The film director Alain Resnais, whose career spanned six decades, has died at the age of 91.

Resnais was described as “a poet of the cinema,” and he was associated with the Left Bank group of film-makers and writers that included Chris Marker,  Agnès Varda,  Jean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Resnais was best known for his films Hiroshima mon amor, L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad, Muriel ou le Temps d’un retour, Satvisky and Providence. Last month, his final film, Aimer, boire et chanter (The LIfe of Riley) was premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.

One of his earliest films was the powerful documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) in 1955. This harrowing film looked at the Holocaust, and told the stories of the prisoners by using footage of the remnants of the concentration camps at Auschwitz and Majdanek. The critic and New Wave director François Truffaut described Night and Fog as the greatest film ever made.

Almost sixty years later, this early work by Alain Resnais has lost none of its power and is arguably one of the most important films made about the Holocaust.

R.I.P. Alain Resnais 1922-2014