Alain Resnais

Alain Resnais made films about memory. In Night and Fog, his 1956 documentary about the Nazi concentration camps, color footage of the empty, overgrown camps alternates with black-and-white archival images of the dead. In Hiroshima mon amour, from 1959, a French actress and a Japanese architect remember love and catastrophe. In Last Year at Marienbad, from 1961, a man insists to a woman that they met a year earlier, and she does not remember. Few filmmakers have explored how the mind holds and loses the past as thoroughly as Resnais.

He was born on June 3, 1922, in Vannes, in Brittany. His birth record gives 8:15 in the morning, which puts Cancer on the Ascendant and his Sun in the eleventh house, the sector of collaborators and creative circles. Gemini, a placement of fragmented, restless thought, holds his Sun. Resnais broke conventional storytelling apart, cutting between past and present, imagination and reality, and his films often feel like a mind jumping between associations.

Venus and Pluto share Cancer, which clings to memory, the past and emotional inheritance, and both fall in his twelfth house, the hidden region of a chart associated with what lies buried. Pluto in Cancer describes deep, sometimes traumatic engagement with history and with what a culture remembers, and Venus there adds tenderness and longing. Resnais's greatest films confront the trauma of the twentieth century, the Holocaust, Hiroshima and the war in Algeria, through the lens of personal memory.

His Moon is in Virgo, describing a meticulous, careful and somewhat reserved emotional nature. Resnais was famous for his precise, carefully planned films, and for his calm, discreet manner.

Jupiter and Saturn, both in Libra, describe collaboration and balance. Libra is the sign of partnership, and Resnais worked closely with writers, often novelists, rather than writing his own scripts: Marguerite Duras wrote Hiroshima mon amour, Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote Marienbad, and later he worked with the playwright Alan Ayckbourn.

As a child he suffered from asthma and was educated largely at home, where he read voraciously and made his first amateur films. He studied at the French film school IDHEC and worked as an editor before directing.

Mars, retrograde in Sagittarius, describes restless, inward-turning energy, and Resnais kept experimenting into old age, making musicals and comedies, including Same Old Song in 1997 and Smoking/No Smoking. Uranus in Pisces and Neptune in Leo add imagination and theatricality.

He won the Golden Lion at Venice for Marienbad and many other honors, and he married the actress Sabine Azéma, a frequent collaborator. His last film, Life of Riley, premiered at the Berlin Film Festival weeks before his death on March 1, 2014, at ninety-one. The Gemini Sun made him a restless experimenter; the Cancer planets made memory his great subject.