Stella Louis Abstract

Alain Resnais and Stan Lee: The ‘Amazing’ and ‘Uncanny’ Collaboration which never works

At the end of the 60s-beginning of the 70s, the French director Alain Resnais, one of the great representatives of the French Nouvelle Vague and father of European cinematographic modernity were in New York. During this stay, he took the opportunity to meet Stan Lee at Marvel publishing house, as a big fan of American Marvel comics and popular culture.

Many projects were born at that time establishing a friendly and creative collaboration between the two men who admired each other. Two named projects, The Inmates and The Monster Maker, didn’t succeed due to several reasons (time, money, artistic disagreements). Then, Alain Resnais was supposed to direct a Spider-Man movie.

This paper will propose to focus and answer two questions in particular. First, we will find out a bit more on the content of those projects, its state of progress and reasons of their failure, by consulting the archives linked to Alain Resnais at the Cinémathèque française (Paris) or get in touch with Marvel Studios. What did link those two different artistic universes to the point to have projects in common? Secondly, this work will allow me to question the meeting between the French cinema of a realistic author, and popular American comic books, and therefore this often very critical distinction between popular and so-called ‘author’ quality.