Alain Resnais

Alain Resnais trained as a film editor in the mid-1940s, then spent a decade directing short films before Night and Fog in 1956 — a documentary about Nazi concentration camps that became a reference point for how to show atrocity. He moved to features in the late 1950s, pulling in novelists like Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet who'd never written for cinema, and together they built Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel, and Je t'aime, je t'aime — films that cracked open chronology and made troubled memory the architecture. Linked to the Left Bank group more than the New…