French director Alain Resnais has died in Paris; he was 91 years old. The influential director was an important part of the French New Wave movement in the 1960s, as well as the subset of Left Bank films. His seminal 1959 film Hiroshima, Mon Amour starred Emmanuelle Riva as a French actress separating from a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada); in now-famous non-linear storytelling, they remember World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima.
He began his career in the 1950s making short film documentaries, like Night and Fog, which dealt with the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Resnais continued to make political films, including Muriel (1963) and The War is Over (1966), about the French-Algerian War and the Spanish Civil War, respectively. He was given the Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009 at the Cannes Film Festival.
Watch a clip from Hiroshima, Mon Amour below, and if you haven't seen it, get to it.
[via the Guardian]
