The Cinema of Alain Resnais

I originally intended this as a reply to Movie Tab II, but I decided that I could open up a new thread, so that is why this is presented as a "movie review". I intend to get into Night and Fog next, and then try to get ahold of all those Resnais films I saw once 30 years ago. Please feel free to add anything you know about the man and his films.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959)

Back in 1976, when I was getting my Biology degree from the University of California at Irvine, this barely-20-year-old punk junior had the revelation that he would rather study movies than become a doctor, so I eventually took 11 classes in film (the equivalent of one full year of college), and none was more esoteric (at least at the time) than the Cinema of Alain Resnais. Week after week, I watched films (on 16mm film - no VCRs at the time) which were beautifully shot and edited, but which seemed to be so highly personal that I had an extremely difficult time trying to penetrate what I thought to be their meanings. However, the fact that UCI could actually get their hands on all those films proved to me that I was getting a pretty good education in world cinema. To this day, this is the only Resnais film which I've seen more than once, with the exception of one of my Criterion pride and joys, Night and Fog. Now that I've seen it three times and am over 50, I feel that I'm mature enough to discuss it intelligently.



Before I get into the film proper, I want to mention that from interviews, Alain Resnais doesn't believe himself to be an auteur, and in fact, he mostly seems to debunk the idea of the theory itself (unless he's lying). He goes out of his way to credit all his co-creators of his films, especially the screenwriters. He also believes himself to be, first and foremost, an editor, and he calls editing a "trade" and not an art. Well, back 30 years ago, I would never have believed that because his films all carried a highly personal stamp, mostly in theme, cinematography and escalating editing techniques, but maybe Resnais is correct in the fact that he's responsible for his films but he goes out of his way to surround himself with people who are on the same wavelength. I realize that this is just common sense, but here I was today, watching Resnais say that he is not an auteur, and yet he seems to be just about the most idiosyncratic filmmaker I've experienced.



The film begins with some lowkey, yet somewhat upsetting, music playing over a credit which has the background of the opening shot above. When the credits end, we see what appears to be a quiet naked couple holding onto each other for dear life, but there bodies are covered by something resembling ash which is falling from above. Before we ever see their faces, the couple, speaking in French, seem to almost chant about how they met in Hiroshima, what they know about the A-Bomb which was dropped 14 years earlier, and how the male just never believes what the female says. We come to learn that the female is a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) who is in Hiroshima finishing up her part in a "Peace Film" and that the male is a Japanese architect-politician (Eiji Okada). They are both married to others, but they have found with each other an intimacy which they have never had with their spouses. We eventually learn why the woman relates so strongly to her experiences in Hiroshima, although the man remains a bit more of an enigma (although Emmanuelle Riva is an incredibly attractive and responsive human being whom everyone should find worth their time).

Unfortunately, I cannot find many of the most stunning visual scenes in the film. However, these should give you a notion of how intensely romantic and sexual they are. The film could not be rated more than a PG in our current system, but the maturity level of the actual exchanges between the couple basically requires an adult "education" and probably a rough one at that. Without giving away too much, I would subtitle this film (and almost all of Resnais' work) as War and Rememberance. Apparently, scripter Marguerite Duras came up with most of the specific ideas which enabled Resnais to adapt a documentary he was shooting about Hiroshima (along the lines of the Auschwitz-set Night and Fog) into a narrative feature about two people, traumatized by WWII, who meet and completely let themselves go with each other, yet they also become embroiled with the passion and true concern that brings back all the memories of the past.



Ultimately, Hiroshima Mon Amour is a film full of images and emotion. I have no problem at all if someone wanted to call it a masterpiece because in my world, it should be seen and reseen. It's much more inviting than many of Resnais' later "picture puzzles" with similar themes. However, I find the need to warn people who aren't all that familiar with 50-year-old European cinema that, at times, they may be confused or bored by it, just as I was 30+ years ago. My rating is still an honest rating for me, but I do have a love for this film which seems to grow a bit with each word I type. Just thinking about the low-angle tracking shot when the Woman walks down a brightly-lit Hiroshima street at night is making me smile. Yet, on the other hand, although most of what's in the film is truly affecting, it still seems overlong at 90 minutes, and I don't believe they ever came up with a proper ending, although it certainly is a poetic one.




