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ALAIN RESNAIS A DECADE IN FILM
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Our Price: $49.95
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A selection of four 1980s films from the director of Last Year at Marienbad. Includes: Life Is a Bed of Roses (La Vie Est un Roman, 1983, 110 mins.), in which Resnais pays tribute to three influenti al French filmmakers--Georges Melies, Marcel L'Herbier, and Eric Rohmer--with a lighthearted film about happiness and the power of the imagination. Set in a chateau that was dedicated to happiness in the 1920s and has since become a progressive school, the film weaves together three stories that shift betwee n the past, present, and the imagined, creating a compelling and entertaining mixture of drama, satire, comedy, fantasy, and music. Love Unto Death (L'Amour a Mort, 1984, 92 mins.) is bleak and anguishing drama that explores themes of love and death. Pierre Arditi and Sabina Azema star as Simon and Elizabeth, an affectionate couple that lives happily in love until Simon experiences a sudden and seemingly fatal seizure. Resnais dresses his lead actors in symbolic colors and uses musical interludes (by Hans Werner Henze) and other formal devices to press his philosophical themes. Melo (1986, 112 mins.), adapted from a 1929 play by Henry Bernstein, tells the story of two lifelong friends and violinists, Marcel and Pierre. When Marcel goes on to stardom, Pierre settles into a contented family life unaware that his wife is sleeping with Marcel. Plagued by guilt, Pierre's wife eventua
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HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR
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Our Price: $39.95
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A high water mark for the French New Wave. From the beginning, in which the love-making of a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) is intercut with newsreel footage of Hiroshima's atomic holocaust and its aftermath, to the couple's painful walk through the reconstructed city, Alain Resnais' film recaptures both the pain and the richness of the war. In French with English subtitles. Alain Resnais---France---1959---91 mins.
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I WANT TO GO HOME
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Our Price: $29.95
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French director Alain Resnais paired with American writer Jules Feiffer (Carnal Knowledge) for this satire of French and Yankee culture. An American cartoonist (Adolph Green) travels to Paris to attend a comic-strip exhibition, but the trip is actually an excuse for him to reconcile with his estranged daughter, a student at the Sorbonne. Experiencing immense culture shock, the American wants to go home until he meets his daughter's professor (Gerard Depardieu). A fan of the cartoonist's work, the professor invites them all to his mother's country house where hilarity results. Also stars Linda Lavin and Laura Benson. In French with English subtitles. Alain Resnais---France/Italy---1989---101 mins.
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LA GUERRE EST FINIE
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Our Price: $24.99
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This great film by Alain Resnais, scripted by Jorge Semprun, stars Yves Montand, Genevieve Bujold, Ingrid Thulin and Michel Piccoli. Resnais shifts between reality and Montand's mental states in an incisive portrait of an aging Spanish revolutionary exile who is imprisoned by his past as he confronts the failure of his ideas. Resnais explores Montand's insecurities through his relationships with two very different women (Thulin and Bujold). Alain Resnais---France---1966---120 mins.
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LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
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Our Price: $39.95
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The strange geometry of a romantic triangle marks the beginning of this elegant, labyrinthine puzzle by Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Mon Amour).
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LIFE IS A BED OF ROSES/ LA VIE
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Our Price: $29.95
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Alain Resnais pays tribute to three influential French filmmakers--Georges Melies, Marcel L'Herbier, and Eric Rohmer--with this lighthearted film about happiness and the power of the imagination. Set in a chateau that was dedicated to happiness in the 1920s and has since become a progressive school, the film weaves together three stories that shift between the past, present, and the imagined, creating a compelling and entertaining mixture of drama, satire, comedy, fantasy, and music. In French with English subtitles. Alain Resnais---France---1983---110 mins.
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LOVE UNTO DEATH
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Our Price: $29.95
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Acclaimed director Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour) explores themes of love and death in this bleak and anguishing drama. Pierre Arditi and Sabina Azema (both of La Vie Est un Roman) star as Simon and Elizabeth, an affectionate couple that lives happily in love until Simon experiences a sudden and seemingly fatal seizure. When he revives miraculously, Simon grows increasingly obsessed with his brush with death until another seizure ends his life. Resnais dresses his lead actors in symbolic colors and uses musical interludes (by Hans Werner Henze) and other formal devices to press his philosophical themes. The result is an underrated accomplishment from one of cinema's most talented directors. In French with English subtitles. Alain Resnais---France---1984---92 mins.
