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Sabine Azéma | |
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Portrait in 1996 |
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Born | (1949-09-20) 20 September 1949 (age 62) Paris, France |
Years active | 1975–present |
Spouse | Michel Lengliney[citation needed] Alain Resnais (since 1998) |
Sabine Azéma (born 20 September 1949) is a French stage and film actress and director. Born in Paris, she graduated from the Paris Conservatory of Dramatic Arts, and began her film career in 1975. Azéma appeared in A Sunday in the Country (1984), for which she won a César Award for Best Actress, and numerous films of Alain Resnais, including Life Is a Bed of Roses (1983), L'Amour à mort (1984), Mélo (which won her a second César Award for Best Actress), Smoking/No Smoking (1993), On connaît la chanson (1997), Pas sur la bouche (2003), and Cœurs (2006). She has been nominated a further five times.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Sabine Azéma |
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Persondata | |
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Name | Azema, Sabine |
Alternative names | |
Short description | Actress |
Date of birth | 20 September 1949 |
Place of birth | Paris, France |
Date of death | |
Place of death |
Sabine | |
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Statue of Semo Sancus from his shrine on the Quirinal |
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Spoken in | Sabinium |
Region | Central Italy |
Extinct | Only trace the vocabulary of mainly Marcus Terentius Varro, 1st century BC |
Language family | |
Writing system | Not written except as Latinized words |
Language codes | |
ISO 639-3 | sbv |
The Sabines (/ˈseɪbaɪn/; Latin: Sabini; Ancient Greek: Σαβῖνοι) were an Italic tribe that lived in the central Appennines of ancient Italy, also inhabiting Latium north of the Anio before the founding of Rome. The above names, English, Latin and Greek, are all exonyms.
The Sabine language is scantily attested, mainly by glosses of ancient commentators on classical authors and inscriptions, where the commentator gives an alternative word he says is the Sabine. In recent times one or possibly two Sabine inscriptions have been tentatively identified. Based on all the evidence the Linguist List classifies Sabine, again tentatively, as a member of the Umbrian Group of Italic languages of Indo-European family.
The Sabines divided into two populations just after the founding of Rome, which is described by Roman legend. The division, however it came about, is not legendary. The population closest to Rome transplanted itself to the new city and united with the pre-existing citizenry, beginning a new heritage that descended from the Sabine but was also Latinized. The second population remained a mountain tribal state, coming finally to war against Rome for their independence, along with all the other Italic tribes, losing, and being assimilated into the Roman Republic.
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Robert Seymour Conway, in his Italic Dialects, a compendium of documents written in Italic languages, reported: "No inscriptions in this dialect remain to us."[1] He did find, however, a vocabulary identified as Sabine of about 36 words in glosses by Roman authors (such as Varro) on other Greek and Latin authors and inscriptions. Moreover, he could identify Sabine spellings within the Latin vocabulary. He graded all these into "well attested" and "less certain," in all, approximately 100 words. In addition to these he cites place names derived from the Sabine, sometimes reconstructing the Sabine. He lists personal names in use on Latin inscriptions from Sabine country, but these have Latin forms.
Latin-speakers called the Sabines' original territory, straddling the modern regions of Lazio, Umbria, and Abruzzo, Sabinium. To this day[update], it bears the ancient tribe's name in the Italian form of Sabina. Within the modern region of Lazio (or Latium), Sabina constitutes a sub-region, situated north-east of Rome, around Rieti.
