alr

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

Screening on Film
Directed by Alain Resnais.
With Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoeff.
France, 1961, 35mm, black & white, 93 min.
French with English subtitles.
Print source: Rialto Pictures

Resnais’ groundbreaking collaboration with Alain Robbe-Grillet is a hypnotic and haunting exploration of the subjectivity and mutability of memory, itself a dominant theme in Resnais’ work. The film’s dreamlike structure circles back on itself repeatedly, with the repetition of words and images evoking the intimacy and unreliability of memory as a man, known only as X, pursues a woman, A, through an upscale resort, insisting that they had an affair the year before and arranged to meet again, while she claims no memory of him. Resisting any easy interpretations, Resnais encourages uncertainty, dissolving the distinction between reality and fantasy, memory and fiction, while A and X, frozen in an endless loop, explore the infinite variations of their enigmatic interactions.

Part of film series

Read more

Alain Resnais and the Enigmatic Art of Memory

Other film series with this film

Read more

Philosophy and Film Theory

Read more

A Tribute to Alain Resnais

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang