SYNOPSIS
In a large international hotel, with a sumptuous but austere décor – a marble universe with gold paneling, statues and stiff servants – the rich, anonymous, idle clientele circulates observing, seriously but without passion, the strict laws of the game of chance, of dance, of wordly conversation or of pistol shots…
Awards
Golden Lion | Venice IFF, Italy, 1961
Critics Award | French Syndicate of Cinema Critics, France, 1962
CAST & CREW
Alain Resnais
Director
Producer(s)
Pierre Courau, Anatole Dauman, Raymond Froment
Script
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Director of Photography
Sacha Vierny
Production designer
Jacques Saulnier
Music by
Francis Seyrig
Sound
Jean Nény
Edit
Jasmine Chasney, Henri Colpi
Cast
Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff
Production company(ies)
Terra Film, Cormoran Films, Precitel, Como-Film, Argos Films, Les Films Tamara, Cinétel, Silver Films, Cineriz
Alain Resnais
(1922 - 2014) French film director whose career 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 Night and Fog (1955), an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. Resnais began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Muriel (1963) and The War Is Over (1966), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past. 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. His films frequently explore the relationship between consciousness, memory, and the imagination, and he was noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives. Throughout his career, he won many awards from international film festivals and academies.
Filmography
L'aventure de Guy (short, 1936), Schéma d'une identification (1946), Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (1946), Visite à Oscar Dominguez (doc., 1947), Visite à Lucien Coutaud (1947), Visite à Hans Hartung (1947), Visite à Félix Labisse (1947), Visite à César Doméla (1947), Portrait d'Henri Goetz (1947), Le lait Nestlé (1947), La bague (1947), L'alcool tue (shoert, 1947), Journée naturelle (1947), Van Gogh (1948, doc.), Malfray (doc., 1948), Les Jardins de Paris (short, 1948), Châteaux de France (1948), Guernica (short, 1950), Gauguin (short, 1950), Pictura (segment Goya, doc., 1951), Statues also Die (doc., 1953), Night and Fog (doc., 1955), Toute la mémoire du monde (doc., 1956), Le mystère de l'atelier quinze (short, 1957), Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959), Le chant du Styrène (doc., 1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), Muriel, or The Time of Return (1963), The War Is Over (1966), Far from Vietnam (segment Claude Ridder, doc., 1967), Je t'aime je t'aime (1968), The Year 01 (Séquence de New York, 1973), Stavisky... (1974), Providence (1977), My American Uncle (1980), Life Is a Bed of Roses/La Vie est un roman (1983), Love unto Death (1984), Mélo (1986), I Want to Go Home (1989), Lest We Forget (segment Pour Esteban Gonzalez Gonzalez, Cuba, 1991), Gershwin (TV, 1992), Smoking/No Smoking (1993), Same Old Song (1997), Not on the Lips (2003), Private Fears in Public Places/Coeurs (2006), Wild Grass (2009), You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet (2012), Life of Riley/Aimer, boire et chanter (2014).