According to Dionysius of Halicarnassus, many Roman historians (including Porcius Cato and Gaius Sempronius) regarded the origins of the Romans (descendants of the Aborigines) as Greek despite the fact that their knowledge was derived from Greek legendary accounts.[2] The Sabines, specifically, were first mentioned in Dionysius's account for having captured by surprise the city of Lista which was regarded as the mother-city of the Aborigines.[3] Ancient historians were still debating the specific origins of the Sabines. Zenodotus of Troezen claimed that the Sabines were originally Umbrians that changed their name after being driven from the Reatine territory by the Pelasgians. However, Porcius Cato argued that the Sabines were a populace named after Sabus, the son of Sancus (a divinity of the area sometimes called Jupiter Fidius).[4] In another account mentioned in Dionysius's work, a group of Lacedaemonians fled Sparta since they regarded the laws of Lycurgus as too severe. In Italy, they founded the Spartan colony of Foronia (near the Pomentine plains) and some from that colony settled among the Sabines. According to the account, the Sabine habits of belligerence and frugality were known to have been derived from the Spartans.[5] Plutarch also states in the Life of Numa Pompilius, "Sabines, who declare themselves to be a colony of the Lacedaemonians..."
Legend says that the Romans abducted Sabine women to populate the newly built Rome. The resultant war ended only by the women throwing themselves and their children between the armies of their fathers and their husbands. The Rape of the Sabine Women ("rape" in this context meaning "kidnapping" rather than sexual violation, see raptio) became a common motif in art; the women ending the war forms a less frequent but still reappearing motif.
According to Livy, after the conflict the Sabine and Rome states merged, and the Sabine king Titus Tatius jointly ruled Rome with Romulus until Tatius' death five years later. Three new centuries of Equites were introduced at Rome, including one named Tatienses, after the Sabine king.
Tradition suggests that the population of the early Roman kingdom was the result of a union of Sabines and others. Some of the gentes of the Roman republic were proud of their Sabine heritage, such as the Claudia gens, assuming Sabinus as a cognomen or agnomen. Some specifically Sabine deities and cults were known at Rome: Semo Sancus and Quirinus, and at least one area of the town, the Quirinale, where the temples to those latter deities were located, had once been a Sabine centre. The extravagant claims of Varro and Cicero that augury, divination by dreams and the worship of Minerva and Mars originated with the Sabines are disputable, as they were general Italic and Latin customs, as well as Etruscan, despite the fact that they were espoused by Numa Pompilius, second king of Rome and a Sabine.[6]
In the 7th century BC, during the reign of Rome's third king Tullus Hostilius, the Sabines and the Romans again warred. The pretexts for the war were, on the Roman side, that a number of Roman merchants had been seized by the Sabines at a market near the temple of Feronia, and on the Sabine side, that some of the Sabines were being detained at Rome. The Sabines sought and obtained the help of some volunteers from Veii, although the government of Veii did not come to their aid, holding faith to the peace treaty previously made with Romulus.
Tullus invaded Sabine territory and met the Sabines at the forest called Malitiosa. The Roman force was superior in both infantry and cavalry. In particular, the Roman cavalry had recently been augmented by the addition of ten new turmae of equites from among the Albans who now dwelt in Rome. The Romans won the battle after a cavalry charge threw the Sabines into disarray. The Sabines suffered heavy losses during the retreat.[7]
In the early 6th century BC, during the reign of Rome's fifth king Lucius Tarquinius Priscus, the Sabines attacked Rome. Tarquinius had been preparing to construct a stone wall around Rome, however the Sabines, having already crossed the Anio river, forced the king to abandon his plans and prepare for the attack. Livy reports that the initial engagement, though bloody, did not result in success for either side.[8]
The Sabines withdrew to their camp, allowing the Romans time to levy additional troops. Tarquinius, believing Rome's military weakness lay in its lack of horsemen, doubled the number of the equites.[8]
A second battle was then fought. The Romans, desiring to cut off the enemy's means of escape, sent rafts of burning logs down the Anio to destroy the bridge over the river by fire. In battle, the Sabine infantry pressed the Romans, and seemed to be winning against the Roman centre. However the Roman horsemen flanked the Sabine infantry, routed them, and impeded their flight from the battle. Many of the Sabines were unable to escape with their lives, both because of the pursuit of the cavalry and also because of the destruction of the bridge. Some of the fleeing Sabines drowned in the Anio; their arms drifted down the river into the Tiber and past Rome, and the Romans recognised this as a sign of victory even before word of the outcome of the battle arrived in the city.[9]
Tarquinius determined to press his victory. He firstly piled up and burnt the spoils that he had vowed to Vulcan, and he sent back to Rome the prisoners and booty which he had captured. He then proceeded, with his army, into the Sabine territory. The Sabines hastily raised a fresh army, but were defeated once more. They then sued for peace.[9]
The Sabine town of Collatia, and its surrounding lands and population, was surrendered to become Roman territory. Livy records the wording of the form of surrender. Egerius, the king's nephew, was left there with a garrison, and Tarquinius returned to Rome to celebrate a triumph.[10] According to the Fasti Triumphales, the date of the triumph was 13th September, 585 BC.
