Alain Resnais

Interviews

Lynn A. Higgins

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496833952
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Among the most innovative and influential filmmakers of the twentieth century, Alain Resnais (1922–2014) did not originally set out to become a director. He trained as an actor and film editor and, during the sixty-eight years of his working life, delved into virtually every corner of filmmaking, working at one time or another as screenwriter, assistant director, camera operator and cinematographer, special effects coordinator, technical consultant, and even author of source material. From such award-winning documentaries as Van Gogh and Night and Fog to the groundbreaking dramas Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, and Muriel, Resnais's films experiment with such themes as consciousness, memory, and the imagination. Distinguishing himself from associations with the French New Wave movement, Resnais considered his films to be "anti-illusionist, " never allowing his spectators to forget they were watching a work of art. In Alain Resnais: Interviews, editor Lynn A. Higgins collects twenty-one interviews with the filmmaker, twelve of which are translated into English for the first time. Spanning his entire career from his early short subjects to his final feature film, the volume highlights Resnais's creative strategies and principles, illuminates his place in world cinema history, and situates his work relative to the New Wave, American film, and experimental filmmaking more broadly. Like his films, the interviews collected here reveal a creator who is at once an intellectual, a philosopher, an entertainer, a craftsman, and an artist.

When the Cinema Emerged from Its Shell: An Interview with Alain Resnais

Jean-Daniel Roob / 1986

In Alain Resnais (Lyon: La Manufacture, 1986), 103ff. Reprinted by permission. Translated by T. Jefferson Kline.

AR: If cinema didn’t “speak” from its inception, it was only because of a set of economic and technical circumstances. I’m entirely convinced that the first idea that its inventors had was the possibility of connecting words and images. There’s a story that when Thomas Edison returned from a trip he’d made, he was met by his students in his office with an image projected on a screen of one of his students saying, “Hello, Mr. Edison!” I imagine that the students had succeeded in synchronizing the film projection with a roll of wax on which his voice had been recorded. Why didn’t the cinema from its very invention develop in this way? It seems to me that these things should work in the same way nature does. Why, for example, out of the thousand upon thousands of possible combinations did the hermit crab emerge as a kind of lobster without a shell? That’s a very perverse kind of tinkering! Well, this hermit crab had the intelligence to see that if there was an empty shell around, he could take up residence in it and therein be protected. And so he survived! So should we say that he was handicapped? He must now be in his nth year of existence and he’s still here. That’s all I have to say about that. Now let’s take film directors, cameramen, and actors; they made such a beautiful thing of silent film that it served their needs quite beautifully.

If we wanted to playfully rewrite history, we could say that the talkies arrived ten years too early, since by 1929, they’d so perfected their audience’s perceptions and appreciation of their “language” that it was a shame to abandon it! But it was inevitable.

J-DR: I sense in your delightful way of evoking silent films that not only did you love them, but that you would have wanted to make some. You only missed this opportunity by a few years, as you say.

AR: Well, I hadn’t really expected to make any films at all … I really didn’t anticipate doing so.

J-DR: But I thought you shot a version of Fantômas in 8mm film when you were thirteen, with the kids from Vannes as actors. Or is that a myth?

AR: No, it’s true. But my critical faculties forbade me from continuing such an experiment. It’s really too bad since I could have produced some monstrosities that would have been fun to look at now. Yes, it could have been quite funny …

J-DR: So here’s Alain Renais, whom nothing destined to be a film director, except his solitary rise toward a career he found irresistible. Resnais, whose career describes an exemplary journey of love and respect for his art, never imagined making films! That’s pretty surprising.

How does he explain that he was able to develop simultaneously his love of silent films and his love of theatrical language?

AR: Well, it’s this way … What I want to say is … I always feel quite awkward in these interviews. Milan Kundera, with whom I’m working at the moment, told me, “In any case, Alain, you can’t avoid it. Either you begin by saying, ‘I’ve already said this in an interview’ and that’s very pretentious because it assumes that people have read everything you’ve said, and remember it, or else you say nothing and you repeat the same broken record ten times and they’ll say, ‘Oh, he’s gone senile.’” And then it’s not good to treat oneself as an object. As for me, if I stop to look at what I’m doing, I can’t go on. When I’m shooting, it’s very difficult for me to accept a presence … it’s very mysterious!

J-DR: I would have liked to penetrate this mystery a bit.

