"The image is always in the present tense." -Alain Robbe-Grillet, author, Last Year at MarienbadAlain Resnais has been making films for over fifty years but he has never grown old. Rather, as Molly Haskell once observed, "There is something perennially newborn about Resnais." The young director who in the 1960s personified the Left Bank "intellectual" branch of the French New Wave, and whom Georges Sadoul described as "exacting, thorough, obsessed with themes of time and memory," is now called in Variety "one of international cinema's most playful and innovative elder statesmen." Viewing his films together, as we have a rare opportunity to do, we can see that Resnais's contribution to modernism is that he always played with cinema, and so transformed it.Resnais's obsession with time, memory, and how the past lives in the present can be traced in the hauntingly beautiful montages, searching camera, and musical language of his best-known films-Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad-and the too-little-known Muriel and Je t'aime, je t'aime, all collaborations with major writers. But what was Marienbad but a giant gameboard? With Mon Oncle d'Amérique Resnais began to make the game-"to allow theory and fiction to coexist on the screen"-more explicit, and by Mélo and Same Old Song, the first-rate cast who were becoming his stock company were playing along with him. Perhaps more than anything, Resnais's films are a reminder of what film can be. His career has been an extraordinary adventure in the cinema of ideas, and in the idea of cinema.Program notes by Judy Bloch.This tribute to Alain Resnais is a touring series organized by Gwen Deglise of The American Cinematheque in Los Angeles, with the generous cooperation of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris (MAE), and the Harvard Film Archive. We thank Cultural Attaché Emmanuel Delloye of the San Francisco Consulate General of France in San Francisco for his assistance and support.FRIDAY MAY 19, 2000