According to the Fasti Triumphales, Rome's last king Tarquinius Superbus celebrated a triumph for a victory over the Sabines.
The fall of the Roman monarchy left the Sabines in an ambiguous position politically with regard to Rome. Their treaties had been with the kings, but now the kings were gone.
According to Livy, hostilities broke out between Rome and the Sabines in 505 BC. The Romans were victorious, and a triumph awarded to the consuls Marcus Valerius Volusus and Publius Postumius Tubertus.[11]
Into this gap stepped Sextus Tarquinius (unless previously assassinated at Gabii), whose rape of Lucretia had been the event that triggered the revolution. He convinced the Sabines that they ought to help restore the kings. They moved against the Romans under native command and were quickly defeated.
Sextus (or Superbus himself) arguing that the Sabine army was mismanaged now brought Fidenae and Cameria to the assistance of the Sabines, who were so impressed by his confidence, his allies and his analysis that they made him dictator and voted for all-out war on Rome. It was at this point that that Titus Claudius (or Attius Clausus) removed all of his relatives and clients to Rome, including approximately 500 fighting men. The Romans settled them in Rome, ennobled Claudius and promised them land beyond the Anio river in the vicinity of Fidenae. All they had to do was take it from the Fidenates.
The Sabines marched toward Rome and were stopped by the river Anio and presumably the consular troops south of it. They placed two camps, one near Fidenae and one in it. Of the consuls for the year, Publius Valerius Poplicola, camped near the Sabines in the open, while Titus Lucretius Tricipitinus camped on a hill near Fidenae. The consular year was 505/504 BC.
Tarquin's plan was to launch a night attack on the camp of Valerius, filling in the ditch and scaling the wall. The troops in Fidenae were to exit the city and cover these operations against a possible attack by Lucretius. However, a Sabine defector and prisoners brought in by a Roman cavalry patrol informed Valerius of the enemy plan. Lucretius was soon advised.
The attack came after midnight. The Sabines were allowed to fill the ditch and throw up brushwood ramps over the wall into a camp that seemed all too still. In hindsight Tarquin might have guessed the danger from the lack of opposition to his inadvertently noisy operations and the total deficit of sentinels. He took those circumstances to mean that the Romans were all sound asleep, a striking underestimation of his enemy.
The Roman maniples were in fact in formation and waiting in the intervallum around the inner perimeter of the castra, invisible in the total blackness. They could see enough to quietly kill all enemies who came over the wall. The moon suddenly rising, the Roman troops and the piles of slain were visible to the Sabines, whose reaction was to drop their weapons and run. As the ambush was no longer a surprise the Roman troops all shouted together, which was the prearranged signal to Lucretius's men on the hill. He sent out his cavalry, which drove the distracted Fidenates from their ambush. They were massacred by Lucretius' infantry coming up. The Sabine army dissolved into a rout of unarmed individuals. Of them 13500 were slain and 4200 taken captive. The battle was not over. Fidenae remained to be taken (see under Roman-Etruscan Wars).[12]
For a list of words relating to Sabine language, see the Sabine language category of words in Wiktionary, the free dictionary. |
Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Sabini. |
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Rape of the Sabine Women |
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Robert Georgio Enrico (13 April 1931 - 23 February 2001) was a French film director and scriptwriter.
He was born in Liévin, Pas-de-Calais, in the north of France.
