Last Year at Marienbad

  • A black & white painting of a large, formal, elegant garden with shrubbery sculpted in the shape of pyramids, statutes, fountains, and lots of lawn. Interspersed throughout, men and women stand in dressed in formal wear, casting long shadows.
  • A black & white photo of a man dress in a black jacket, bow tie & white shirt possibly looking a woman, or her refection, in a black dress with lots of jewelry, framed in an elegant mirror.
  • An image of either the same woman looking at her reflection in mirrors or 3 different, identical dressed women, all staring off in the distance. It is not clear. Nothing is as it seems.
  • A woman, with her forefinger pressed to her lip lays on her back in a dress seemingly made of feathers

“A gorgeous puzzle box of a movie!”

– Mark Harris, The New York Times

“Highly seductive… a masterpiece of masterpieces!”

– Jonathan Rosenbaum

4k Restoration

Part of ‘Deux par Resnais‘, with LA GUERRE EST FINIE 

Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad) has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story. – The Criterion Collection

Directed by Alain Resnais. Screenplay by Alain Robbe-GrilletStarring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff. Costume Design: Coco Chanel. France. In French with English subtitles. 1961. DCP. Approx. 94 min.

“The movie is what it is – a sustained mood, an empty allegory, a choreographed moment outside time, and a shocking intimation of perfection.”
­– J. Hoberman

“The Finnegans Wake of the movies! I can’t remember a film of more sustained visual delight.”
– Dwight MacDonald

“I was not prepared for the voluptuous quality of MARIENBAD, its command of tone and mood, its hypnotic way of drawing us into its puzzle, its austere visual beauty.”
– Roger Ebert

“One of the strangest artifacts of cinema history… no other film has affected fashion as deeply.”
– Joshua Rothkopf, Time Out

Runtime
1h 34m
Director
Alain Resnais
Format
2D Digital
Country
fr
Language
French with English Subtitles
Categories
Deux par Resnais , Featured