Home Video Hovel: Last Year at Marienbad, by Scott Nye

Before there was Last Year at Marienbad, someone had to make it. Seems simple enough to say, but how many films can you really say that about? That someone had to make it; that its existence is now so inextricable, so fundamental to not only the development of cinema but to crafting the very essence of it. That without it, we would know a good deal less about what the art form is.

The film existed for me a good deal before I first saw it. It wasn’t always so easy to come by, and I have Movie Madness to thank for stocking out-of-print DVDs. In that time, as with any film you have to wait to see, a concept of it forms in your head, an idea forged from things you might have read about it and – more often for the very great films – an abstract notion of it that you’ve unconsciously received. The surprise of first seeing Marienbad was not that it was haunting, terrifying, moving, or wondrous. The surprise was that it so completely felt exactly like that impression I had formed. That it seemed to already be part of me, laying in wait to take shape and fall into motion.

There are elements of Marienbad that have nothing to do with this feeling, but there is a whole lot about this movie that has everything to do with that feeling. That you already know everyone you meet. That they already know you, maybe better than you’d like. That you are but a passenger towards your fate rather than its actor. That you’re doomed to repeat your mistakes, or to come up short in your efforts. That we’re all only performing ourselves, behaving in ways that tell us nothing new; we already know everything we ever will.

I have never found the film as cold, unemotional, or inaccessible as some of its reputation suggests. I think it’s as much about the essence of living as any piece of art has ever glimpsed.

The premise is simple, easy to communicate, and intriguing – while staying at a luxury resort, a man (Giorgio Albertazzi) tells a woman (Delphine Seyrig) that they met last year, perhaps in Marienbad or perhaps in several other such resorts, and may have had an affair, and may have even planned to run away together the next year. She insists they never met. She is at the resort with another man (Sacha Pitoëff) who has the manner of a husband, but their relationship is no clearer than the woman’s and the first man’s. None of the characters have names. The film proceeds through a series of memories and imagined events that meditate on a conflict without illuminating it. Sacha Vierny’s camera wanders through halls, across gardens, pushing and gliding and pulling and panning in ways that are alternately elegant and abrasive. We’ll never know if any tells the truth, or if there’s a truth to tell.

Director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet were a natural fit to collaborate – the former’s Hiroshima mon amour was an excavation of collective memory and an abstract portrait of trauma in the same way the latter’s novels (such as The Voyeur and Jealousy) obsessed over all the details surrounding a central subject, rather than directly tackling or in some ways even acknowledging that subject the way literature had in the past. Their collaboration was often oppositional, and one can see why they never worked together again (Robbe-Grillet directed his first feature soon after), but that sense of competing impulses and interpretations is much of what makes the film tick.

More than nearly any other film, the sense of Marienbad’s characters being definite people is particularly abstract. They are almost suggestions of people, embodiments of elements of the id, or what we imagine people should look like – always dressed extravagantly, always changing clothes to fit the particular emotion of the moment. Each beautiful, in a slightly strange way. Pitoëff, tall and imposing, gaunt, almost skeletal. Albertazzi, his Italian accent reportedly a reason the film was denied entry at the Cannes Film Festival (Resnais’s vocal opposition to the Algerian War potentially another). For Seyrig, too, her voice was a liability. She had trouble finding work until Resnais cast her and made her an icon.

The film became an icon itself, on its own and for the kind of film it represented (Pauline Kael’s essay “The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties” being a particularly engaging example of something with which I entirely disagree). It continues to be debated, disparaged (recent Letterboxd reviews include “Gf had to explain it to me after” and “may be a load of artful crap”), and, fortunately, celebrated. Criterion released it on Blu-ray in 2009, temporarily pulling it from the out-of-print bin, before losing the rights in 2013. Kino then toured a 4K restoration in 2019, and released a Blu-ray edition later that year. While that edition built valuably on the supplements, providing a commentary by the great Tim Lucas and a wonderfully long visual essay, I found the transfer to be thin and disposable, all cleanliness without much life.

Kino’s new 4K edition is all the more a breath of fresh air and a revelation. The image quality is staggering, shimmering and robust, as though redefining the term “silver screen.” It embraces the visual boldness of the film, the way slight halos seem to form around people, as though they were etched in stone left out in the sun or carved from light itself. The overall color temperature is considerably lighter than the Criterion release, which feels correct – detail is clearer (you can actually make out the “Hitchcock cameo” rather than needing to search for it, for example) and the range of light and shadow feels wider. While it’s difficult to fully trust these things, it reminded me much more than past releases of how the film looked when I saw it on 35mm. The Criterion edition still has that great “unrestored” soundtrack, so it will be difficult to choose in the future (not that there’s anything exactly “wrong” with the audio here, but the Criterion is quite distinct for that inclusion), but where I previously thought nothing would unseat that release, this could easily become my go-to for future viewings.

Kino’s ported the supplements from their Blu-ray release, and why wouldn’t they? Tim Lucas, one of the most incisive and educated in the game, nimbly dances through the film’s movements, keeping pace with what’s onscreen and tying it all to its production history, impact, interpretations, and his own insights. It’s an absorbing, fascinating listen. Should you want to go further down the rabbit hole that is this film, TIFF”s James Quandt provides a great visual essay called “Last Year at Marienbad A to Z” that walks playfully – if somewhat stiffly (Quandt isn’t quite as engaging a speaker as Lucas) – through various elements of the film. Letters may stand for subjects (Auteur, Rape), people associated with the film (Vierny, Sacha), or those that inspired it (Ernst, Max; Orpheus and Eurydice). Volker Schlondorff rounds out the experience with recollections of working as a second assistant director on it, largely due to his fluency in German and French. His anecdotes range from the insightful (Resnais directed the actors to not consider psychology at all) to the slightly perverse (he still retains the napkins Delphine Seyrig used to dab her lipstick on set).

Finally, Kino includes Resnais’s short film Toute la memoire du monde, which may not be as bold and daring as Night and Fog or as formally playful as Le chant du styrène (to cite two of his more famous shorts), but which has always been my favorite from that period of his work. It takes us through the workings of the Bibliothèque national de France, but is really a reflection on the nature of knowledge and the exhilarating if necessarily incomplete effort to catalog it. Makes for an ideal comparison to Marienbad, no?

Kino’s new 4K UHD edition more than does justice to Resnais’s landmark film. It is a true standout release for the format, and quite possibly the new definitive edition of the film. I cannot recommend it highly enough.