French director Alain Resnais has died at the age 91.
His film career spanned more than 60 years
Alain Resnais’ producer, Jean-Louis Livi, confirmed the director died in Paris on Saturday.
He was often associated with French New Wave cinema but he also embraced modernism and surrealism.
Alain Resnais’ last film, The Life of Riley – based on an Alan Ayckbourn play – premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February 2014.
It was his third film based on Alan Ayckbourn’s work, and reflected the direction his interests took in using theatre as a basis for his films.
French President Francois Hollande said France had lost “one of its greatest filmmakers”.
Alain Resnais first drew attention with his documentary Night and Fog (1955), which focused on Nazi concentration camps.
His first feature film would also draw on the horrors of conflict, this time the Hiroshima atomic bomb for Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959).
In devising the film with novelist Marguerite Duras, he deduced that the sheer devastation caused by the attack could not be dramatized, so he used the theme of the impossibility of speaking about the event.
The film was nominated for a best-screenwriting Oscar and won a number of critics’ awards for best foreign film.
The film was brought under the umbrella of the emerging French New Wave, which also included directors Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, although Alain Resnais said he did not consider himself completely a part of the movement.
Alain Resnais won a number of awards at major film festivals.
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