P.S. Sarah told me that the first thing she thought of while watching Hiroshima Mon Amour is that it reminded her of Brief Encounter. I hugged her and told her I thought that was great! Then, I asked her to dig deeper

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I enjoyed reading your post Mark, and it's a film I've never seen but am drawn to it now

Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955)

This film, the first Resnais film I ever watched, is probably too potent for me to even discuss. It's 32 minutes long, and it's equally divided up into what the WWII Nazis at the concentration camps (Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Struthof, Mathausen) documented in B&W with what the Allies found when they "liberated" the camps, and color footage of what the camps looked like 10 years later. The narration, written by poet Jean Cayrol and spoken by Michel Bouquet (Le Jouet, the original The Toy) is incredibly moving, as is the powerful music by Hanns Eisler. For me to even try to put what this movie conveys into some critical context seems to make me less of a human being, but I chose this as a thread, so I'll give it a try.

One of the subversive things about Night and Fog is that, even though almost NONE of its footage was readily available before the film's release, most people today believe they know the full measure of the atrocities committed at these camps. If you watch Night and Fog, which is highly philosophical and almost subliminal, you may well wonder what the big deal is today. However, I have showed this film to all my high school students; you know, the ones who think that the coolest scenes in Saving Private Ryan are the ones where the guy on Omaha Beach takes off the helmet which saved his life and immediately has his brains splattered, and the scene with the dueling snipers, where Jackson puts a hole in the German's shooting eye. Anyway, they just sit there, reading the subtitles and wondering what the point is, and then, all of a sudden, in the final eight minutes, the film turns into the most powerful thing you've ever experienced. All my female students are crying (just like this big wuss), but my male students aren't exactly crying, but they are quite impressed by the images which they could never imagine that they would ever see without special effects.

As I mentioned in my first post, Resnais films are mostly about War and Rememberance. This film is the most perfect example of this in his entire filmography. At the end of Night and Fog, the narrator wonders if man will ever fully escape from enslaving and killing his fellow man when he finds it "necessary". The narrator also wonders who will ever take responsibility for the unspeakable horrors I will not show you here. Apparently, Resnais intended Night and Fog as a commentary on France's current occupation of Algeria in the mid-1950s and how his own beloved people could follow in the Nazis' footsteps by not learning from history. In fact, there are a few implications in Night and Fog that the French Vichy government aided the Nazis in their extermination of undesirables, but since this film was sponsored by the 1955 French government, anything along those lines is supposed to have been censored.

All I can say is that if you can watch this film without becoming an overflowing wall of tears, then you're a much better man than I. I'm not actually sure if the film appeals more to one's brain, heart, soul or philosophy, but I truly believe everyone should watch Night and Fog at least once. I'll understand if you can't take it again. but I'm up to about eight times now, and I feel good about myself every time I show it to a new set of students. I know; I'm reprehensible.

Listening again to the Resnais interview in Night and Fog, the only thing the French government wanted cut from Night and Fog was a French policeman at a way station for the transport of the Jews to the camps, so Resnais says that, since he never even realized the policeman was in the film, he agreed to have his hat's insignia "washed out", so in that way, there actually was no "censorship" by the government. Resnais wasn't intending to comment on policemen doing their job during WWII. Rather, he wanted to show the world what really happened, and if anything debunks the "concept" that the Holocaust never happened, Night and Fog does, and it still reinforces Resnais' contempt for the 1955 French government's handling of Algeria.


Night and Fog


1950s French-Algeria War

La Guerre est finie (Alain Resnais, 1966)



Alain Resnais is obviously a political filmmaker. His films undoubtedly reflect the politics of the underdog, and more often than not, they also reflect a leftist leaning, but he already said that he's not an auteur, so maybe Spanish scripter Jorge Semprún (Z, Special Section) is truly responsible (don't count on it!) for the message of this film. Well, being a Resnais film, the message isn't really difficult to decipher, but the true meaning is often open to interpretation. Resnais focuses on Yves Montand's Diego, a Spaniard fighting against the Franco regime while supporting his Leninist allies. He has spent most of his life aiding and abetting what he sees as his people's chance for freedom, but having reached middle age and having to live six months of any year in France, he seems more concerned with his friends' survival than he does for broad political gestures which he knows from experience will accomplish very little.



