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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 film directed by Alain Resnais, starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff. The screenplay is by Alain Robbe-Grillet.[1]
Plot summary
At a social gathering at a château, a man approaches a woman. He claims they met the year before at Marienbad and is convinced she is "waiting here" for him. The woman insists they have never met. A second man, who may or may not be the woman's husband, repeatedly asserts his dominance over the first man. Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorientating shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships between the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers.
The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as "A", the first man is "X", and the man who may be her husband is "M".
Production and style
Still from
L'année dernière à Marienbad; in this surreal image, the couples cast long shadows but the trees do not
The film is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the 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 to be incomprehensible. Among the notable images in the film is a scene in which two characters (and the camera) rush out of the château 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 châteaux and their grounds, including the Nymphenburg Palace and Schleissheim Palace in Bavaria. He edited them to produce a disorienting 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.[2]
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 2008 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.[3]
The music video for To the End, a 1994 single by British Rock group Blur, is based on the film.
References
- ^ According to Thomas Beltzer, in Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation, the film script may have been based in part on The Invention of Morel, a science fiction novel published in 1940 by the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares. The Invention of Morel is about a fugitive, hiding out alone on a deserted island who one day awakens to discover that the island is miraculously filled with anachronistically dressed people who, according to the text, “dance, stroll up and down, and swim in the pool, as if this were a summer resort like Los Teques or Marienbad." He later learns that they are creations of an inventor, Morel, whose recording machine captured the exact likenesses of a group of friends, which are "played" over and over again.
- ^ LA Weekly - Film+TV - Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" returns - J. Hoberman - The Essential Online Resource for Los Angeles
- ^ Making a Mess of Marienbad
Further reading
- Kyrou, Ado (1963) Le Surréalisme au Cinéma. Paris: Le Terrain Vague
- Leutrat, Jean-Louis (2000) L'Année dernière à Marienbad. London: British Film Institute
- Powell, Dilys (1989) The Golden Screen. London: Pavilion Books; pp. 183-84 (review published in The Sunday Times, 1962)
- Powell, Dilys (1991) The Dilys Powell Film Reader. Manchester: Carcanet; pp. 372-73 (review published in The Sunday Times, 1962, preceded by notes made during Sep 1961 - Feb 1962)
External links
| Films directed by Alain Resnais |
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| Feature films |
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| Short films |
L'aventure de Guy (1936) · Schéma d'une identification (1946) · Ouvert pour cause d'inventaire (1946) · Visite à Oscar Dominguez (1947) · Visite à Lucien Coutaud (1947) · Visite à Hans Hartung (1947) · Visite à Félix Labisse (1947) · Visite à César Doméla (1947) · Van Gogh (1947) · Portrait d'Henri Goetz (1947) · Le lait Nestlé (1947) · L'alcool tue (1947) · La bague (1947) · Journée naturelle (1947) · Van Gogh (1948) · Malfray (1948) · Les jardins de Paris (1948) · Châteaux de France (1948) · Guernica (1950) · Gauguin (1950) · Statues Also Die (1953) · Night and Fog (1955) · Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) · Le mystère de l'atelier quinze (1957) · Le chant du Styrène (1958)
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June 25, 1961
March 7, 1962
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