Alain Resnais was a French film director and screenwriter whose career extended over more than six decades. After training as a film editor in the mid-1940s, he went on to direct a number of short films which included Night and Fog, an influential documentary about the Nazi concentration camps. Resnais began making feature films in the late 1950s and consolidated his early reputation with Hiroshima mon amour, Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel, all of which adopted unconventional narrative techniques to deal with themes of troubled memory and the imagined past; these films were contemporary with, associated with, the French New Wave, though Resnais did not regard himself as being part of that movement. He had closer links to the "Left Bank" group of authors and filmmakers who shared a commitment to modernism and an interest in left-wing politics, he established a regular practice of working on his films in collaboration with writers unconnected with the cinema such as Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Jorge Semprún and Jacques Sternberg.
In films, Resnais moved away from the overtly political topics of some previous works and developed his interests in an interaction between cinema and other cultural forms, including theatre and comic books. This led to imaginative adaptations of plays by Alan Ayckbourn, Henri Bernstein and Jean Anouilh, as well as films featuring various kinds of popular song, his films explore the relationship between consciousness and the imagination, he was noted for devising innovative formal structures for his narratives. Throughout his career, he academies. Resnais was born in 1922 at Vannes in Brittany. An only child, he was ill with asthma in childhood, which led to his being withdrawn from school and educated at home, he was an eager reader, in a range that extended from classics to comic books, but from the age of 10 he became fascinated by films. For his twelfth birthday his parents gave him a Kodak 8mm camera with which he began to make his own short films, including a three-minute version of Fantômas.
Around the age of 14, he discovered surrealism and through that an interest in the works of André Breton. Visits to the theatre in Paris gave Resnais the desire to be an actor, in 1939 he moved to Paris to become an assistant in Georges Pitoëff's company at the Théâtre des Mathurins. From 1940 to 1942 he studied acting in the Cours René-Simon, but he decided in 1943 to apply to the newly formed film school IDHEC to study film editing; the film-maker Jean Grémillon was one of the teachers who had the most influence on him at that period. Resnais left in 1945 to do his military service which took him to Germany and Austria with the occupying forces, as well as making him a temporary member of a travelling theatre company, Les Arlequins, he returned to Paris in 1946 to start his career as a film editor, but began making short films of his own. Finding himself to be a neighbour of the actor Gérard Philipe, he persuaded him to appear in a 16mm surrealist short, Schéma d'une identification. A more ambitious feature-length work, Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire, has vanished without trace.
After beginning with a series of short documentary films showing artists at work in their studios, as well as a few commercial commissions, Resnais was invited in 1948 to make a film about the paintings of Van Gogh, to coincide with an exhibition, being mounted in Paris. He filmed it at first in 16mm, but when the producer Pierre Braunberger saw the results, Resnais was asked to remake it in 35mm. Van Gogh received a prize at the Venice Biennale in 1948, won an Oscar for Best 2-reel Short in 1949. Resnais continued to address artistic subjects in Gauguin and Guernica, which examined the Picasso painting based on the 1937 bombing of the town, presented it to the accompaniment of a text written by Paul Éluard. A political perspective on art underpinned his next project, co-directed with Chris Marker, Les statues meurent aussi, a polemic about the destruction of African art by French cultural colonialism. Nuit et Brouillard was one of the first documentaries about the Nazi concentration camps, but it deals more with the memory of the camps than with their actual past existence.
Realising that standard documentary techniques would be incapable of confronting the enormity of the horror, Resnais chose to use a distancing technique by alternating historical black-and-white images of the camps with contemporary colour footage of the sites in long tracking shots. The accompanying narration was intentionally understated to add to the distancing effect. Although the film encountered censorship problems with the French government, its impact was immense and it remains one of the director's most admired works. A different kind of collective memory was considered in Toute la mémoire du monde, in which the endless spaces and bibliographic riches of the Bibliothèque nationale were explored in another compendium of long travelling shots. In 1958 Resnais undertook a commission from the Pechiney company to make short film, in colour and wide-screen, extolling the merits of plastics, Le Chant du styrène. Poetry was brought to the project by Raymond Queneau who wrote the narration for the film in rhyming couplets.
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Dietrich James "D. J." Richardson is an American professional basketball player for Aix Maurienne Savoie Basket of the LNB Pro B. He attended Peoria Central for his first three years of high school and transferred to Findlay Prep in Henderson, Nevada for his senior year, he played collegiately at the University of Illinois. As a junior at Peoria Central Richardson was selected to first-team All-State by the Champaign-Urbana News-Gazette and second-team All-State by the AP and Chicago Sun-Times. In his senior year at Findlay College Prep, along with Texas recruit Avery Bradley, led the Findlay College Prep Pilots to a high school national championship after beating Oak Hill 74-66 and finishing their season 33-0. Richardson joined fellow 2009 recruits, including Brandon Paul, on the University of Illinois 2009–10 men's basketball team coached by Bruce Weber. Andy Katz of ESPN called Richardson and Paul "the best freshman backcourt not at Kentucky John Wall and Eric Bledsoe". Richardson was named Big Ten Freshman of the Year by the coaches and was unanimously selected to the Big Ten All-Freshman team.