Resnais' trademark editing techniques are mostly relegated to the first part of the film. We see what Diego either recalls or imagines of all the various times he has been put into a similar position; where he has to go through all the motions of covering himself and trying to help comrades, several of whom he doesn't even know. Interestingly enough, these early scenes seem to focus on the dozens of women he's either followed or witnessed, so yes, fighting the good Lenin fight apparently makes you something of a stud. After the suspenseful opening scene where Diego and his comrade are pulled over at the French border by the Authorities, the next important scene is his meeting of Nadine (Geneviève Bujold in her film debut). In what amounts to a surrealistic sex scene, Nadine seems to float around the room (while instantaneously undressing, with nothing but a solid white background under her). Predictably, the next scene seems to show her awaking in bed with night clothes on, so was it a dream or not?



The film's title seems to carry multiple meanings. Is the war against fascism over? Is Diego's specific attempt at war over? One of the interesting things about Nadine's character is that even though she's French, she and other twentysomething French revolutionaries want to carry on the war in a much more violent way than the oldtimers' concept of a "General Strike" in Spain on or about May Day. But the young are always gung ho and "impatient", as Diego calls them, and he should know since he's a "professional revolutionary". Actually, the deepest relationship which Diego has is with his "girl friend" Marianne (Ingrid Thulin), who has been together with him for nine years now, but she's starting to feel a bit shortchanged in both the honesty and the intimacy department. She wants to spend the rest of her life with Diego and have his children, but Diego has spent so much of his life using false names and false personas that he has a difficult time believing he can change or become tied down to something so petit bourgeois.




OK, I think I've been going on a bit too much about the politics involved in the film, and personally, I find that part to be pretty outdated. However, I still think the film works as a low-key political paranoid thriller. I find the best parts of the film to be those where you see somebody is following someone else, but you aren't really sure which of the characters they are following. Then, you take the veteran Diego, and once he realizes somebody is following someone, he decides to follow the "somebody". Diego spends most of the film either paranoid that somebody is after him or oblivious to the fact that his closest comrades no longer trust him. In fact, one of Resnais' most interesting conceits is that he has a narrator discuss to the audience what Diego is thinking and feeling, but the narrator is not Yves Montand! It's actually the screenwriter, Jorge Semprún. That's just another way in which Resnais seems to reinvent cinema, even in a film which a majority of people will have a difficult time diving into. Just remember, if you watch this film, that it's a thriller for people who feel paranoia whenever they leave the confines of their home, even though that's what the character does on a day-to-day basis. He seems attracted to the "mundane, outmoded fear of giving his life for a hopeless cause."

Thats a pretty low score for Hiroshima Mon Amour -- a little disappointing, I might say. Considering it is one of my favorite films. But very nice review.

Have you seen Last Year at Marienbad? You might have some difficulty, because for the most part it is out of print (as far as I know). Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay, so naturally its very complex but extraordinary.

Great thread Mark

I was gonna mention Marienbad too. I've written my own (fairly giddy) review of it, but hearing anyone else's take on that clockwork fruit of a film would be very welcome indeed (if only to convince me that it really does exist )

Think i might have to expose myself to the first two films you mention above too. They look well worth the trip.

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Virtual Reality chatter on a movie site? Got endless amounts of it here. Reviews over here

Yes, I saw Last Year at Marienbad over 30 years ago at college when I saw the three above, as well as Muriel, Je t'aime, je t'aime, and a couple of others. There is no way I can discuss Marienbad again without rewatching it.

You know what? I spaced out because I remember watching most of Coeurs (2006) earlier this year on cable, but I didn't write it up because I missed the beginning. It seemed about .

