French film director born in Vannes in 1922. Drafted in 1945, he came back and began making increasingly acclaimed war-related shorts on 16mm, including Night and Fog, a disturbing film about Nazi concentration camps. His brilliantly lit, evocative films are mainly about memory. His first feature, Hiroshima mon Amour(1959), uses complicated flashback techniques to recreate a romance between a French woman and a Japanese man, which reminds her of her first love, a German soldier. Other notable films include Last Year at Marienbad(1961), another film about memory, in which a stranger in a hotel tries to persuade a married woman to run away with him on the basis of an affair they had 'last year at Marienbad' which she cannot remember.