AR: I’m always afraid of violating a film by speaking about it before it’s finished. For example, as a filmgoer, I hate 99 percent of the previews that are shown for new films. When I see them come up in a movie theater, I try to close my eyes and block my ears in order to keep them from ruining the pleasure that I’ll look forward to when I see the film. I think movie directors ought to be able to keep these previews to a minimum. I loved the time when movie directors were satisfied just to make films. Before the war, there were no declarations by … I don’t know … Jean Renoir, Carné, Duvivier, René Clair, Grémillion … just to mention some French directors.

J-DR: But even the ones you mention made up for it later.

AR: Yes, and how! Mind you, we shouldn’t get all nostalgic about the prewar years, when you consider that movies were made mostly for illiterates. No one thought that these people could be considered normal human beings. Especially the Americans. Everyone thought that American directors were barbarians. Someone once told me, “You know, they have Impressionist paintings on their walls.” What? Paintings? They know what paintings are? I remember that at the Cannes festival in 1948 or 1949 you could count on creating a laugh riot if you claimed that Gene Kelly or Stanley Donen were cultivated people and had good taste. This prejudice lasted a long time. But now, happily, it’s over.

My love of the theater came later, because I grew up in Brittany and I saw only horrible plays that were “classics.” I even developed a furious hatred for classic scenery.

J-DR: But there must have been theater festivals or tours by companies like Kessenty’s.

AR: Well, Barret’s company did tours, but I didn’t go to see them. They were for kids. And in any case, they didn’t come to Vannes. The theater in Vannes was in such ruins that people brought garden chairs to sit in, and took the precaution to bring covers and umbrellas since the roof was so bad that rain fell directly into the hall. The entrance was very strange. In this little street, there were two porches that, from the outside, appeared to be identical; one led to the theater, the other to the urinals.

J-DR: In such conditions, these aren’t the light perfumes of your nascent vocation that dominate. So you had to wait until you could visit your grandfather in Paris to go to the theater and discover the power of Giraudoux’s The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, with Jouvet in the leading role, The Sea Gull starring Pitoëff, and such actors as Dullin, Guitry, and Claude Dauphin in Bernstein’s Hope.

AR: It was a shocking discovery. I immediately became a fanatical theatergoer, but by this time, the cinema had become the talkies. It had happened. I’d accepted it as soon as I saw René Clair’s Le Million and A Nous la Liberté.

J-DR: That is, from the moment René Clair accepted sound film.

AR: Yes. Chaplin was the only holdout. But I was already 100 percent enthusiastic about it. I didn’t miss the piano player who accompanied the images or the pot-pourri of an orchestra, or the ridiculous records that were played.

J-DR: But if my math is right, you were still pretty young at that point: Clair’s Le Million was released in 1931, so you were only nine …

AR: You know, Brittany is a kind of island, at kind of the ends of the Earth from Paris, so we didn’t see any sound films until four or five years after they were introduced.

J-DR: You were a great fan of the ciné-clubs in your adolescence, and that’s where you learned to watch films before undertaking them yourself, if we exclude your first childish attempts at it. If filmmakers had refused to discuss their films, they would have rendered the ciné-clubs orphans, abandoned to various speculators. You would have been very disappointed …

AR: Not really. The filmmakers didn’t come as far as Brittany. The ciné-clubs belonged to amateurs. Then, in Paris, I went to the Ursulines and discovered another kind of film, as Cocteau’s articles on film invited us to do. Langlois did a few minutes of introduction to each showing. It was particularly enthralling, moreover, since he never finished his sentences and … it was amazing! But at that time, we never saw any filmmakers. I’m not saying I approve of their silence. It was a question of equilibrium.

J-DR: And to what do you attribute the erosion of this equilibrium?

AR: I think it was essentially a question of economics. The price of film tickets never followed the rate of inflation. A ticket should cost 120 FF, but it’s only 30 to 35 FF. To take out an ad in France-Soir or another paper would cost I don’t know how many thousands of francs. You simply couldn’t make it if you risked this kind of money on publicity even if you sell lots of 30-franc tickets. So you send the director and some actors to the theater.

J-DR: Well, I guess that’s what’s called after-sale services!

AR: Sure, because that way you get two or three columns of free publicity. The producers tell us: “Don’t worry about what you’re going to say, it’s not important. People will see the name of the film. That replaces the advertising I’d have had to put in Le Figaro, Le Matin, Libération … I don’t have other means of promoting the film.” OK, but now we’re running in circles. We all say the same thing. Evidently, François Truffaut gave wonderful interviews, but that’s very rare.

J-DR: As for me, I’m not convinced—that’s a euphemism—that one of Alain Resnais’s presentations on TV would be so bad. But he wouldn’t like doing it, so that’s good enough reason not to do it. So what do you think about the evolution of publicity of the type that we see emerging now?

