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"For me, this film is an attempt…to approach the complexity of thought, of its processes."

- Alain Resnais

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD (1961) is a hypnotically beautiful puzzle box of a film, and one of the most influential in the history of cinema. It was created out of a collaboration between its avant-garde nouveau roman writer (and sometime filmmaker) Alain Robbe-Grillet and its director Alain Resnais. In the film’s hypnotic treatment of space, time, and memory, it ushered in a new era of cinematic modernism. In a large international hotel in the European resort town of Marienbad, with a sumptuous but austere décor – a marble universe – a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) is convinced he met an enigmatic woman (Delphine Seyrig) the previous year at the same location, and perhaps had a flirtation. A second man (Sacha Pitoëff), possibly the woman's lover or husband, repeatedly intimidates the first man.

Their relationships unfold through shards of flashbacks that never quite fit into place. LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, shunning the causal relationship between events. Spatial and temporary continuity is destroyed by the method of filming and editing; the film offers instead a mental continuity, a continuity of thought, as in dreams (indeed, the film was praised by surrealists Jacques Brunius and Ado Kyrou).  Time, space and memory are fluid, with no certainty over what is happening to the characters, what they are remembering, and what they are imagining.  These ambiguities are further contradicted and amplified by the narrator’s voice-over commentary. The omnipresence of hallway mirrors throughout the film serves to further refract images back upon themselves. The film is cubist in construction, with past, present, and an imagined future folding in on each other.

With Sascha Vierny’s sumptuous black and white widescreen (Dyaliscope) cinematography, the camera glides endlessly throughout the luxuriously baroque hotel. The opening sequence conjures an atmosphere of constriction, with slow tracking shots along ceilings, mirrors, the hotel lobby, and empty corridors. The confining architecture is echoed by the incantatory repetitions of the narrator’s voice, weaving in and out of the soundtrack like a faulty wireless, or a broken record; the desolate organ music and seductive camera movements lull the viewer in to the same trance-like acquiescence as the audience watches what appears to be a tableau vivant, in which the characters move like somnambulists through a hermetically sealed world.

In determining the visual appearance of the film, Resnais said that he wanted to recreate "a certain style of silent cinema", and his direction as well as the actors' make-up sought to produce this atmosphere. The filmmaker showed his costume designer photographs from L'INHUMAINE (1924) and L'ARGENT (1928), for which great fashion designers of the 1920s had created the costumes. He also asked members of his team to look at other silent films including Pabst's PANDORA'S BOX (1929): he wanted Delphine Seyrig's appearance and manner to resemble that of Louise Brooks and Theda Bara.  Early in the film, an elaborate full-sized cutout of Alfred Hitchcock makes one of his trademark cameo appearances – easy to miss in the midst of all those mannequin-like patrons. This homage to one of Resnais’ favorite filmmakers illuminates his playful approach to mise-en-scène. It also signals that LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD can be understood as a mystery, albeit far afield from the narrative style of the Master of Suspense.

Although seemingly devoid of political content, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD can be further appreciated by reconsidering Resnais’ filmmaking career trajectory.  In 1951, he made the short film GUERNICA, about the famed Picasso painting depicting the Spanish Civil War, and in 1956, NIGHT AND FOG (NUIT ET BROUILLARD), an emotionally devastating film about the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. His first feature, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR (1959) looks at the legacy of the Second World War (in particular, the atomic bomb and French collaboration with German occupiers) from the perspective of a love affair in Japan between a French woman and a Japanese man. His third feature, MURIEL (from 1963) confronts France’s war in Algeria and its legacy of colonialism and the devastation of France itself during the Second World War from the perspective of a family and a past romance in the city of Boulogne-sur-Mer. LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD was produced between the release of these two feature films.   

Resnais himself was involved in theater in prewar Paris as it was about to be occupied by the Nazis. In 1945, he arrived in Germany and Austria to perform his military service with the occupying forces. LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD converted the filmmaker’s own experience—of a life in art in a time of war—into a drama that reveals by what it conceals. The home movie footage in THE MAKING OF THE LAST YEAR AT MARIENAD chronicles in one brief section the day trip of cast and crew to Dachau – a suburb of Munich – which was just a short ride from the chateau where the production was shot. Not only a formal masterpiece, then, LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD is also a haunting statement about impending doom lurking outside the confines of the chateau.

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD is presented here in a splendid 4K restoration from Studio Canal. In addition, several essential extras are included in this digital publication, which, taken together, greatly increase the appreciation of this groundbreaking film. One is the documentary MEMORIES OF LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD, which reconstructs in chronological fashion Super8mm footage taken on the set of the film. Another insightful guide is a visual essay by curator James Quandt about the movie. Finally, TOUT LA MÉMOIRE DU MONDE, a short film made by Resnais in 1956, explores all the priceless archival treasures found in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. As the voiceover narration poses the question of how humanity remembers itself, the foregrounding of the theme of memory in this film foreshadows a central concern Resnais revisits in LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. As film critic Richard Brody notes in the following clip, Resnais views memory as a supreme function of political morality.

Nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards.

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