Persondata | |
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Name | Enrico, Robert |
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Short description | |
Date of birth | 13 April 1931 |
Place of birth | |
Date of death | 23 February 2001 |
Place of death |
Pierre Arditi | |
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Pierre Arditi in 2009 |
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Born | Pierre Marie Denis Arditi[1] 1 December 1944 (1944-12) (age 67) Paris |
Occupation | actor |
Partner | Évelyne Bouix |
Awards |
1987 Molière – Best Actor in a Supporting Role 1987 7 d'Or – Best Actor |
Pierre Arditi was born on 1 December 1944 in Paris, child of the French painter Georges Arditi (fr), from Marseille, and a Belgian mother. He is an award-winning French film and stage actor. He is the brother of French actress Catherine Arditi.
Being born before 1967 from a Belgian mother married to a foreign citizen, he is a famous example of non-transmission of Belgian citizenship by mother's blood.
He has often played romantic, womanizing roles, similar to those played by Marcello Mastroianni.
In 1987 he won a César Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his role in Mélo, and in 1994, a César Award for Best Actor for his role in Smoking/No Smoking.
Although his work has primarily been in French film and theater, Arditi is known in the Anglophone world as the French voice of Christopher Reeve. Arditi dubbed Christopher Reeve on the French-language version of the three first Superman movies by Richard Donner and Richard Lester (See the French Wikipedia article on Pierre Arditi for more information). Because of the added footage in the DVD Special Edition of Donner's Superman, the movie had to be re-dubbed with a different voice actor, much to the chagrin of the generation of moviegoers who had grown up with the original soundtrack and identified Superman's voice with Arditi's. He also provided the French voice for Reeve in the comedy/whodunit Deathtrap. Finally, he was the voice of the documentary serie Untamed Africa, written and produced by Frederic Lepage.
He was made Chevalier (Knight) of the Légion d'honneur in 2002.[1] He was made Chevalier (Knight) of the Ordre national du Mérite on 7 April 1994,[2] and promoted Officier (Officer) in 2005.[2]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Pierre Arditi |
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Name | Arditi, Pierre |
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Date of birth | 1 December 1944 |
Place of birth | Paris |
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This article about a French film actor or actress is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
This article about a French stage actor or actress is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
Alain Resnais | |
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Alain Resnais with Ariane Ascaride, Juliette Binoche and Agnès Jaoui at the 23rd César Award ceremony, 1998. |
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Born | (1922-06-03) June 3, 1922 (age 90) Vannes, Morbihan, Brittany, France |
Years active | 1946 - present |
Alain Resnais (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ ʁɛnɛ]; born 3 June 1922) is a French film director whose career has extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps.[1]
He began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad) (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. These films were contemporary with, and associated with, the French New Wave or nouvelle vague, though Resnais did not regard himself as being fully part of that movement. He had closer links to the 'Left Bank group' of authors and filmmakers who shared a commitment to modernism and an interest in left-wing politics. He also established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers usually unconnected with the cinema, such as Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jorge Semprún.[1][2][3]
In later films Resnais moved away from the overtly political topics of some previous works and developed his interests in an interaction between cinema and other cultural forms, including theatre, music, and comic books. This led to imaginative adaptations of two plays by Alan Ayckbourn, and two different styles of musical in On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song) (1997) and Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips) (2003).[4][5]
His films have frequently explored the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he is noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives.[4][6] Throughout his career he has won many awards from international film festivals and academies.
