French screen icon, famously cast in her first major part in New Wave Alain Resnais’s first film, “Hiroshima mon amour,” legendary actor Emmanuelle Riva died in Paris yesterday. At age eighty-nine she has had a career that’s spanned five decades, starting with auteur filmmakers in the sixties all the way to her heartbreaking and understated portrayal of an Alzheimers victim in Michael Haneke’s 2013 “Amour,”

Alain Resnais, master of irony and, in his last decades, of whimsical comedy, would have appreciated the fact that his latest oeuvre, “Aimer, Boire, Chanter,” opened in Paris on March 26, not even a month after he himself took his final bow at age 91, on March 1st (see our OBITUARY)

The romp, set in the English countryside and based on an Alan Ayckbourn play, “Life of Riley” never introduces

The world’s lost a great filmmaker, France an eminent and prodigious artist.

In his films Alain Resnais, a force of nature whose career spanned no fewer than seventy-seven years (his first documented film dates to 1936), was preoccupied with the themes of memory, history and time. He created works of staggering importance like, “Night and Fog,” “Last year