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Last Year at Marienbad
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L'année dernière à Marienbad (translated as Last Year in Marienbad in the UK and Last Year at Marienbad in North America) is a 1961 French movie directed by Alain Resnais, starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff. The screenplay is by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
film is set at an elite social gathering at a chateau. A man approaches a woman and asks "Didn't we meet at Marienbad last year?" The woman is non-committal and demure.
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Encyclopedia
L'année dernière à Marienbad (translated as Last Year in Marienbad in the UK and Last Year at Marienbad in North America) is a 1961 French movie directed by Alain Resnais, starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff. The screenplay is by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Plot
The film is set at an elite social gathering at a chateau. A man approaches a woman and asks "Didn't we meet at Marienbad last year?" The woman is non-committal and demure. "Didn't you say you would leave your husband and we would run away together?" he asks. Again, she says "No," but they continue to talk as if they perhaps had indeed made plans. When a second man, who may be A's husband, approaches, the conversation ends somewhat awkwardly and the characters move on.
As the film progresses, the relationship of the characters and the sequence of events are not made clear. Instead images and events such as the conversation above are repeated several times, but in different places in the chateau and its grounds. Several sequences involve the men at the chateau passing the time with various games (such as Nim and target shooting). There are numerous tracking shots of the chateau's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers.
Production and style
The film is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the exact temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question. The dream-like nature of the film has fascinated and baffled audiences and critics, some hailing it as a masterpiece, others finding it incomprehensible. Among the notable images in the film is a scene in which two characters (and the camera) rush out of the chateau and are faced with a tableau of figures arranged in a geometric garden; although the people cast long dramatic shadows, the trees in the garden do not.
Marienbad is a town in the Czech Republic (it is not clear whether the film's setting is meant to be Marienbad or somewhere else). Resnais filmed the scenes within several different chateaux and their grounds, including the Nymphenburg Palace and Schleissheim Palace, both in Bavaria. He edited them together to produce a disorientating space that does not make geographical sense. Some additional footage was shot at an indoor studio. The woman's wardrobe was designed by Coco Chanel.
Reception
The film was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay (Alain Robbe-Grillet), and it won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. In 1963 Adonis Kyrou declared the film a total triumph in his influential Le Surréalisme au Cinéma (p.206), recognizing the ambiguous environment and obscure motives within the film as representing many of the concerns of surrealism in narrative cinema.
Less reverently, the film received an entry in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time, by Harry Medved, with Randy Dreyfuss and Michael Medved. The authors lampooned the film's surrealistic style and quoted numerous critics who found the film to be pretentious and/or incomprehensible.
Influence
Last Year at Marienbad forms a thematic basis for Marienbad My Love, a novel about a cinematographer who commits himself to creating a science-fiction-themed tribute to the film. The book, by Mark Leach, incorporates prose that reflects some of the narration and dialogue of the film.
Further reading
- Ado Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au Cinéma (Paris: Le Terrain Vague, 1963)
- Jean-Louis Leutrat, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (London: British Film Institute, 2000)
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