AR: Well, you can’t help noticing that today’s ads have taken a very aggressive turn. They don’t brag about their products any more; they unsettle us, and want to engage us in a dialogue, no matter what the product. They try to surprise us, to amuse us and to speak in very familiar tones to the passers-by.

J-DR: A typical example of what you’re describing is the advertising that accompanied Bertrand Blier’s film Tenue de soirée [Ménage, 1986]. Almost as large as the print of the film’s title, we see at the top of the poster, the hook, “Bitchin’ Film!” But good taste no longer seems to be a criterion for doing publicity.

AR: I think, based on what I’ve heard, that Bertrand Blier wasn’t very happy about this promotion. But there was nothing he could do about it. In the film director’s contract, it is generally specified that he has no right of veto. You can ask that they show you the publicity, but you can’t stop it.

J-DR: So how do you feel about this?

AR: Well, it’s pretty complicated. Because if the director had this right, he would be able, in certain cases, to block the release of his film. He could blackmail his producer. You see, that wouldn’t be good. So you can always say, “If you’re not happy, produce your films yourself.” It’s stupid to beat up on producers blindly.

J-DR: Did that job ever interest you?

AR: To be a producer? It’s a colossal amount of work. It already takes a huge amount of time to take care of the scenario, the actors, the shooting, the editing, et cetera. So if on top of all that, you had, after you left the set, to have dinner with foreign distributors, which happens a lot, and then do your accounting when you got home … You’d have to have the courage and taste for it.

J-DR: So you never thought of being a producer, but did you ever want to be an actor?

AR: An actor? Yes, I’ve done some acting, like everybody else. At eighteen … It was more the smell of the stage and the taste for spectacle that attracted me. It wasn’t so much the acting itself, but being a member of the troupe. I really didn’t have the true vocation. But speaking objectively, I wasn’t always bad. The drama of it was that I didn’t seem to have the instinct for which button to push. But when I was bad, it was abominable, and I really felt it. Afterwards I’d experience nights of despair and anguish. It was horrible. When you know you’re going to have to do a scene, even in a theater course, after 11 a.m. you get into a crazy state. Stage fright takes over. You don’t know if it’s going to turn out well or badly, and you don’t really know what you need to do to make it work. Maybe if I’d found some way of helping myself … But no, I don’t think I had the temperament for it, in any case.

J-DR: Florence Malraux once said, “Alain an actor? I can’t imagine that he’d ever have been good at it. He has neither the qualities nor the defects necessary for it. He’s horrified of appearing in public. He’s very uneasy if has to stand up and speak into a microphone. He can’t stand being in front of a camera. He’s never accepted to appear on television because of that. You see, this is not exactly the behavior of a man who was destined to be an actor.” So you hate appearing on TV, but have you ever been tempted to work for television?

AR: Working for television comes down to making a film, but four times faster.

J-DR: Yes, but I was thinking about your project for The Adventures of Harry Dickson that required a three hour projection, what Americans call a miniseries. Television was the only way you could produce it.

AR: I got some proposals for it, but the budgets were so much lower than film budgets that I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off. When I was in America, I proposed a film of Conan to a producer. He told me it was madness; that it would never succeed. But he was thinking of it as a low-budget series and I wanted to do a big-budget production. Because that was the only way to attract a large audience. At that time, Spielberg hadn’t yet made his first film. If you made a film in fifteen days using painted sets, there’s not much chance you’re going to attract an audience.

J-DR: So, d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chronology
• Filmography
• A Stoic Filmmaker: Interview with Alain Resnais
• Trying to Understand My Own Film
• Interview with Alain Resnais: The War Is Over
• Alain Resnais, Antidoctrinary
• Interview with Alain Resnais
• Memories of Resnais
• Conversations with Resnais: There Isn’t Enough Time
• Facts into Fiction: An Interview with Alain Resnais
• Interview with Alain Resnais: On Mon Oncle d’Amérique
• Of Mice and Men: An Interview with Alain Resnais
• Interview with Alain Resnais: on L’Amour à mort
• Tracking Some Angles: A Talk with Alain Resnais
• When the Cinema Emerged from Its Shell: An Interview with Alain Resnais
• Interview with Alain Resnais: On Mélo
• Interview with Alain Resnais
• Alain Resnais: On The Same Old Song
• Alain Resnais’s Not on the Lips
• A Conversation with Alain Resnais: A Persistent Shadow
• An Auteur in Spite of Himself: An Interview with Alain Resnais
• A Conversation with Alain Resnais on You Ain’t Seen Nothin Yet
• A Conversation with Alain Resnais on The Life of Riley
• Additional Resources
• About the Editor