Alain Resnais

Private Fears in Public Places, (French: Cœurs (“Hearts”), is a 2006 French film directed by Alain Resnais. It was adapted from Alan Ayckbourn’s play Private Fears in Public Places. The film won several awards, including a Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

Synopsis:
In Paris, six people all look for love, despite typically having their romantic aspirations dashed at every turn.

For the second time in his career Alain Resnais turned to an Alan Ayckbourn play for his source material (having previously adapted another play for Smoking/No Smoking), and remained close to the original structure while transferring the setting and milieu from provincial England to the 13th arrondissement of Paris (contrary to his usual preference).Read More »

Quote:
“Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime,” which opened yesterday at the New Yorker Theater, was shown at the eighth New York Film Festival. The following is from Roger Greenspun’s review, which appeared Sept. 15, 1970, in The New York Times.

Like most of the previous films of Alain Resnais, “Je T’Aime, Je T’Aime” is science fiction of a sort. And like virtually all of Resnais’s previous films, its concern is for the past recaptured. To support this concern it proposes a story, the most fragmented of all Resnais’ stories, dealing with, perhaps intense but nevertheless transitory love affair.Read More »

Quote:
The role of the doctor in a factory. The investigations he makes to discover the origin of ailments which attack the workers in a large chemical factory.Read More »

A middle-aged political activist tries to dissuade his young followers from taking radical action.Read More »

This collaborative film, banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism (and now available only in shortened form), is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. Marker’s characteristically witty and thoughtful commentary is combined with images of a stark formal beauty in this passionate outcry against the fate of an art that was once integral to communal life but became debased as it fell victim to the demands of another culture.Read More »

Synopsis:
Director Alain Resnais’s STAVISKY… is a stylized recounting of the life of Alexandre Stavisky, a masterful swindler who sold thousands of worthless bonds, working his way into a massive financial hole and drowning in a riotous political scandal. The film focuses on his heyday, which came in the years just before his arrest and subsequent death in 1934. Surrounded by an aristocratic class of financiers who, like Stavisky, delighted in transferring enormous sums among a multitude of accounts around Europe, he was an expert at moving money. Stavisky inhabited the lavish wooden parlors and grandiose theaters of Paris, the ocean overpasses and casinos of Biarritz, with sexy cars, planes, and women to get him from place to place. Read More »

SYNOPSIS
On the eve of the First World War, a wealthy count, Forbek, builds a rocco pleasure dome in the French countryside. He invites his wife and his friends to live a life of idyllic seclusion inside the dome. In 1982, the same dome is the venue for a teaching seminar attended by a number of teachers with some radical ideas for educating children. Both Forbek and the seminar’s organisers are striving for similar things, the creation of a better world. Both are doomed to failure…
taken from here
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From beyond the grave, celebrated playwright Antoine d’Anthac gathers together all his friends who have appeared over the years in his play “Eurydice.” These actors watch a recording of the work performed by a young acting company, La Compagnie de la Colombe. Do love, life, death and love after death still have any place on a theater stage? It’s up to them to decide. And the surprises have only just begun…
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REVIEWS
Strictly Film School, by Acquarello
[…]They are kindred spirits, bound together by personal shame and guilt of survival, and an overwhelming sense that they can never go home again (as in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s White. It is through their affair that the memory of her beloved is reawakened. In essence, the architect is the catalyst: the receptive soul who guides her through the painful, introspective path that leads to closure.Read More »