Providence

Alain Resnais’s first film in English was conceived as a “documentary about imagination,” and the director achieved this through masterful formal maneuvers. Its opening shot situates the film on a Victorian-era estate known as Providence, and inside the home we’re privy to the fevered dreams and emotional reckonings of an aging writer whose body is succumbing to cancer. Though Providence suffered a terrible reception in America, over time it has found its champions, one being artist Tacita Dean. Declaring Providence her favorite film, she particularly appreciates that “it deals effortlessly with the problems of enacting the fantasies of a writer’s imagination. It mixes places and time within single sequences to create an uncanny sense of dislocation, but its brilliance is its leanness—not a single moment of excess.”