L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) 1961 – 1962 M
When
3.00pm, Sat 17 Aug 2019 (122 mins)Where
Gallery of Modern Art & Cinema A
About
L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) 1961
Last Year at Marienbad 1961 screens with short film La Jetée 1962
La Jetée 1962
Chris Marker's monumental La Jetée is a shining example of nuclear-inflected science fiction. The film is a dystopian puzzlebox - it tells the story of a man drafted to take part in time travel experiments in an attempt to avert the nuclear devastation wrought by a Third World War. His almost monomaniacal obsession with a childhood memory of a woman on a jetty and a subsequent fatal incident has granted him a unique level of mental resilience against the pressures inherent to the experiments.
L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) 1961
‘Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad) has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story.’ Criterion
94 minutes | PG
La Jetée 1962
La Jetée will screen from an archival 16mm print.
Chris Marker's monumental La Jetée is a shining example of nuclear-inflected science fiction. The film is a dystopian puzzlebox - it tells the story of a man drafted to take part in time travel experiments in an attempt to avert the nuclear devastation wrought by a Third World War. His almost monomaniacal obsession with a childhood memory of a woman on a jetty and a subsequent fatal incident has granted him a unique level of mental resilience against the pressures inherent to the experiments.
Marker utilises the unusual technique of (almost) only using still photographs with narration to play this narrative out on screen. His arresting monochrome photography establishes a world shrouded in shadows and decay, set against the comparative resplendence of the pre-war scenes in Paris. Despite only playing a minor role in the drive of the plot, the film's nuclear connection reveals itself in this fascination with the titanic destruction of a society and the desperate isolation of those left behind. It, like the two films with which it shares its screening date, also engages with conceptions of memory, guilt, and trauma. A monumental work despite being less than half an hour in length, La Jetée is an unmissable cinematic achievement.
28 minutes | M
Production Credits
L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)
- Cinematographers: Chris Marker, Sacha Vierny
- Editors: Jean Ravel, Jasmine Chasney, Henri Colpi
- Production Companies: Argos Films, Radio-Télévision Française
- Print Source: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra
- Rights: Umbrella Entertainment
- Screening Format: 16mm, DCP
- Director: Alain Resnais
- Script: Alain Robbe-Grillet
- Producers: Pierre Courau, Anatole Dauman, Raymond Froment
- Production Designer: Jacques Saulnier
- Music: Francis Seyrig
- Cast: Sacha Pitoëff, Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi
- Print Source / Rights: Studio Canal
- Year: 1961
- Runtime: 94 minutes
- Country: France
- Languages: French, German, (with English subtitles)
- Colour: Black & White
La Jetée
- Director/Script/Cinematographer: Chris Marker
- Editor: Jean Ravel
- Production Companies: Argos Films, Radio-Télévision Française
- Print Source: National Film and Sound Archive of Australia, Canberra
- Rights: Umbrella Entertainment
- Screening Format: 16mm, 35mm
- Year: 1962
- Runtime: 28 minutes
- Country: France
- Languages: French, German, (with English subtitles)
- Sound: Mono
- Colour: Black & White