Last Year at Marienbad

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).