Alain Resnais, 1922-2014

French director Alain Resnais died on Saturday aged 91. I have to admit that Resnais is one of those directors whose name I probably ought to know better, as I probably should have seen one or another of his filma along the way.

Of course, I may in fact have seen one. Resnais directed Night and Fog, a short documentary about the Holocaust which was one of the points of discussion in an introductory religion class I took my Freshman year of college. Since it's only a half-hour long and not a feature, we would have had time to watch the whole thing in one class, but I don't recall offhand whether or not we did.

I do know, however, that I haven't seen Hiroshima, mon amour or Last Year at Marienbad, two of his early features that are the sort of title I hear people who are big fans of French cinema bring up. I probably should have seen one or the other of them at some point, but there you are.

The upshot is I'm really not the person to be writing a post about Resnais, at least not a competent post about him. So I apologize for the brief nature of this particular obituary post, as compared to, say, the one I wrote on Shirley Temple.