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Alain Resnais was born in 1922 at Vannes in Brittany, where his father was a pharmacist.[7] He was an only child, and throughout his childhood he was often ill with asthma, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home.[8] He was an eager reader, in a range that extended from classics to comic-books, but from the age of 10 he became fascinated by films. For his twelfth birthday his parents gave him a Kodak 8mm camera with which he began to make his own short films, including a three-minute version of Fantômas.[9] Around the age of 14 he discovered surrealism and through that an interest in the works of André Breton.[10]
Visits to the theatre in Paris gave Resnais the desire to be an actor, and in 1939 he moved to Paris to become an assistant in Georges Pitoëff's company at the Théâtre des Mathurins. From 1940 to 1942 he studied acting in the Cours René-Simon (and one of his small jobs at this time was as an extra in the film Les Visiteurs du soir[11]), but he then decided in 1943 to apply to the newly-formed film school IDHEC to study film editing.[12] The film-maker Jean Grémillon was one of the teachers who had most influence on him at that period.[13]
He left in 1945 to do his military service which took him to Germany and Austria with the occupying forces, as well as making him a temporary member of a travelling theatre company, Les Arlequins.[14] He returned to Paris in 1946 to start his career as a film editor, but also embarked on short films of his own. Finding himself to be a neighbour of the actor Gérard Philipe, he persuaded him to appear in a 16mm surrealist short, Schéma d'une identification (now lost).[12] A more ambitious feature-length work, Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, has also vanished without trace.[15]
After beginning with a series of short documentary films showing artists at work in their studios, as well as a few commercial commissions, Resnais was invited in 1948 to make a film about the paintings of Van Gogh, to coincide with an exhibition that was being mounted in Paris. He filmed it at first in 16mm, but when the producer Pierre Braunberger saw the results, Resnais was asked to remake it in 35mm. Van Gogh received a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948, and also won an Oscar for Best 2-reel Short in 1949.[16] (Braunberger went on to act as producer for several of Resnais's films in the following decade.) Resnais continued to address artistic subjects in Gauguin (1950) and Guernica (1950), which examined the Picasso painting based on the 1937 bombing of the town, and presented it to the accompaniment of a text written by Paul Éluard.[17] A political perspective on art also underpinned his next project, co-directed with Chris Marker, Les statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die), a polemic about the destruction of African art by French cultural colonialism.[18]
Nuit et Brouillard (Night and Fog) (1955) was one of the first documentaries about the Nazi concentration camps, but it deals more with the memory of the camps than with their actual past existence. Realising that standard documentary techniques would be incapable of confronting the enormity of the horror (and even risked humanising it), Resnais chose to use a distancing technique by alternating historical black-and-white images of the camps with contemporary colour footage of the sites in long tracking shots. The accompanying narration (written by Jean Cayrol, himself a survivor of the camps) was intentionally understated to add to the distancing effect. Although the film encountered censorship problems with the French government, its impact was immense and it remains one of the director's most admired works.[1][19]
A different kind of collective memory was considered in Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), in which the seemingly endless spaces and bibliographic riches of the Bibliothèque nationale were explored in another compendium of long travelling shots. In 1958 Resnais undertook a commission from the Pechiney company to make short film, in colour and wide-screen, extolling the merits of plastics, Le Chant du styrène. Poetry was brought to the project, literally, by Raymond Queneau who wrote the narration for the film in rhyming couplets.[20]
In his decade of making documentary short films, Resnais had established his interest in and talent for collaboration with leading figures in other branches of the arts; with the painters who were the subjects of his early works; with writers (Eluard in Guernica, Cayrol in Nuit et Brouillard, Queneau in Le Chant du styrène); with musicians (Darius Milhaud in Gauguin, Hanns Eisler in Nuit et Brouillard, Pierre Barbaud in Le Chant du styrène); and with other film-makers (Resnais was the editor of Agnès Varda's first film, La Pointe courte, and co-directed with Chris Marker Les statues meurent aussi). Similar collaborations underpinned his future work in feature films.[21]
