Alain Resnais, the French filmmaker whose cryptic "Last Year at Marienbad" extended its influence across generations, has died at 91.
Resnais was editing drafts of his next project even from his hospital bed, according to producer Jean-Louis Livi, who was working on the film with him.
Resnais, who died Saturday, was renowned for reinventing himself during each of his full-length films, which included the acclaimed "Hiroshima Mon Amour" in 1959 and most recently "Life of Riley," which was honored at the Berlin Film Festival just weeks ago.
"He was a man of the highest quality, a genius," Livi told France Info radio on Sunday, confirming Resnais' death with "enormous sadness, accompanied by enormous pride."
French President Francois Hollande said France had lost "one of its greatest filmmakers."
"He received all the recognition and prizes. But what counted for him was always his next work," Hollande said in a statement.
"Last Year at Marienbad" is his most influential work, mixing fragments of time and weirdness within a castle. The 1961 film is routinely cited among the highest works of French New Wave artistry, although Resnais' career extended well beyond that period. It has been cited by fans as varied as filmmaker David Lynch and the late Jackie Kennedy, who screened the movie at the White House.
"I'm a bit surprised to be so shocked by the death of someone who was 91. Usually we take this news with a kind of calm sadness," said Danis Podalydes, an actor and director who worked with Resnais. "But the intellectual youth of this man was so surprising."
Thierry Fremaux, head of the Cannes Film Festival, said Resnais' films tended to fly past the festival's judges, who were not always enamored of his work.
"He pushed the aesthetic and narrative experimentation very far, and then he completely renewed his style," Fremaux told the French network LCI.
Austrian activist wins privacy/targeted advertising case against Meta over personal data on sexual orientation
The European Union's top court said Friday that social media company Meta can't use public information about a user's sexual orientation obtained outside its platforms for personalized advertising under the bloc's strict data privacy rules.
The decision from the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg is a victory for Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems, who has been a thorn in the side of Big Tech companies over their compliance with 27-nation bloc's data privacy rules.
The EU court issued its ruling after Austria's supreme court asked for guidance in Schrems' case on how to apply the privacy rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or GDPR.
Schrems had complained that Facebook had processed personal data including information about his sexual orientation to target him with online advertising, even though he had never disclosed on his account that he was gay. The only time he had publicly revealed this fact was during a panel discussion.
"An online social network such as Facebook cannot use all of the personal data obtained for the purposes of targeted advertising, without restriction as to time and without distinction as to type of data," the court said in a press release summarizing its decision.
Even though Schrems revealed he was gay in the panel discussion, that "does not authorise the operator of an online social network platform to process other data relating to his sexual orientation, obtained, as the case may be, outside that platform, with a view to aggregating and analysing those data, in order to offer him personalised advertising."
Meta said it was awaiting publication of the court's full judgment and that it "takes privacy very seriously."
"Everyone using Facebook has... Read More