SUBJECTS

Bioy Casares, Adolfo. La invención Morel -- Film and video adaptations, Hotels -- Europe -- Drama, Memory -- Drama, Seduction -- Drama

Last Year at Marienbad

(L'année dernière à marienbad)

35mm Print

featuring

Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff, Françoise Bertin,

“Once again I walk, once again, along these corridors, across these salons, these galleries, in this edifice from another century, this huge, luxurious, baroque hotel . . .” The incantatory voice-over narration could be the voice of Sacha Vierny’s camera as it travels through time, past the statues and statuesque beings-in-time—the characters—in this masterpiece of mise-en-scène. Some critics interpreted Marienbad’s labyrinthine gardens as a dreamscape, others as a landscape of the mind that rejects cause and effect. Still, why not take it at face value? A man attempts to convince a woman (Delphine Seyrig) that, a year ago, they met and fell in love at a European spa, perhaps Marienbad where they are now. The seamless integration of past and present is central to Alain Resnais’s films, but, as author-screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet said, “The image is always in the present tense.”

Judy Bloch
FILM DETAILS 
Based On
  • Alain Robbe-Grillet's novel

Cinematographer
  • Sacha Vierny
Language
  • French
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • B&W
  • 'Scope 35mm
  • 94 mins
Source
  • Rialto Pictures
CINEFILES

CineFiles is an online database of BAMPFA's extensive collection of documentation covering world cinema, past and present.

View Last Year at Marienbad documents  

Alain Resnais and the enigmatic art of memory (program note), Harvard Film Archive, 2010

Last year at Marienbad (L'annee derniere a Marienbad) (program note), Harvard Film Archive, 2010

Providence (program note), Harvard Film Archive, 2010

House of 1,000 corpses : Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad returns (review), Village Voice, J. Hoberman, 2008

Abstruse triangle : 'Marienbad' is still crazy after all these years (article), Citybeat, Andy Klein, 2008

The greatest film ever made? (article), Reader (Chicago, Ill.), Jonathan Rosenbaum, 2008

Memory Montage Modernism: the films of Alain Resnais (program note), Cinematheque Ontario/a division of Toronto International Film Festival Group, James Quandt, 2000

Time and again: the cinema of Alain Resnais (program note), Film Society of Lincoln Center, 2000

Last year at Marienbad (distributor materials), New Yorker Films, 1989

A tribute to Andrei Tarkovsky (program), Hong Kong Film Festival, Michael Lam, 1987

Displaying 10 of 33 publicly available documents.


View all Last Year at Marienbad documentation on CineFiles.