Resnais's first feature film was Hiroshima mon amour in 1959. It had originated as a commission from the producers of Nuit et Brouillard (Anatole Dauman and Argos Films) to make a documentary about the atomic bomb, but Resnais initially declined, thinking that it would be too similar to the earlier film about the concentration camps;[22] it presented the same problem of how to film incomprehensible suffering.[23] Then however in discussion with the novelist Marguerite Duras a fusion of fiction and documentary was developed which acknowedged the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima; one could only speak about the impossibility of speaking about Hiroshima.[24] The themes of memory and forgetting were explored in a new narrative technique which balanced images with narrated text and ignored conventional notions of plot and story development.[25] The film was shown at the 1959 Cannes Film Festival, alongside Truffaut's Les Quatre Cents Coups, and its success became associated with the emerging movement of the New Wave.[26]
Resnais's next film was L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) (1961), which he made in collaboration with the novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet. The tantalisingly fragmented and shifting narrative presents three principal characters, a woman and two men, in the opulent setting of a grand European hotel or château where the possibility of a previous encounter a year ago is repeatedly asserted and questioned and contradicted. After winning the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, the film attracted great attention and provoked many divergent interpretations of how it should be understood, encouraged by interviews in which Robbe-Grillet and Resnais themselves appeared to give conflicting explanations of the film. There was little doubt however that it represented a significant challenge to the traditional concept of narrative construction in cinema.[27]
At the beginning of the 1960s France remained deeply divided by the Algerian War, and in 1960 the Manifesto of the 121, which protested against French military policy in Algeria, was signed by a group of leading intellectuals and artists who included Alain Resnais. The war, and the difficulty of coming to terms with its horrors, was a central theme of his next film Muriel (1963), which used a fractured narrative to explore the mental states of its characters. It was among the first French films to comment, even indirectly, on the Algerian experience.[28]
A contemporary political issue also formed the background for La guerre est finie (The War Is Over) (1966), this time the clandestine activities of left-wing opponents of the Franco régime in Spain. Resnais's scriptwriter on this film was the Spanish author Jorge Semprun, himself an ex-member of the Spanish Communist Party now in voluntary exile in France.[29] Both men denied that the film was about Spain, but when it was entered for the official competition at the Cannes Film Festival in 1966, an objection from the Spanish government caused it to be withdrawn and it was shown out of competition.[30] In 1967 Resnais participated with six other directors, including Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard, in a collective work about the Vietnam war, Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam).
From 1968 onwards, the films of Resnais no longer addressed, at least directly, big political issues in the way that a number of his previous ones had done,[31] and his next project seemed to mark a change of direction. Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968) drew upon the traditions of science-fiction for a story of a man sent back into his past, a theme which enabled Resnais again to present a narrative of fragmented time. The film was unlucky in its release (its planned screening at Cannes was cancelled amid the political events of May 1968), and it was almost five years before Resnais was able to direct another film.[32] Resnais spent part of that period in America working on various unfulfilled projects, including one about the Marquis de Sade. He also published Repérages, a volume of his photographs, taken between 1948 and 1971, of locations (many of them for 'possible films') in London, Scotland, Paris, Nevers, Lyon, New York and Hiroshima; Jorge Semprun wrote the introductory text.[33] Some of the photographs relate to a long-cherished but unfulfilled idea for a film based on the Harry Dickson stories by Jean Ray.
After contributing an episode to L'An 01 (The Year 01) (1973), a collective film organised by Jacques Doillon, Resnais made a second collaboration with Jorge Semprun for Stavisky (1974), based on the life of the notorious financier and embezzler whose death in 1934 provoked a political scandal. With glamorous costumes and sets, a musical score by Stephen Sondheim, and Jean-Paul Belmondo in the title-role, it was seen as Resnais's most commercial film to date, but its complex narrative structure showed clear links with some of the formal preoccupations of his earlier films.[34]
With Providence (1977), Resnais made his first film in English, with a screenplay written by David Mercer, and a distinguished cast that included John Gielgud and Dirk Bogarde. The story shows an ageing, maybe dying, novelist grappling with alternative versions of his own past as he adapts them for his fiction. Resnais was eager that the dark subject should remain humorous, and he described it as "a macabre divertissement".[35] Formal innovation characterised Mon oncle d'Amérique (My American Uncle) (1980) in which the theories of the neurobiologist Henri Laborit about animal behaviour are juxtaposed with three interwoven fictional stories; and a further counterpoint to the fictional characters is provided by the inclusion of film extracts of the classic French film actors with whom they identify.[36] The film won several international awards including the Grand Prix at the Cannes Film Festival, and it also proved to be one of Resnais's most successful with the public.[37]