Coeurs [aka Private Fears in Public Places] (Alain Resnais, 2006)



This most recent Alain Resnais film, released when he was 84, was on TV today so I rewatched it. He does have a film coming out this year in France. This is an adaptation of Alan Ayckbourn's 2004 play Private Fears in Public Places, transplanted from England to Paris. It follows six people whose lives intersect, but the common thread seems to be the inability to find love or, perhaps more to the point, the lack of communication between loved ones over an extended period of time. All the characters in the film have either lost loved ones or are in the process of breaking up, trying to start over or maybe even trying to communicate with others in baffling ways.



For example, a major character, played by Sabine Azéma, is a devout Christian who tries to cheer up her coworker at a property rental agency, played by André Dussollier, by giving him VHS tapes of a TV show where personalities share their most-inspiring religious songs. The strange thing about these tapes is that somewhere before the show ends, what appears to be a homemade tape comes on showing what seems to be the Christian woman stripping (we can't see above her neck). There are several other offbeat tangents which the film pursues, so I'll let those be for now, at least until someone whats to discuss the film.


Alain Resnais

As far as Resnais' style is concerned, this film is far different than his earlier films in that he basically tells the story straightforwardly. He only uses one idiosyncratic editing technique throughout, and that's the superimposition of snow falling when he cuts from one story to the next. I can only recall two times where he edited between stories without the snow, and I haven't quite convinced myself that it may have been because there was a 98.6 degree connection between those scenes or characters. I'm not really sure if the snow connotes the coldness with which the characters struggle to find any human contact or warmth in their lives. The snow is actually seen to be falling on two characters having an indoor conversation during one of the more touching scenes near the end of the film. Watch it and tell me what you think it means and what the theme is.

Mon oncle d'Amérique (Alain Resnais, 1980)



Resnais teamed up with scripter Jean Gruault (The Wild Child) and scientific author Henri Laborit to create one of his most open, inviting films with this, even though it's obviously a Resnais film and will ask its viewers to work to get the maximum pleasure from this film. After all, you don't want to watch a flick and become filled with anguish, do you? This movie begins with Laborit explaining how different forms of life survive and react, and eventually he settles on humans and the four basic ways their brains respond to stimuli, based on their upbringing and its relationship to societal standards. We then see the quick intercuting of the early life stories of the three central characters whose lives all eventually intersect in the late 1970s: the fiftyish politician Jean (Roger Pierre) who suffers from kidney stones, the 30-ish Communist actress Janine (Nicole Garcia), and the 40-ish accountant René (Gérard Depardieu) who strives to rise above his station.



Laborit quite convincingly explains that man's four basic "natural" responses are for survival (food, water, procreation), distinction between pleasure and pain, "fight or flight" (the need to conquer a foe or escape from a stronger one) and inhibition (which causes anguish which leads to many physical illnesses and perhaps even suicide). The intercutting between the three characters and Dr. Laborit lasts a full half hour, and it also includes all the characters' favorite film personalities; for Jean, it's Danielle Darrieux (Madame de... herself), for Janine, it's Jean Marais (Jean Cocteau's Beast and Orpheus), and for René, it's Jean Gabin. After the half hour, the film falls into a more "normal" pattern of editing and storytelling, although it's still unclear how the characters relate to each other and the scientist.




While this film maintains Resnais' preoccupation with how the past influences the present and future, it adds totally new elements to his filmography. The fact that a real scientist is basically describing the story of humankind through these three characters and utilizes rats in cages being indoctrinated to stimuli to show you how rats and humans behave similarly based on their education makes this film especially unique. For fans of David Lynch's Inland Empire, this film has humans with rat heads running around the real world and their homes (in the equivalent of their cages) more than 25 years earlier, plus there is a world-renowned scientist trying to explain why they do it! Resnais works in several new editorial techniques (yes, they reappear near the end of the film too!), but this film just seems much more human, and hard as it may be to believe, much more funny than the earlier films in this thread. Although the movie does get quite tragic near the end, it contains more outright laughs than any Resnais film I've seen, and it's often because Laborit is just so deadpan about what humans do and why they do it that when you see actors doing it to recreate how rats in cages act it's a bit weird but much more liberating and humorous. Mon oncle d'Amérique may well be the "lightest" Resnais film, and therefore, his open door to a new group of prospective fans. I recommend you check it out.


