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Alain Resnais’ epochal and enigmatic 1961 film, Last Year at Marienbad, is a dream-like study of non-linear time and memory. In the film, a man pursues a woman through the endless corridors of a luxury hotel while another man, who may or may not be her husband, looks on. Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships among the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in this finely woven dance of memory.

Resnais is a contemporary of Chris Marker’s, whose film, La Jetée, inspired The Eternal Return series. The two directors, both part of the Left Bank Group, collaborated to make Le statues meurent aussi (Statues also Die, 1953) and Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967).

Curator: Emily Berçir Zimmerman

Bio:

One of France’s most distinctive and highly regarded directors, with a career spanning six decades, Alain Resnais was born in Vannes, France, in 1922. He studied at L`Institut des hautes études cinématographiques before starting a career in the mid-1940s making short films. Of these, the most celebrated is Nuit et brouillard (1955), an eye-opening and devastatingly poignant documentary about deportations and Nazi concentration camps during World War II. 

Resnais’ first full-length film was Hiroshima mon amour (1959), an unusual romantic drama that was critically acclaimed in France and abroad, and won Resnais instant fame, establishing him as a major director of the French New Wave. In later films he moved away from the overtly political topics of some of his previous works and developed his interests in an interaction between cinema and other cultural forms, including theater, music, and comic books. This led to imaginative adaptations of two plays by Alan Ayckbourn, and two different styles of musicals in On connaît la chanson (Same Old Song, 1997) and Pas sur la bouche (Not on the Lips, 2003).