From the 1980s onwards Resnais has shown a particular interest in integrating material from other forms of popular culture into his films, drawing especially on music and the theatre.[4][5] In almost all of his films since this period he has also chosen to work repeatedly with a core group of actors comprising Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, and André Dussollier, sometimes accompanied by Fanny Ardant or Lambert Wilson. The first four of these were among the large cast of La vie est un roman (Life Is a Bed of Roses) (1983), a comic fantasy about utopian dreams in which three stories, from different eras and told in different styles, are interwoven within a shared setting. The action is punctuated by episodes of song which develop towards the end into scenes that are almost operatic; Resnais said that his starting point had been the desire to make a film in which dialogue and song would alternate.[38]
Music, very differently used, was a major component of L'Amour à mort (Love unto Death) (1984). For this intense chamber work with four principal actors (Azéma, Arditi, Ardant and Dussollier), Resnais asked Hans Werner Henze to compose musical episodes which would act as a "fifth character", not an accompaniment but a fully integrated element of the drama with which the speech of the actors would interact.[39] In subsequent years, Resnais gave his attention to music of more popular styles. He made Gershwin (1992), an innovative TV documentary in which the American composer's life and works were reviewed through the testimonies of performers and filmmakers, juxtaposed with commissioned paintings by Guy Peellaert. In On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song) (1997), his tribute to television works of Dennis Potter, the characters express their key emotions or private thoughts by bursting into snatches of well-known (recorded) popular songs without interrupting the dramatic situation.[40] A long-neglected operetta from the 1920s was the unexpected basis for Resnais's next film Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips) (2003), in which he sought to reinvigorate an unfashionable form of entertainment by recreating its theatricality for the camera and entrusting most of its musical numbers to actors rather than to trained singers.[41]
References to the theatre are plentiful throughout Resnais's filmmaking (Marienbad, Muriel, Stavisky, Mon oncle d'Amérique), but he first undertook the challenge of taking a complete stage work and giving it new cinematic life in Mélo (1986), an adaptation of Henry Bernstein's 1929 play of the same name. Resnais remained entirely faithful to the play (apart from shortening it) and he emphasised its theatricality by filming in long takes on large sets of evidently artificial design, as well as by marking off the acts of the play with the fall of a curtain.[42] After an excursion into the world of comic-books and cartoons (another of Resnais's enthusiasms) in I Want to Go Home (1989), an ambitious theatrical adaptation followed with the diptych of Smoking/No Smoking (1993): Resnais, having admired the plays of Alan Ayckbourn for many years, chose to adapt what appeared the most intractable of them, Intimate Exchanges, a series of eight interlinked plays which follow the consequences of a casual choice to sixteen possible endings. Resnais slightly reduced the number of permuted endings and compressed the plays into two films, each having a common starting point, and to be seen in any order. Sabine Azéma and Pierre Arditi played all the parts, and the theatricality of the undertaking was again emphasised by the studio set designs for a fictional English village.[43] Resnais returned to Ayckbourn in the following decade for his adaptation of Private Fears in Public Places to which he gave the film title of Cœurs (2006). Among the stage/film effects which contribute to its mood of "cheerful desolation" is the artificial snow which is continually seen through set windows until eventually it falls on the studio interior as well.[44]
Speaking in 1986, Resnais said that he did not make a separation between cinema and theatre and refused to make enemies of them.[45] He preferred working with "people of the theatre", and he said that he would never want to film a novel.[46] It was therefore something of a departure when he chose L'Incident, a novel by Christian Gailly, as the basis for Les Herbes folles (Wild Grass) (2009). He explained however that what initially attracted him to the book was the quality of its dialogue, which he retained largely unchanged for the film. When Les Herbes folles was shown at the Cannes Film Festival, it was the occasion for a special jury award to Resnais "for his work and exceptional contribution to the history of cinema".[47]
In spring 2011 Resnais completed filming Vous n'avez encore rien vu, which again took the theatre as its theme and background, and was loosely based on Jean Anouilh's 1941 play Eurydice.[48][49] The film was shown in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.[50][51]
