Last Year in Marienbad

Great Britain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD:it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada: LANGUAGES: French ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ),English ( Subtitles ),ANAMORPHIC WIDESCREEN (2.35:1), SPECIAL FEATURES: Cast/Crew Interview(s), Documentary, Interactive Menu, Scene Access, Short Film, Trailer(s),SYNOPSIS: In a huge, old-fashioned luxury hotel a stranger tries to persuade a married woman to run away with him, but it seems she hardly remembers the affair they may have had (or not?) last year at Marienbad. SCREENED/AWARDED AT: BAFTA Awards, Oscar Academy Awards, Venice Film Festival, Product Description

Terrific

Forget all prior claims you've read about Alain Resnais's 90 minute long, 1961 black and white film, Last Year In Marienbad (L'Année Dernière Á Marienbad, and Last Year At Marienbad in North America)- from the bad to the good, from publicity nonsense which declaims the three main characters are named after letters, when they are unnamed, and see it raw; for then you'll see why greatness is its own company. This is because the difference between this truly great film, a work of art considered an art film high point, and Carnival Of Souls, considered a B horror film, which was released a year later, are minimal. The similarities between the films are considerable, even though I doubt that the latter film's director, Herk Harvey, had even seen Last Year In Marienbad while making his only feature film. This is because Last Year In Marienbad truly is one of those films, or works of art, that, the moment it is experienced, the viewer connects with it as something they feel has always been. It is like that tune you hear, that becomes a Top 40 hit, and you swear you've known it for years.
In this way, the fact that Last Year In Marienbad has been dubbed one of the most influential films of all time should not surprise. Perhaps only Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fritz Lang's Metropolis, Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, Akira Kuroswawa's Seven Samurai, and Frank Capra's It Happened One Night can claim to have been more influential overall, and in their genres. Yet, in reality, Last Year In Marienbad is not so much influential as being a touchstone film- a film that got to a source, common to the human experience, before many other films did. Aside from Carnival Of Souls, the number of other films were profoundly influenced, or rather dipped their toes in the same waters as various aspects of this film, range from George Lucas's THX-1138 to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 and The Shining, from Ingmar Bergman's The Silence to Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup and George Romero's Night Of the Living Dead. Even the brilliant 1967 British television series The Prisoner and the low budget 1990s Canadian sci fi film Cube seem to have been influenced by this film in its M.C. Escherian manifolds. This is further proof that quality transcends ephemeral labeling....The film was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay, and won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival. Aside from all the other schools and -isms that lay claim to it, the one it is most often lumped with is the French New Wave cinema, yet, it has only a marginal affinity with the early seminal works of Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Resnais's film is very much a film that takes deep advantage of its art form's past, and subverts those forms in wholly opposite ways from the aforementioned directors', as well as artistically succeeding far beyond the art of those two, as well. In short, a difference of degree does become a difference of kind, despite the sloth of some critics to knee-jerkedly lump groups of artists, and their art, so haphazardly together. That such an utterly timeless fictive film as Last Year In Marienbad came from Resnais, who also made the hopelessly dated documentary film Night And Fog, shows the power of being willing to change technique to address a certain subject. And the dialogue, by Robbe-Grillet, although elliptical, has a power and depth that would open wells that later experimental films, like Louis Malle's My Dinner With Andre, would also mine.
But, as I admonished at the start, heed not any claims for this film, even mine. See it for yourself, for this is one of the great works of art that also acts as a de facto Rorschach Test for the percipient. Those addicted to the drudgery and predictability of formulaic Hollwood hackery will be bored senseless by the film. The remaining 1% or less of us will recognize Last Year In Marienbad as the great work of art it is. Sometimes, exclusivity has its benefits.
September 14, 2008

The Perfect Film

People tend to either love or hate this film. Whilst some adore it's labyrinthine, non-linear structure; the playfulness of the imagery; and the innate contradictions between the voice-over narrative and the visual imagery, others consider this irrelevant and tedious.

The subtlety of the film in both the auditory and visual modes encourages examination. Why do the figures in the garden cast shadows, when the garden itself doesn't? The film has the texture of a dream, reminiscent of the eerie paintings of Paul Delvaux and Giorgio de Chirico.

This is a film that all students of the subject should see. It is not an easy film to watch, but an endlessly rewarding one to consider and reconsider. It is a film for those who believe art should challenge. August 28, 2006

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