Henri Laborit

Good review, Mark. I haven't seen it, but I'll add it to my queue...

I have to say I expected higher scores for films from a director you made a separate thread on. :\

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As I've explained elsewhere, if the content seems to interest you or you enjoy Resnais, just add one popcorn box to my rating. My ratings are mine, and don't belong to elitists or "the masses". Oh, and if you think I overrate mainstream films, just subtract one box. I don't write "reviews" or start threads so that I can post the rating. The rating is not as important as the writing, at least to me.

Have you heard about the Criterion release of Last Year at Marienbad, Mark? Thought you might be interested...

http://www.criterion.com/films/1517

I recently had my first look at Resnais with Hiroshima Mon Amour, which I really liked; I suspect it will look even better a second time around. I am extremely excited about the aforementioned Criterion release of Marienbad, which I think is up in June.

Also, he just picked up a lifetime achievement award at Cannes.

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the angel stayed until something died, one more murder suicide

Muriel, or the Time of the Return (Alain Resnais, 1963)



My first encounter with Muriel (and Resnais) came in the mid-1970s when I was a student at the University of California at Irvine. For some reason, this film annoyed me like almost no other. Resnais is a master at using editing in original ways and constructing intellectual puzzles out of his films, and this one really seemed almost beyond pretentious to me at the time. Today, I see the film as being much easier to grasp, although I still see it as a film for a highly-specialized audience. Resnais' trademark non-linear and even misleading editing is still on display here although the actual point of the film seems extremely clear to me now.



Muriel was Resnais' third film (after Hiroshima, mon amour and Last Year at Marienbad) in a trilogy which highlighted rememberances of the past, and in some ways, although it's the fuzziest in its specifics, it seems the clearest in its intentions. Basically, the film takes place in rebuilt (after WWII bombings) Boulogne, France, where Hélène (Delphine Seyrig, made up to look about 20 years older than she was) greets her ex-lover Alphonse (Jean-Pierre Kérien) and his niece Françoise (Nita Klein) at the railway station and brings them back to her home/antique shop where Hélène's stepson Bernard (Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée) also lives. Both men have recently returned from Algeria although they never met each other there. This film is set during the Algerian Revolution, and Muriel is Bernard's fiancee who's never shown in the film.



Almost immediately, things prove to be not what they seem. Characters are living lies, they're mixing up their pasts with other characters, and they come together only to seem to try to drift even further apart. Muriel does beg the question whether people on any level can really know each other and share themselves. This doesn't just mean lovers, but parents and their children and friends too. Muriel paints a picture of a world where people make overtures at closeness and changing their lives for the better, but in reality, they seem all too comfortable living in the past, even when that past is a complete fabrication. When you add in some of Resnais' machine-gun-paced editing, the film does become something of an endurance test to sit through with basically no traditional entertainment value at all, except for the possibility of unravelling a couple of mysteries involving characters' past (and present) lives. Even so, the acting is excellent and Resnais' first use of color in a feature film does pay off occasionally in a striking visual juxtaposition. I'll admit that I can get into the film better now because I have a good friend who basically lives in the past and keeps embroidering his past, even when he knows that I won't buy it. Of course, this friend is only trying to cover up his own insecurities and unhappiness with his present. In Muriel, Resnais is taking the entire country of France to task for their bloody participation in Algeria, and he's doing it almost subliminally since the French censors let him off scot free without forcing him to edit any of his film.

To answer anyone who wonders why I've devoted an entire thread to Resnais when I seem to give his films low ratings, I want to mention that my ratings tend to reflect more what I think people in general will think about a certain film. My ratings are not meant necessarily for people who already are fans of a certain film or director. Nevertheless, I admire Resnais and if he'd only made Night and Fog, he'd be worthy of his own thread. I can appreciate Resnais' films more on an intellectual and cinematic level (except for Night and Fog) than on an emotional or storytelling one. Even so, I far prefer Resnais' form of intellectualism and political-activism-through-cinema than that of Jean-Luc Godard, so basically I started up this thread because I believe that Resnais is underseen and underexposed, and I, for one, know that he has a sense of humor because I've seen several witty interviews of his on the various DVDs I watch. Alain Resnais is 87 and has finished his latest film Wild Grass which will be released later this year.


