Last Year in Marienbad
| Last Year at Marienbad | |
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| Directed by | Alain Resnais |
| Produced by | Pierre Courau Raymond Froment Robert Dorfmann Anatole Dauman |
| Written by | Alain Robbe-Grillet |
| Starring |
Delphine Seyrig Giorgio Albertazzi Sacha Pitoëff |
| Music by | Francis Seyrig |
| Cinematography | Sacha Vierny |
| Edited by | Jasmine Chasney Henri Colpi |
| Distributed by | Cocinor |
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Release date
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Running time
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94 minutes |
| Country | France Italy |
| Language | French |
L'Année dernière à Marienbad (released in the US as Last Year at Marienbad and in the UK as Last Year in Marienbad) is a 1961 French-Italian film directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet.
Last Year at Marienbad 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, even if it never quite ventures into surrealism. The film's dreamlike nature has both fascinated and baffled viewers; many have hailed the work as a masterpiece, while others consider it incomprehensible.
At a social gathering at a château or baroque hotel, a man approaches a woman. He claims they met the year before at Marienbad and is convinced that she is waiting there for him. The woman insists they have never met. A second man, who may be the woman's husband, repeatedly asserts his dominance over the first man, including beating him several times at a mathematical game (a version of Nim). Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships among 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".
L'Année dernière à Marienbad was created out of an unusual collaboration between its writer Alain Robbe-Grillet and its director Alain Resnais. Robbe-Grillet described its basis: "Alain Resnais and I were able to collaborate only because we had seen the film in the same way from the start, and not just in the same general outlines but exactly, in the construction of the least detail as in its total architecture. What I wrote might have been what was already in [his] mind; what he added during the shooting was what I might have written. ...Paradoxically enough, and thanks to the perfect identity of our conceptions, we almost always worked separately."
Robbe-Grillet wrote a screenplay which was very detailed, specifying not only the décor and gestures but also the placement and movement of the camera and the sequencing of shots in the editing. Resnais filmed the script with great fidelity, making only limited alterations which seemed necessary. Robbe-Grillet was not present during the filming. When he saw the rough-cut, he said that he found the film just as he had intended it, while recognising how much Resnais had added to make it work on the screen and to fill out what was absent from the script. Robbe-Grillet then published his screenplay, illustrated by shots from the film, as a "ciné-roman" (ciné-novel).
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