Arguably the single most important director to emerge from the French New Wave, Alain Resnais fed his early imagination a varied diet of popular movies, pulp fiction, Proust, Katherine Mansfield and comic books, retaining throughout his career the ability to bridge the gap between high and low culture in his films. He began making 16mm documentary "art" shorts in the late 1940s, visiting the works of Hans Hartnung, Felix Labisse, Henri Goetz and Max Ernst, among others, but it was his more ambitious "Van Gogh" (1948) which finally succeeded in truly drawing the observer into the artist's
