[1] Resnais began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour (1959), Last Year at Marienbad (1961), and Muriel (1963), all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past.

He also established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers previously unconnected with the cinema such as Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Semprún and Jacques Sternberg.

[1][2][3][4] In later films, Resnais moved away from the overtly political topics of some previous works and developed his interests in an interaction between cinema and other cultural forms, including theatre, music, and comic books.

[13] Resnais left in 1945 to do his military service which took him to Germany and Austria with the occupying French forces, as well as making him a temporary member of a travelling theatre company, Les Arlequins.

Resnais continued to address artistic subjects in Gauguin (1950) and Guernica (1950), which examined the Picasso painting based on the 1937 bombing of the town, and presented it to the accompaniment of a text written by Paul Éluard.

[1][20] A different kind of collective memory was considered in Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), in which the seemingly endless spaces and bibliographic riches of the Bibliothèque nationale were explored in another compendium of long travelling shots.

In 1958 Resnais undertook a commission from the Pechiney company to make short film, in colour and wide-screen, extolling the merits of plastics, Le Chant du styrène.

[21] In his decade of making documentary short films, Resnais established his interest in and talent for collaboration with leading figures in other branches of the arts: with the painters who were the subjects of his early works; with writers (Eluard in Guernica, Cayrol in Nuit et Brouillard, Queneau in Le Chant du styrène); with musicians (Darius Milhaud in Gauguin, Hanns Eisler in Nuit et Brouillard, Pierre Barbaud in Le Chant du styrène); and with other filmmakers (Resnais was the editor of Agnès Varda's first film, La Pointe courte, and co-directed with Chris Marker Les statues meurent aussi).

The fragmented and shifting narrative presents three principal characters, a woman and two men, in the opulent setting of a grand European hotel or château where the possibility of a previous encounter a year ago is repeatedly asserted and questioned and contradicted.

[28] At the beginning of the 1960s France remained deeply divided by the Algerian War, and in 1960 the Manifesto of the 121, which protested against French military policy in Algeria, was signed by a group of leading intellectuals and artists who included Resnais.

[29] A contemporary political issue also formed the background for La guerre est finie (The War Is Over, 1966), this time the clandestine activities of left-wing opponents of the Franco government in Spain.

[34] Throughout the 1960s, Resnais was attached to direct an international production called Les Aventures de Harry Dickson, based on the stories by Jean Ray, with Anatole Dauman as producer.

He also published Repérages, a volume of his photographs, taken between 1948 and 1971, of locations in London, Scotland, Paris, Nevers, Lyon, New York and Hiroshima; Jorge Semprun wrote the introductory text.

After contributing an episode to L'An 01 (The Year 01) (1973), a collective film organised by Jacques Doillon, Resnais made a second collaboration with Jorge Semprun for Stavisky (1974), based on the life of the notorious financier and embezzler whose death in 1934 provoked a political scandal.

[38] With Providence (1977), Resnais made his first film in English, with a screenplay written by David Mercer, and a cast that included John Gielgud, Dirk Bogarde and Ellen Burstyn.

[5][42] In almost all of his remaining films he chose to work repeatedly with a core group of actors comprising Sabine Azéma, Pierre Arditi, and André Dussollier, sometimes accompanied by Fanny Ardant or Lambert Wilson.

He made Gershwin (1992), an innovative TV documentary in which the American composer's life and works were reviewed through the testimonies of performers and filmmakers, juxtaposed with commissioned paintings by Guy Peellaert.

[45] A long-neglected operetta from the 1920s was the unexpected basis for Resnais's next film Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips, 2003), in which he sought to reinvigorate an unfashionable form of entertainment by recreating its theatricality for the camera and entrusting most of its musical numbers to actors rather than to trained singers.

[46] There are many references to the theatre throughout Resnais's filmmaking (Marienbad, Muriel, Stavisky, Mon oncle d'Amérique), but he first undertook the challenge of taking a complete stage work and giving it new cinematic life in Mélo (1986), an adaptation of Henri Bernstein's 1929 play of the same name.

[55][56] Aimer, boire et chanter (2014) was the third film which Resnais adapted from a play by Alan Ayckbourn, in this case Life of Riley, in which three couples are thrown into confusion by the news that a shared friend has a terminal illness.

[59][60] Resnais was often linked with the group of French filmmakers who made their breakthrough as the New Wave or nouvelle vague in the late 1950s, but by then he had already established a significant reputation through his ten years of work on documentary short films.

[61] Resnais was more often associated with a "Left Bank" group of writers and filmmakers who included Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet (with all of whom he collaborated in the earlier part of his career).

[1][64] Unlike many of his contemporaries, he always refused to write his own screenplays and attached great importance to the contribution of his chosen writer, whose status in the shared "authorship" of the film he fully acknowledged.

[42][72] A frequent criticism of Resnais's films among English-language commentators has been that they are emotionally cold; that they are all about technique without grasp of character or subject,[73] that his understanding of beauty is compromised by a lack of sensuousness,[74] and that his seriousness of intent fails to communicate itself to audiences.

[76] There is general agreement about Resnais's attachment to formalism in his approach to film; he himself regarded it as the starting point of his work, and usually had an idea of a form, or method of construction, in his head even before the plot or the characters took shape.

"[78] Another term which appears in commentaries on Resnais throughout his career is "surrealism", from his documentary portrait of a library in Toute la mémoire du monde,[79] through the dreamlike innovations of Marienbad,[80] to the latterday playfulness of Les Herbes folles.