Icarus Films announced this past week that new 2K film restorations of five of Alain Resnais early short films will available on Blu-ray and DVD this coming Mar. 22.
Titled simply, Alain Resnais: Five Short Films, Icarus could have easily embellished it with “Five Brilliant Short Films” or “Five Award-Winning Short Films,” but the name of fame French filmmaker Alain Resnais and “Short Films” is more than ample for cinephiles, film buffs and lovers of the cinema in general.
Resnais found himself in Paris during the German occupation and was in the right place at the right time to become an early student at the newly formed Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinématographiques, where he studied film editing. Other famous alumni of the film school include the likes of Louis Malle, Costa Gavras and Claude Marie Sautet.
Following a tour of duty, he returned to Paris and in the immediate post-war period began making the first of his famous short films — it would be a decade before he would venture into feature-length filmmaking, and when he did, his very first film was a masterpiece, Hiroshima Mon Amour, which was followed by Last Year at Marienbad, Je t'aime, Je t'aime, My American Uncle and more.
The focus of this collection from Icarus Films is on the post-war to 1958 and his work in film editing and documentary filmmaking. The first of these from the period that is featured in this collection is titled Van Gogh, which had its premiere at the Venice Film Festival in September of 1948 and found its way to the United States the following year and was nominated for Best Short Film … and won the Oscar!!
Simple, eloquent, Van Gogh is the story of the famous Dutch Post-Impressionist painter as told with just his works and music, with narration by French actor Claude Dauphin (Is Paris Burning?, Grand Prix, Phantom of the Rue Morgue … as the “President of Earth” in Roger Vadim’s Barbarella).
Next are two, which were likely filmed and edited in 1949, but did not find distribution until 1950 and 1951 respectively. These are, Gauguin (narration by Jean Servais) and Guernica (co-directed by Robert Hessens) … again the theme was the art world, with Gauguin looking at the life and works of French Post-Impressionist artist, Paul Gauguin, and Guernica at the reaction of Pablo Picasso to Spanish Civil War massacre in the Basque town of Guernica during the spring of 1937.
From 1956, we have All the Memory in the World, which was screened at the Cannes Film Festival in 1957, narration is by Jacques Dumesnil (perhaps best remembered as Jean in Jacques Daroy’s Rumors) and the subject is Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale.
And rounding out this stunning collection of Alain Resnais short-film works is his 1957 film, The Song of the Styerne. The manufacturing of plastics goes from the mundane to the surreal in this short film, which features narration by Pierre Dux (Shadow and Light, Z), which was delivered in 12-syllable iambic verse known as Alexandrine (example, from Hardy’s “The Convergence of the Twain” … “Cold currents thrid, and turn to rhythmic tidal lyres” or “In shadowy silent distance grew the Iceberg too” … or Shelley’s “To a Skylark,” “Like an unbodied joy whose race is just begun”).
Alain Resnais: Five Short Films is presented in French with English subtitles.
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