Daily Inspiration Quote by Alain Resnais

A director famous for labyrinths of memory spots a different kind of maze, and you can hear the professional jealousy in the admiration. Resnais’s line is deliberately plain: not a manifesto, not a review, just a jolt of recognition. “Something is going on here” is the filmmaker’s equivalent of an alarm bell. It marks the moment when craft becomes event.

The context matters. The Singing Detective (Dennis Potter’s TV fever dream of illness, pulp plotting, and musical hallucination) arrived as television was still supposed to be smaller than cinema, less ambitious, less dangerous. Resnais, watching it in New York, is encountering British broadcast experimentation through an American filter: late-night TV, a foreign city, a medium that’s meant to be disposable. That distance sharpens the shock. He’s not primed by the U.K. discourse around Potter; he’s simply struck by the formal audacity.

The subtext is also an argument about where “serious” innovation lives. Resnais spent decades folding time, identity, and trauma into elegant cinematic structures; Potter does similar work with a remote control audience, weaponizing melodrama and pop songs to make fractured consciousness legible. Resnais’s phrasing honors that without overpraising it. He doesn’t say it’s “good.” He says it’s happening. That’s the key: art as a live wire, not a commodity, and television as an unexpected site of revolt.