welles' Shakespearean filmsor the cross at the end of Le Journal d'un Curdde Campagne."This led to a discussion of films in general,and here again Resnais' tastes are exceedinglyeclectic. He admires Bresson tremendously,feels that certain scenes in his recent Pickpocket"go very far," but is naturally irritated by theChristian aspects of the film. He adores Renoir,placing Le Crimede MonsieurLange on a parwith La Regle du Jett-and he subscribes toRenoir's theories on the autonomy of the actorand "spontaneous" directing. Other men citedincluded Fellini ("all Fellini, pasted end to endand run off at one sitting, with the sequencesnot necessarily in the right order; even if there'sGod in it, I don't mind so long as it's Felliniwho's telling me the story"); Bufiuel ("Je l'aimepourson culte de l'amouret poursa gendrositd"-a modern French catch-word which is besttranslated as "humanitarianism"; his favoriteBufiuel film is L'Age d'Or and he was to ac-knowledge his debt to Surrealism at severalpoints in the conversation); Antonioni; Vis-conti; and Welles-but also Howard Hawkes,one of those inexplicable favorites of Frenchmovie addicts. Resnais loves the old serials("Feuillade," we agreed, "was a very greatman") and even likes the sort of thing Langis doing today in that vein: "The Bengal Tigerisn't as good as Mabuse, of course, but it stillgives me a kick." I asked him if any films canbe said to have influenced or inspired him inany way. He answered that as far as influenceswere concerned he had always considered him-self as pottering away on the fringe ["un brico-leur en marge"] and then, after a moment'sreflection, he said that there was one kind offilm that had always made him want to makemovies: the American musical comedy! (Donen,Minnelli, Kelly, etc.)Resnais was very reluctant to discuss his fu-ture plans. He admitted that he was havingthree scripts written for him at the present time(he never wants to adapt any pre-existing work,scruples at touching anything which already has

its definitive form) but doesn't seem too enthusiastic about the fact. He seems to have astrong inferiority complex about "not knowinggrammar," as he puts it, or in other words abouhaving no literary flair in a country where everyschool boy is supposed to be able to write likeMadame de Sevigne. Also, this is the first timehe has ever been in a position to choose his ownsubject matter. (Even Hiroshima was a commissioned film at the outset: a Franco-Japaneseco-production had to be made, and it had to beset in Hiroshima.) He finds himself somewhaat a loss. Since our conversation, however,have learned from a mutual friend about Resnais' fondest project, one which ties in rathenicely with his considerations on heterogeneity,Surrealist painting and Feuillade's serials. It ibased upon a comic strip which appeared in Holland during the early 'thirties and told of thamazing, picaresque adventures of a certainHarry Nixon. The film is to be a vast, lavishfresco-like serial, involving the wildest kind ofin de sidcle science fiction, with sets to be designed by Paul Delvaux. Unfortunately it isuch a costly venture (the figure quoted was million dollars) that it is doubtful that the filmcan be produced for some time to come, despiteResnais' current prestige. In a work of this sorthowever, Resnais would doubtless resolve thintellectual and aesthetic problems he confronted in Hiroshima.STATEMENT REQUIRED BY THE ACT OF AUGUST 241912, AS AMENDED BY THE ACTS OF MARCH 3, 1933AND JULY 2, 1946 (Title 39, United States Code, Sectio233) SHOWING THE OWNERSHIP, MANAGEMENTAND CIRCULATION OF Film Quarterly, published quarterly at Berkeley, California, for October 1, 1959.1. The names and addresses of the publisher, editor, managing editor, and business manager are:Publisher: University of California Press, Berkeley 4.Editor: Ernest Callenbach, 2143 Blake Street, Berkeley 4Business M'anager: Barnard Norris, 2318 Webster StreeBerkeley 5, California.2. The owner is: The Regents of the University of CaliforniaBerkeley 4, California.3. The known bondholders, mortgagees, and other securitholders owning or holding 1 per cent or more of total amounof bonds, mortgages, or other securities are: None.[Signed] Barnard Norris, Business ManageSworn and subscribed before me this 17th day of Septembe1959. [Signed] William J. Schoener(My commission expires Notary Public, AlamedDecember, 1960) County, California

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Conversation With Resnais