8

SUNDAY

Memory, loss, and war are the central threads of Alain Resnais’ first 25 years as a filmmaker, beginning even before he made his breakthrough fiction features, Last Year at Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour. The themes are also present in the director’s best-known documentary, 1955’s Night and Fog, an alternately stately and horrific contemplation of Auschwitz (with one eye on the then-timely issue of France’s treatment of Algeria). That influential film concludes “Alain Resnais Documentaries,” a program of three ’50s shorts by the director. The tracking shots that characterize both Night and Fog and Last Year at Marienbad also define Resnais’ revealingly titled All the Memory of the World, a film about France’s old Bibliothèque Nationale (replaced in the ’90s by a modernistic megaproject). The third film is Statues Also Die, a study of Western culture’s baleful effect on traditional African art that was co-directed by Chris Marker. The program starts at 6:15 p.m. (see Showtimes for other dates and locations) at the AFI Kennedy Center. $8.50. (202) 785-4600. (Mark Jenkins)