Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année dernière à Marienbad) won the Golden Lion at Venice 1961. The film's reception on initial release was sharply polarised — adored by a segment of the international art-cinema community, dismissed by another segment as deliberate inscrutability — and the debate has continued. The film entered the Sight & Sound poll's upper tier in 2022, sixty years after its release.

In an enormous baroque hotel — the production used Schloss Schleißheim, the Schloss Nymphenburg and the Schloss Mirabell as combined locations — a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) repeatedly insists to a woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the previous year, perhaps in Marienbad, and that she promised to leave with him. She is not so sure. Sacha Pitoëff plays a third figure who is described in the screenplay as her husband or possibly her lover. The film's structural conceit is that the same possible memories are revisited repeatedly, in different chronological orders, with different outcomes, and that the audience must decide what the actual events were — or whether actuality is the right framework.

Resnais's collaboration with screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet (who would later direct his own films in the same broad register) produced one of the foundational pieces of European modernist cinema. Sacha Vierny's photography of the baroque-hotel exteriors and interiors, the geometrical garden sequences, and the recurring shot-compositions established a visual register that has continued to influence subsequent art cinema across continents.