Between 1964 and 1976, Alain Resnais made three films: La Guerre est finie, Je t'aime je t'aime and Stavisky; he also contributed a section to Chris Marker's collaborative Loin du Viêt-nam and worked on a number of projects which did not come to fruition. Linking La Guerre est finie and Stavisky is the work of screenwriter and novelist Jorge Semprun, who, after working on the first film with Resnais and going on to work with Costa Gavras, returned to Resnais. In his short piece for Chris Marker's cinematic essay, Loin du Viêt-nam, Resnais invents a character, Claude Ridder, who will reappear, played by a different actor, in his next film, Je t'aime je t'aime. In Je t'aime je t'aime, Resnais and Jacques Sternberg offer an analysis of memory and destiny, in the guise of a science fiction film.

Alain Resnais's documentaries are meticulous, exquisitely edited works, encompassing both his interest in art, the visual arts and his own art as filmmaker, and his constant attempt to create a visual testimony to traumatic history. Resnais was encouraged to take advantage of a Van Gogh exhibition at the Orangerie in Paris to make a film about the artist. Resnais followed Van Gogh with a further short documentary, Paul Gauguin, which he acknowledges as less innovative. In Guemica, Resnais extends his work outwards to encompass not only personal tragedy but a broad traumatic history. In his documentary, Les Statues meurent aussi, Resnais will be more self-conscious about self/other relations, colonial and post-colonial tensions. In naming the film Nuit et brouillard, Resnais chooses a title with sensory impact. In Toute la mémoire du monde, Resnais offers a tangible image of the archiving of memory.

Alain Resnais approached actors and screenwriters Agnès Jaoui and Jean-Pierre Bacri asking them to adapt the plays in a French version. The films which Resnais has made since the early 1990s, Smoking and No Smoking, On connaît la chanson, and finally Pas sur la bouche could not seem more different from the documentaries, and traumatic subjects, with which Resnais is first associated. In Smoking and No Smoking Resnais pursues his interest in the narrative of a life one can conceive or imagine. On connaît la chanson won 7 Césars in 1997 and has been Resnais's most popular film to date. While there is melancholy in On connaît la chanson it is, arguably, Resnais's most endearing film and clearly the funniest. Like Jacques Demy, Resnais in Pas sur la bouche constructs a stylised world.

Providence is a film which is self-conscious about cinema as medium; for William F. Van Wert, it is 'a meta-film, a film about the making of films, a work of art about the fabricating of art works'. Providence was Alain Resnais's first English-language film. Providence is in two parts: one longer, initial night section and one shorter day part. In an interview about Providence, Resnais specifies that he sees his films as 'un réceptacle de l'imaginaire ou de l'inconscient du spectateur'. In interview, David Mercer suggests that in the first section of Providence there are three levels of reality: that of nightmare, that of literary creation and the imagination, and that of the material reality of the elderly writer. Marsha Kinder, comparing Providence to Robert Altman's Three Women, sees Resnais's film 'dissolving the boundaries between fantasy and ordinary reality'.

Alain Resnais L'Année dernière à Marienbad was made in the autumn of 1960. T. Jefferson Kline draws out the importance of an allusion in L'Année dernière à Marienbad to Henrik Ibsen's play Rosmersholm. Questions of death have haunted readings of L'Année dernière à Marienbad. L'Année dernière à Marienbad is certainly a film which plays with a timeless past, leading Léo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, ever critical of the phase in Resnais's filmmaking, to describe the film as 'a decadent period piece'. From L'Année dernière à Marienbad, indeed, Resnais's films are increasingly uncertain and indirect in their politics. It premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1961 and won the top prize, the Golden Lion. Like Hiroshima mon amour, it was the product of a collaboration, this time between Resnais and another experimental modem novelist, nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Gaston Bounoure offers a rich image of life in the Alain Resnais pharmacy, surmising that it might have held the Surrealist journal Minotaure, possible source of Resnais's interest in the art of Ernst, Magritte and others. Such fragments offer a possible collage of Resnais's childhood, a Virtual image of his past. Resnais rejects the chronological representation of events in order to reflect on film form and to represent the complexity of the human process of imagination and recall. Looking beyond his personal history, his work explores cultural and popular memory, mass trauma and individual losses, pursuing such issues in both documentaries and feature films. To find the crystal image in L Année dernière à Marienbad seems particularly apt since the mansion Resnais creates is itself encrusted with many mirrors in whose crystalline, reflective surfaces we see much of the action of the film take place.

Hiroshima mon amour is a film which depends on division and merger. In Hiroshima mon amour, the history of Hiroshima is embedded within the first traumatic and erotic images of the film. Hiroshima mon amour was a co-funded French and Japanese production, filmed on location in Hiroshima and Nevers, and in studios in Tokyo and Paris between September and December 1958. The film's première was at the Cannes festival in May 1959. Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Resnais's first feature film, originated in a commission to the director from the producers of Nuit et brouillard. Pierre-Louis Spadone specifically connects Michel de Certeau's image of walking through the city with Resnais's tracking shots. Particularly relevant to Hiroshima mon amour are possible links between the affect and sensation of the urban encounter for Certeau and for Resnais.

Alain Resnais describes Mon oncle à Amérique as a film about the central nervous system and human behaviour. Mon oncle d'Amérique was Jean Gruault's first and most successful collaboration with Resnais; they would go on to make La Vie est un roman and L'Amour à mort. Despite interest in bandes dessinées, Resnais insists that I Want to Go Home does not bear the influence of cartoon in its form. I Want to Go Home anticipates the playfulness of Resnais's works of the following decade but does not equal their formal invention, reach or poise. Resnais's company returns to play in Mélo. In Gershwin, Resnais disrupts chronology; his account of the composer's life begins with forgetting, with Gershwin experiencing a traumatic moment of amnesia while playing in a concert in June 1937.

Alain Resnais's films of the 1980s bear comparison with late François Truffaut - specifically, for example, in their mutual use of scripts by Jean Gruault. Vincent Amiel, reflecting on Resnais's works from the new perspective offered by Pas sur la bouche, writes: 'Mais ils [ses films] s'appellent aussi mutuellement, et leur autonomie lacunaire ne cesse de dire que chacun est un fragment d'une même démarche'. Films of rupture, fracture, illusion and departure, traumatised works despite their visual pleasures - Resnais's works across his career haunt each other, displace and dispel one another, with no move to plenitude or completion. Disruptions in relations between self and other are the matter of his filmmaking. Each text is a challenge or catalyst for the filmmaker; in his engagement with such extraneous textual material Resnais allows his films to differ internally, to respond visually and technically to a new irritant or inspiration.

The film with which Alain Resnais would follow L'Année dernière à Marienhad, Muriel, bears the subtitle Le Temps d'un retour (the time of a return). The film marks a return for Resnais, who will work again with Jean Cayrol. Cayrol and Resnais first discussed the project in 1959, and Resnais began shooting three years later. The Algerian War ended in 1962; in its aftermath Resnais and Cayrol could succeed in making and showing Muriel, described by John Francis Kreidl as an overtly anti-Organisation de l'armée secrète film. In Muriel, as Resnais multiplies narrative strands and repeated images, the viewer, reminded of Hiroshima mon amour and Marienbad, becomes increasingly uncertain about the possibility of experiencing or making sense of this return. The way in which Resnais approaches Algeria, in Muriel, is through the story of a woman tortured.