Last Year at Marienbad
(L'Année dernière à Marienbad)

Screening on Film

Directed by Alain Resnais.
With Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff.
France/Italy, 1961, 35mm, black & white, 94 min.
French with English subtitles.

When this film appeared, viewers had never seen anything like it, and we can perhaps still say the same today. The characters meet in an opulent chateau/resort hotel with an elaborate geometric garden, and the air is heavy with memory and imagination of what might have occurred a year ago, what might occur now: a murder, a love affair. Working from a script by the celebrated novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, Resnais created dazzling surfaces, an hypnotic rhythm of deliberately paced camera movements, and a dense atmosphere of sexual tension centered about Seyrig, who delivers a great, otherworldly performance.