Richardson finished his career ranked 13th on Illini all-time scoring list (1,477 points, third in made 3-pointers, tied for third in games played. After his senior season, Richardson was selected to participate in the Portsmouth Invitational Tournament. After going undrafted in the 2013 NBA Draft, Richardson worked out for the Utah Jazz in mid-September 2013. On October 24, 2013, Richardson signed to play professionally in Austria for the UBC Güssing Knights. In January 2014 Richardson signed to play for Toros de Aragua of the Venezuelan Professional Basketball League, however he suffered an ankle injury that forced the team to cut him before playing a game. On July 31, 2014 Richardson signed with Korikobrat which competes as a member of the Korisliiga in Finland. After that season, he signed with Kouvot from the same Korisliiga for the 2015–16 season, he won the Finnish championship with Kouvot. On February 26, 2018, Richardson joined Aries Trikala of the Greek Basket League. Profile at FIBA.com Profile at Eurobasket.com Profile at FightingIllini.com
Archer Kent Blood was an American career diplomat and academic. He served as the last American Consul General to Bangladesh, he is famous for sending the worded "Blood Telegram" protesting against the atrocities committed in the Bangladesh Liberation War. He served in Greece, Germany and ended his career as charge d'affaires of the U. S. Embassy in New Delhi, retiring in 1982. Born in Chicago, Archer Blood graduated from high school in Virginia, he received a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia in 1943 served in the U. S. Navy in the North Pacific in World War II. In 1947, he joined the Foreign Service, received a master's degree in international relations from George Washington University in 1963. In 1970, Blood arrived in Dhaka, East Pakistan, as U. S. consul general. When the Bangladesh genocide began, his consulate reported events as they occurred to the White House, but received no response due to America's alliance with West Pakistan, fuelled in part by President Nixon's personal friendship with the then-President of Pakistan, Yahya Khan, as well as by National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger's desire to use Pakistan's cordial relationship with China as a pathway to resuming American relations with China.
Although Blood's initial cables failed to elicit a response from his government, they caused a stir with the American public when they were leaked, prompting Pakistan's foreign ministry to complain to the American government. With tensions in East Pakistan rising, Blood saw the independence of Bangladesh as an inevitability, remarking that "the ominous prospect of a military crackdown is much more than a possibility, but it would only delay, ensure, the independence of Bangla Desh." After foreign journalists were rounded up and expelled from East Pakistan, Blood sheltered a reporter who had snuck away so that events could continue to be reported, in addition to sheltering Hindu Bengalis being targeted by the West Pakistani forces, despite being warned by the American government to refrain from doing so. Blood played a role in the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, though this may not have been known in the United States at the time. A report suggests that one of the two triggers for the invasion was "Amin’s reception of acting American Chargé d’Affaires Archer Blood on October 27" in 1979.
The Blood Telegram, sent via the State Department's Dissent Channel, was seen as the most worded expression of dissent in the history of the U. S. Foreign Service, it was signed by 20 members of the diplomatic staff. The telegram stated: Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities. Our government has failed to take forceful measures to protect its citizens while at the same time bending over backwards to placate the West Pak dominated government and to lessen any deservedly negative international public relations impact against them. Our government has evidenced what many will consider moral bankruptcy... But we have chosen not to intervene morally, on the grounds that the Awami conflict, in which the overworked term genocide is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state. Private Americans have expressed disgust. We, as professional civil servants, express our dissent with current policy and fervently hope that our true and lasting interests here can be defined and our policies redirected in order to salvage our nation's position as a moral leader of the free world.
In an earlier telegram, Archer Blood wrote about American observations at Dhaka under the subject heading "Selective genocide": 1. Here in Decca we horrified witnesses to a reign of terror by the Pak Military. Evidence continues to mount that the MLA authorities have list of AWAMI League supporters whom they are systematically eliminating by seeking them out in their homes and shooting them down 2. Among those marked for extinction in addition to the A. L. hierarchy are university faculty. In this second category we have reports that Fazlur Rahman head of the philosophy department and a Hindu, M. Abedin, head of the department of history, have been killed. Razzak of the political science department is rumored dead. On the list are the bulk of MNA's elect and number of MPA's. 3. Moreover, with the support of the Pak Military. Non-Bengali Muslims are systematically attacking poor people's quarters and murdering Bengalis and Hindus. Although Blood was scheduled for another 18-month tour in Dhaka, President Richard M. Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger recalled him from that position since his opposition went against their hopes of using the support of West Pakistan for diplomatic openings to China and to counter the power of the Soviet Union.
He was assigned to State Department's personnel office. Government officials in 1972 admitted that they didn't believe the magnitude of the killings, labeling the telegram alarmist, his career was marred by the telegram. He wrote the book, The Cruel Birth of Bangladesh – Memoirs of an American Diplomat, about his experience during the Bangladesh Liberation War. Archer Blood received the Christian A. Herter Award in 1971 for "extraordinary accomplishment involving initiative, intellectual courage and creative dissent"; the Blood Telegram was a precursor to the formation of the State Department'Dissent Channel' that formed in the following years, a mechanism through which agency officials could express formal critiques of United States foreign policy. Blood died of arterial sclerosis on September 3, 2004, in Fort Collins, where he had been living since 1993, his death made h