Alain Resnais, master of modern lyricism in film, dead at 91

French filmmaker Alain Resnais died yesterday in Paris at the age of 91.

Resnais's films exist as outliers in the oeuvre of the French New Wave, more closely allied with Left Bank intellectuals like writers Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbes-Grillet. He managed to inject his extremely personal films with the grace and intellectual lyricism usually found only in the masterworks of literature.

The highlights of his career include Night and Fog, a documentary about the devastation of the Holocaust, and Hiroshima mon Amour, a revolutionary fictional meditation on the bombing of Hiroshima, and more generally, the moral depravity of war. Other works include Last Year at Marienbad, The War is Over, and Je t'aime, Je t'aime.