For all his technical innovation, Resnais is candid about his debt to earlier directors: "You have to realize that you can't make something totally new. I never thought I made a big break from other directors." He sees his own work in specific context. The two intersecting times of Hiroshima Mon Amour, admits Resnais, owe much to Griffith's Intolerance.

Elsewhere, Resnais has made more subtle acknowledgments. Suggesting his debt to the comics, he lists "Fearless Fosdick" in the credits of one film. Alfred Hitchcock, a hero of Resnais's, appears in Marienbad in an almost unnoticeable private joke: "We made a tribute to Hitchcock by putting his photographic silhouette in the hotel in Marienbad, waiting for an elevator which, of course, never comes."

When he views films himself, Resnais claims, he forgets about being a director. "I'm a movie buff. I like films where I can feel the style of a director come through." He lists the directors he enjoys: Renoir, Fellini, Bergman, Truffaut, Bunuel . . . on and on, a whole canon of modern film.

One director who does not receive Resnais's unreserved admiration is Stanley Kubrick. He does praise Kubrick's ability to answer the critics and his technical accomplishment. "But I can't understand why I don't enjoy Clockwork Orange more at the end. I was not fulfilled. I think he could use more speed . . . . I would like sometime to edit him."

RESNAIS'S HUMILITY in speaking of other directors or of his own work is neither sham nor evasion. It is part of Resnais's larger awareness of the complex nature of his role. The director's control is inevitably incomplete: "All of my films have been chosen by cir-cumstances, in a way." Resnais is less of an originator than an executor of film. Film is an art of collaboration, and the director is but one of the collaborators.

But the way that Resnais submits to circumstances does not deny him creativity. The ultimate task of bringing verbal and visual--script and camera--together into the final experience of film, is still the director's. With the force of an individual sensibility, Resnais can transcend circumstances and synthesize influences. He makes films which are uniquely his, while preserving the individuality of each script.

Thus, although Resnais's own fascination with time pervades all his films, its handling varies according to the conception of the different script writers. Time in Hiroshima has the source of its order in the psychology of the main characters, whereas in Robbe-Grillet's Marienbad the order of time is more metaphysical than personal. Unlike either, Jorge Semprun's script for La Guerre est Finie demanded greater conventionality of form, with a focus on social reality rather than metaphysical complexity. In his treatment of time, then, Resnais peculiarly mixes continuity and flexibility.

At the root of Resnais's work lies neither a political persuasion nor a personal metaphysic, but a way of seeing. For Resnais, images, rather than thoughts, are the true domain of the director. His professed desire is disarmingly simple: "I love to make beautiful images. The more I get older the more I think beauty is important after all.