Pera Film

Alain Resnais
Enigma, Image and Memory

1 – 30 December 2012

I'm always in search of special nonrealistic language that has musicality.

Pera Film, in collaboration with Institut Français continues its homage to French Masters with Alain Resnais: Enigma, Image and Memory, a program saluting Resnais’s (b.1922) career spanning more than fifty years of filmmaking. The program celebrates Resnais’s 90^th birthday with his landmark feature films as well as his shorts.

While a seminal figure of the French New Wave, Alain Resnais was not, like so many of his contemporaries, an alumnus of the film journal Cahiers du Cinema. In fact, he existed well outside of the sphere of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette, with a dedication to formalism, modernist concerns, and social and political issues not found in the work of his fellow innovators. Focusing repeatedly on themes of time and memory, Resnais drew from the well of serious literature to offer a singular philosophical and artistic vantage point, employing enigmatic narrative structures, lush cinematography, and lyrical editing patterns to create some of the most provocative and controversial work of the period.

in collaboration.