Alain Resnais

Business executive Odile seeks a new, larger apartment. Her younger sister Camille, having completed her doctoral thesis in history, is a Paris tour guide. Simon is a regular on Camille's tours as he's attracted to her. However, Camille has fallen for Marc, and they begin an affair. Nicolas is also looking for an apartment, since he hopes to eventually have his family join him in Paris.

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Two actors play eighteen different roles in a story that asks the question: would my life have been different if I had lit a cigarette?

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Two actors portray eighteen Yorkshire villagers, who offer several iterations of their lives depending on whether or not they lit a cigarette at a certain point in time.

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Two actors play eighteen different roles in a story that asks the question: would my life have been different if I hadn't lit a cigarette?

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Documentary about George Gershwin directed by Alain Resnais with various celebrities speaking on their admiration and affection for Gershwin's music.

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A compilation of 30 French filmmakers, Alain Resnais and Jean Luc Godard among them, who use film to make a plea on behalf of a political prisoner. Jean Luc Godard and Anne Marie Mieville's film concerns the plight of Thomas Wanggai, West Papuan activist who has since died in prison. The short films were commissioned by Amnesty International.

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Joey Wellman, an American cartoonist from Cleveland now largely forgotten at home, visits France with his partner Lena to attend an exhibition in Paris about the comic strip (bande dessinée) which features his work. He also hopes to be reconciled with his daughter Elsie who has been a student in Paris for two years, in flight from the American culture of which she sees her father as a typical example. Elsie is naively infatuated with French literature, and is trying to secure an introduction to the brilliant university professor Christian Gauthier, an expert on Flaubert but also an enthusiast for comic books. The meeting of father and daughter goes badly, but Elsie is persuaded to join Joey and Lena for the weekend at the country house of Gauthier's mother, Isabelle. During a comic-themed masquerade party, all of the characters are made to reconsider their present and past relationships.

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In 1920s Paris, violinists and lifelong friends Pierre Belcroix and Marcel Blanc are happy with their lives, although Marcel has become famous and Pierre has not. Pierre is married to Romaine, a stylish young flapper. However, Marcel meets and falls in love with her, which Marcel little suspects.

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Elisabeth and Simon have been deeply in love for two months when Simon momentarily dies, but returns to life. Despite declining further medical tests, the couple are forced to grapple with the possibility of his death. Eventually, they tell their close friends Jérôme and Judith Martignac about the event. The Martignacs are both clerics, and Judith has just been giving a funeral service for a villager who committed suicide, though Jérôme would have nothing to do with suicide...

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In this whimsical fable, Resnais deftly interweaves three story lines: the creation of an early-20th-century utopia; romantic high jinks at a school conference; and a fantasy sparked by F/X pioneer Georges Méliès.

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Professor Henri Laborit uses three people's stories to discuss behaviourist theories of survival, combat, rewards and punishment, and anxiety: René is a technical manager at a textile factory and must face the anxiety caused by corporate downsizing; Janine is a self-educated actress/stylist who learns that the wife of her lover is dying and must decide to let them reunite; and Jean is a controversial career-climbing writer/politician at a crossroads in life.

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On the eve of his 78th birthday, ailing, alcoholic writer Clive Langham spends a painful and sleepless night mentally composing and recomposing scenes for a novel in which characters based on his own family are shaped by his fantasies and memories, alongside his caustic commentary on their behaviour.

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Biarritz, 1933. Charm and talent assist small-time swindler Serge Alexandre, alias Stavisky, to bribe his way into the centre of French politics. But when his great scam involving millions is exposed, he brings the government to the verge of collapse and the country to the brink of civil war.

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A series of 43 documentary shorts, directed (without credit) by several famous French filmmakers and each running between two and four minutes. Each "tract" espouses a leftist political viewpoint through the filmed depiction of real-life events, including workers' strikes and the events of Paris in May '68.

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Recovering from an attempted suicide, a man is selected to participate in a time travel experiment that has only been tested on mice. A malfunction causes the man to experience moments from his past in a random order.

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In seven different parts, Godard, Ivens, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais, and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War.

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On his way from Madrid to Paris, Diego, a chief of the Spanish Communist Party, is arrested at the border for an ID check but manages to flee. When he arrives in Paris, he searches for one of his comrades to prevent him from going to Madrid where he could be arrested.

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In the seacoast town of Boulogne, antique furniture saleswoman Hélène lives with her stepson, Bernard, who's back from military duty in Algiers. An old lover of Hélène's comes to visit, Alphonse, with his niece Françoise; he too is back from Algiers, where he ran a café. Bernard speaks of his fiancée, Muriel, whom Hélène has not met. The past is obscured by guilt, misperceptions, and missed possibilities. Appearances deceive, things change. As Hélène and Alphonse try to sort out a renewal, everyone seems off-kilter just enough to hint that all cannot end well.

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At a weekend gathering, a man tells a woman that they had spent time there together a year prior. But, the woman has no recollection whatsoever and is convinced that he is simply fabricating the encounter. The more he speaks about their activities the previous year however, the more compelling he becomes. The question remains however – did they meet previously or not?

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The deep conversation between a Japanese architect and a French actress forms the basis of this celebrated French film, considered one of the vanguard productions of the French New Wave. Set in Hiroshima after the end of World War II, the couple -- lovers turned friends -- recount, over many hours, previous romances and life experiences. The two intertwine their stories about the past with pondering the devastation wrought by the atomic bomb dropped on the city.

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Le chant du Styrène is a 1958 French documentary film directed by Alain Resnais. The film was an order by French industrial group Pechiney to highlight the merits of plastics.

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A documentary film about occupational diseases shot in 1957 at the Francolor factory in Oissel. It takes the form of a scientific investigation to discover the origin of a mysterious illness that has infected a worker at the factory.

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A documentary about the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. It presents the building, with its processes of cataloguing and preserving all sorts of printed material, as both a monument of cultural memory and as a monstrous, alien being.

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Filmmaker Alain Resnais documents the atrocities behind the walls of Hitler's concentration camps.

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Commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine, this short documentary examines how African art is devalued and alienated through colonial and museum contexts. Beginning with the question of why African works are confined to ethnographic displays while Greek or Egyptian art is celebrated, the film became a landmark of anti-colonial cinema and was banned in France for eight years.

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Alain Resnais & Robert Hessen use the famous Picasso mural "Guernica" in combination with newspaper headlines in an anti-war cry against the Spanish Civil War. Narration by Jacques Pruvost highlights the Guernica atrocity of April 1937, followed by a poem by Paul Eluard read by María Casares to a discordant score by Guy Bernard.

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A documentary film directed by seven famous directors, and narrated by several famous Hollywood actors. The film attempts to give the general filmgoing public a taste of art history and art appreciation.

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A short documentary on Paul Gauguin, a French painter and sculptor.

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The biography of Dutch artist Van Gogh, illustrated only with images of his paintings and drawings, or details of those, and according dramatic musical score.

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Directed by Alain Resnais

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