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Wednesday, 19 May 2010

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Film Appreciation with K S Sivakumaran :

French director Alain Resnais



Alain Resnais

This week we shall see how I appreciated some of the films of one of the great masters of the international cinema. He is a Frenchman and his name Alain Resnais. When the European Cinema was flourishing with the advent of the French “New Wave” in the late 1950s, this film maker and film critic too came into prominence Black and White pictures were the order of the day and films in colour were a rare phenomenon.

Among Resnais films a few were noteworthy: Hiroshima, My Love and Last Year at Marienbad. These two films I had seen in the 16 mm version some 50 years ago at the screenings at Lionel Wendt theatre- courtesy the Colombo Film Society. However two years ago I saw a few more films of his in a Retrospective at the Kerala International Film Festival.

The purpose of this piece is to inform the younger generation that may have not heard of either Alain Resnais or his films. We as young readers were aware of his films and films by other great directors through our reading of high quality journals like the Sight and Sound and Film and Filming, just to mention a few journals.

Since most of our readers might not have seen these films for them to judge whether my appreciation of such films could be of any interest to them, I shall briefly tell the storyline of only one of the films this week so that if they happen to see this film at some point or the other they may have their own interpretation.

Let’s begin with Last Year at Marienbad. As some of our well read readers would know Alain-Robbe-Grillet is a famous writer in French. It was he who wrote the screenplay for this film Nevertheless the film was not easily understood by many at that time. It was a puzzle. And intriguing.

In a place called Marienbad a man had an affair with a woman in the previous year and was trying to woo her again. But the strange thing is that she does not remember him nor the affair or it maybe that she pretends to not knowing about the affair. The man tries to convince their affair, but she doesn’t respond. She had a lover already and told him then that she could not go with him, but promised to be with him in the following year. Such affairs as our conservative readers would say are unethical or immoral. But in the western society such escapades are quite common.

The heroine is then shown at a different time at a different place. This makes the audience bewildered. And so is the hero. He is not sure whether he had an affair with that woman at all in the previous year. Was it a fantasy or mixing up of time or an experimentation of the new wave trend?” I wouldn’t know then, but eminent film critics have “read” the film differently.

Perhaps you too would. I enjoyed the film as an adolescent for the so-called love affair.

sivakumaran.ks@ gmail.com

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