"If short films didn’t exist, Alain Resnais would have surely invented them." (Jean-Luc Godard) 

Known mainly for his features, Alain Resnais directed over twenty short films throughout his career. The most important ones were made from 1947 to 1956, in a prelude to the Nouvelle Vague, and comprise an excellent introduction to Resnaisian cinema, foreshadowing some of the central themes of his filmography, as well as his film writing style, both sober and poetic.

Among his first shorts, two are portraits of painters captured through their work (“Van Gogh”, 1947, and “Paul Gauguin”, 1950); two others approach art as a mirror of the world (“Guernica”, 1950, and “Statues also die”, 1953, codirected with Robert Hessens and Chris Marker, respectively). For Resnais, it is not just about using art as an excuse to address more serious issues but showing how artistic creation allows one to think about reality in its most heart-wrenching, be it the painter’s tragic fate in “Van Gogh”, or the horrors of war explored by Picasso in the works surrounding “Guernica”. In both cases, the camera pans through the paintings filmed in black and white, and from this wandering emerges a new cinematic mise-en-scène of the pictorial and existential universes of the two artists.

For Resnais, making short films is also the chance to put his creative freedom to the test with projects that, at first sight, lend themselves to a more impersonal approach. In “All the Memory in the World” (1956), the camera delves into the “backstage” of the National Library of France, unveiled in a series of remarkable travelling shots that follow the path of a book from its legal deposit to the readers’ hands; the movie addresses a crucial issue for humanity: how to organize and preserve a collective memory in permanent evolution. Next in “The Song of Styrene” (1958), what should be a didactic documentary about the modern techniques and applications of polystyrene unfolds into a scientific-lyrical film made up of abstract shapes and saturated colors, and into a guided tour of the Péchiney factory, to the sound of Raymond Queneau’s scathing Alexandrine verses.

Finally, “Night and Fog” (1956): when it comes to presenting one of the most timelessly urgent documentaries of the 20th century, words are not enough. In it, we find many of the formal aspects present in Resnais’s other short films: travelling shots, music, voice off, editing at the service not of beauty but of “fairness”, in Serge Daney’s words. Resnais shows, for the first time, images of Nazi concentration camps, articulating black and white archival images that expose the unbearable vestiges of human barbarism with more contemporary color footage that reveal nature ready to regain ground. Still today, “Night and Fog” constitutes a heavy but necessary legacy of responsibility and fight against oblivion for future generations.