Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad) won the Golden Lion at Venice in 1961. Its first reception was sharply split, adored by part of the international art-cinema audience and dismissed by another part as deliberate inscrutability, and the argument has never really stopped. It entered the upper tier of the Sight & Sound poll in 2022, sixty years after its release.

In an enormous baroque hotel (the production combined Schloss Schleißheim, the Schloss Nymphenburg and the Schloss Mirabell as locations), a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) keeps insisting to a woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the year before, perhaps in Marienbad, and that she promised to leave with him. She is not so sure. Sacha Pitoëff plays a third figure, described in the screenplay as her husband or possibly her lover. The same possible memories come round again and again, in different orders and with different outcomes, and it is left to the audience to decide what actually happened, or whether "actually" is even the right question to ask of this film.

Resnais's collaboration with the screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, who would later direct his own films in a similar vein, produced one of the foundational works of European modernist cinema. Sacha Vierny's photography of the hotel, inside and out, of the geometric gardens and of the compositions that keep recurring set a visual register that art cinema on several continents has drawn on ever since.