Resnais is often linked with the group of French filmmakers who made their breakthrough as the New Wave or nouvelle vague in the late 1950s, but by then he had already established a significant reputation through his ten years of work on documentary short films. He defined his own relationship by saying: "Although I was not fully part of the New Wave because of my age, there was some mutual sympathy and respect between myself and Rivette, Bazin, Demy, Truffaut... So I felt friendly with that team."[2] He nevertheless acknowledged his debt to the New Wave because it created the conditions of production, and particularly the financial conditions, which allowed him to make a film like Hiroshima mon amour, his first feature film.[52]
Resnais is more often associated with a 'Left Bank group' of writers and filmmakers who included Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet (with all of whom he collaborated in the earlier part of his career).[3] They were distinguished by their interests in documentary, left-wing politics, and the literary experiments of the nouveau roman.[53]
The importance of creative collaboration in Resnais's films has been noted by many commentators.[1][54] Unlike many of his contemporaries, he has always refused to write his own screenplays and has attached great importance to the contribution of his chosen writer, whose status in the shared "authorship" of the film he fully acknowledges.[55] He is also known to treat the completed screenplay with great fidelity, to the extent that some of his screenwriters have remarked on how closely the finished film has realised their intentions.[56]
Time and memory have regularly been identified as two of the principal themes of Resnais's work, at least in his earlier films.[6][57] He has however consistently tried to modify this view of his concerns: "I prefer to speak of the imaginary, or of consciousness. What interests me in the mind is that faculty we have to imagine what is going to happen in our heads, or to remember what has happened".[58] He has also described his films as an attempt, however imperfect, to approach the complexity of thought and its mechanism.[59]
Another view of the evolution of Resnais's career has seen him moving progressively away from a realistic treatment of 'big' subjects and overtly political themes towards films that are increasingly personal and playful.[60] Resnais himself has offered an explanation of this shift in terms of challenging what has been the norm in film-making at the time; having made his early films when escapist cinema was predominant, he has progressively felt the need to move away from exploration of social and political issues as that has itself become almost the norm in contemporary cinema. Experimentation with narrative forms and genre conventions has instead become a central focus of his films.[5][61]
A frequent criticism of Resnais's films among English-language commentators has been that they are emotionally cold; that they are all about technique without grasp of character or subject,[62] that his understanding of beauty is compromised by a lack of sensuousness,[63] and that his seriousness of intent fails to communicate itself to audiences.[64] Elsewhere however it is suggested that such views are partly based on a misreading of the films, especially his earlier ones, which has impeded an appreciation of the exhilarating humour and irony which pervade his work; and other viewers have been able to make the connection between the film's form and its human dimension.[65]
There is general agreement about Resnais's attachment to formalism in his approach to film; he himself regards it as the starting point of his work, and usually has an idea of a form, or method of construction, in his head even before the plot or the characters take shape.[66] For him it is also the basis for the communication of feeling: "There cannot be any communication except through form. If there is no form, you cannot create emotion in the spectator."[67]
Another term which appears in commentaries on Resnais throughout his career is "surrealism", from his documentary portrait of a library in Toute la mémoire du monde,[68] through the dreamlike innovations of Marienbad,[69] to the latterday playfulness of Les Herbes folles.[70] Resnais himself traced a link to his teenage discovery of surrealism in the works of André Breton: "I hope that I always remain faithful to André Breton who refused to suppose that imaginary life was not a part of real life".[71]
In 1969 Resnais married Florence Malraux (daughter of the French statesman and writer André Malraux); she was a regular member of his production team, working as assistant director on most of his films from 1961 to 1986. His second wife is Sabine Azéma, who acted in the majority of his films from 1983 onwards; they were married in the English town of Scarborough in 1998.[72]
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Persondata | |
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Name | Resnais, Alain |
Alternative names | |
Short description | French film director |
Date of birth | June 3, 1922 |
Place of birth | Vannes, Morbihan, Brittany, France |
Date of death | |
Place of death |