Last Year at Marienbad

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 movie directed by Alain Resnais, starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff. It is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the exact temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question.

The oneiric nature of the film has fascinated and baffled audiences and critics, some hailing it as a masterpiece, whilst others find it incomprehensible. 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.



Links:

"Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation" by Thomas Beltzer
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/10/marienbad.html

N.Y. Times Review by Bosley Crowther
http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=28413

At the Crossroads:
"Deleuze begins his redefinition of film consciousness by taking issue with this multiple view of several consciousnesses to a view of no determinate consciousness. Rather than present particular views on the world from narrative centers, Deleuze's interpretation of the forks and splitting of unfurling imagery shows that "the characters themselves are attributes in a logic of memory presented by the film's overall strategy" (Rodowick 102), which moves by leaps, temporal disjunction, and fractured identity. This crucial step means that if images are to be read through a logic of memory, we are no longer in the realm of commonly accepted subjectivity but rather within a machinic series emanating from a molecular level of process. This is the formation of realities and objects through assemblages, which include and absorb the brain and body within the indiscemibility of matter and memory."
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3768/is_200401/ai_n9468303