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

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Alain Resnais and the Enigmatic Art of Memory

Other film series with this film

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Philosophy and Film Theory

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A Tribute to Alain Resnais

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The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

Current and upcoming film series

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The Reincarnations of Delphine Seyrig

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Rosine Mbakam, 2025 McMillan-Stewart Fellow