Lynn A. Higgins 
Alain Resnais 
Interviews

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.

About the author

T. Jefferson Kline is professor emeritus of French at Boston University. He has written five books on French cinema, film, and intertextuality in screenplay. He is editor of Agnès Varda: Interviews and coeditor of Bertrand Tavernier: Interviews and Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews, all published by University Press of Mississippi.