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MELO
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Our Price: $29.95
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Adapted from a 1929 play by Henry Bernstein, Melo marked the first time that director Alain Resnais had ever handled his own screenplay. The film tells the story of two lifelong friends and violinists, Marcel and Pierre. When Marcel goes on to stardom, Pierre settles into a contented family life unaware that his wife is sleeping with Marcel. Plagued by guilt, Pierre's wife eventually takes deadly measures to end the affair. "An incomparable masterpiece" (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader). In French with Alain Resnais---France---1986---112 mins.
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MON ONCLE D'AMERIQUE (MY AMERICAN UNCLE)
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Our Price: $19.95
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Long out of print, good luck trying to find a new copy of Alain Resnais' Oscar-nominated psychodrama for under $20 online. Gerard Depardieu stars.
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MURIEL (RESNAIS)
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Our Price: $24.98
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No less hauntingly beautiful than Last Year at Marienbad or Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Alain Resnais's departure in Muriel ou le Temp s d'un Retour was to politicize the literal story. In this case, an inciden t from provincial life involving the reunion of a middle-aged widow with an old love, and her son's anguish over torturing and murdering a woman, Muriel, during the Algerian War. Out of the trivia of everyday life and its anxieties, the director creates a mosaic that probes the relationship between personal conscience and public consciousness, as well as themes of time and memory characteristic to his work. "Muriel approaches the cinema of pure association and is clearly Resnais's greatest work" (David Cook, A History of Narrative Film). With Delphine Seyrig, Jean-Pierre Kerien, Nita Klei n, and Jean-Baptiste Thierree. Cinematography by Sacha Vierny and music by Hans
Alain Resnais---France---1963---116 mins.
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NIGHT AND FOG
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Our Price: $14.95
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Alain Resnais' searing, unforgettable film on Nazi concentration camps is a devastating record of man's inhumanity, playing like a collective, haunted memory.
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PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES
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Our Price: $24.95
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Challenging nouvelle vague director Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) toys with melodramatic form and artifice in this adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn's play about six strangers searching for love in the snowy streets of Paris. "Resnais's mastery shows how avant-garde the movie equivalent of a well-made play can be...resembles a Vincente Minnelli musical with the songs elided" (Village Voice). The stellar cast includes Sabine Azema, Isabelle Carre, Laura Morante, Lambert Wilson, Andre Dussollier, and Pierre Arditi. Resnais won the Silver Lion for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival. Also known as Coeurs. In French with English subtitles. Alain Resnais---France---2006---121 mins.
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SAME OLD SONG
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Our Price: $29.95
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With Same Old Song, the great French director Alain Resnais made one of the most playful films of his career, but one that is no less striking or thought-provoking than his more overtly serious work. Paying tribute to Dennis Potter (The Singing Detective), this musical comedy has characters lip-synch to recordings of famous French pop songs as they become caught in a web of romantic confusion. "Light and vivacious on the surface, but with a subtle undercurrent of melancholy...The City of Light has never seemed more illusional, as the rise and fall of apartment blocks and whole neighborhoods parallel the amorous entanglements of these characters" (New York Film Festival Program). In French with English subtitles. Alain Resnais---France---1997---120 mins.
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SMOKING - NO SMOKING
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Our Price: $89.95
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These two feature-length films, typically shown in tandem, were conceived by Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad) and adapted from a set of dramatic works by Alan Ayckbourn. Formally rigorous but light-hearted in spirit, the films chart the personal trajectories of three women (all played by Sabine Azema) and three men (all played by Pierre Arditi). In Smoking, a housewife decides one morning to smoke a single cigarette; in Non Smoking she does not. Resnais shows the consequences through scenes that elapse at regular intervals in the future--five seconds, then five days, five weeks, and five years. The variables that occur at each juncture lead to a total of twelve conceivable conclusions. "Brilliant, ingenious, hilarious" (Susan Sontag, Artforum). In French WITHOUT English subtitles. Alain Resnais---France---1993---298 mins.
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WILD GRASS
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Our Price: $28.95
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In this brilliant, mad comedy from the great Alain Resnais, a middle-aged woman named Marguerite (Sabine Azema) has her purse stolen on the street. When Georges (Andre Dussollier), a middle-aged married man, stumbles upon her wallet by accident, he becomes more and more obsessed with its attractive owner. "Wild Grass is carefree and anarchic, takes bold risks, spins in unexpected directions...a young man's film made with a lifetime of experience" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times). Based on Christian Gailly's novel The Incident. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at Cannes. In French with English subtitles.
Alain Resnais---France---2009---104 mins.
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