Resnais on the left



Resnais on the set of Wild Grass (2009).

I saw Hiroshima, Mon Amour a couple years ago. I almost remember the woman's story as if it were a separate movie from the love affair. It is different in tone and the cinematography feels different and the city of Nevers, France is beautiful and medieval when juxtaposed to the brand new Hiroshima built by the main male character among others (he is an architect). The character of the man is only known through his relationship to this lovely and nutty actress, yet he feels like the sum of everything he has lost.

The movie also seemed a little self-indulgent and narcisissitc to me as did the main female character as it equates the bombing of Hiroshima with one woman's lost love and lost sanity. The man lost his city and his family and lord knows what else, but the film is tied up in the young woman's loss. It just seems to me more than a matter of degrees of loss but of a lack of sensitivity on the part of the film makers.

Maybe I am picking nits but that was my gut reaction to this movie.

Still I liked the melodrama of the story that takes place in Nevers, France.

I wouldn't mind seeing La Guerre est Finie because I love Yves Montand.

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Louise Vale first woman to play Jane Eyre in the flickers.

Alright, let's revive this thread with some much-needed discussion on this Left Bank Cinema pioneer. OK I just reviewed this post and noticed it may come off as pretentious, elitist, and completely presumptive and vague. But such are the risks when discussing this film; pretension is inevitable!

Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais has always been fascinated with Time--its relativity, its effect on people and places, and its influence on truth. Many of his films have addressed the ambiguous nature of memory, and time's ability to distort it, heighten it, or create an entirely new reality. In Night and Fog, the director offers a bucolic, sweeping image of a Polish landscape; the scene's stillness evokes peace and lasting beauty. Then, without warning, the countryside is overcome with documentary footage of postwar ruin and prisoner liberation--this was Auschwitz. Resnais contrasts the exact same setting in two vastly different eras to illustrate the power of time. In Hiroshima mon amour, the director creates a similar effect through use of archival war footage, flashbacks, and repetition of dialogue and scenes. The film's elliptical narrative creates a film structured according to memories and moments, time is relative. Comparable techniques are employed in Muriel or the Time of Return and The War is Over. But none comes so close to perfection as Last Year at Marienbad, which transcends the medium of cinema to become a lasting work of modernist art.


Characters stand still as pawns on a chessboard, no different from the landscaping that surrounds them. Over the course of the film they will be moved in accordance with faulty memory.

With Last Year at Marienbad, Resnais constructs a Delphic labyrinth of cyclical time and vacillating awareness, and walks a fine line between artifice and reality. The film is at once impenetrable and hypnotic. A plot summary is nearly impossible, and not really necessary to an understanding of the picture, since its narrative is fragmented beyond the point of lucidity. Basically, a man encounters a woman at a baroque hotel-the setting is more a character than the actual people-and he insists they met last year at Marienbad and promised to run away together. The woman does not remember this, but through flashbacks and the power of suggestion, the pair creates a reality in which they did meet.


The woman is subject to the man's memory of her; she is as much an object as the ornate furniture that surrounds her.

Enigmatic shots down corridors capture the exaggerated architecture and art of the hotel. In some instances, the difference between the characters and the environment's sculptures, paintings, and landscaping is blurred. This is just as well, as the characters are not so much three-dimensional people as objects of memory and perspective, moved like pawns throughout the maze-like estate. The characters' presence at any moment appears to be utterly circumstantial-they don't even have names. What is important is the memories they create. And Resnais is not so concerned with the mechanics of memory as he is with the suggestive power of memory to influence certainty, establish new truths, and create entirely different realities.

The film jumps between scenes taking place in the assumed present and scenes that occurred last year at the estate, or perhaps didn't occur ever. Nearly every scene in the picture defies logic of space and time, and our understanding of them according to the language of cinema. Still, the transition between these vignettes is seamless to the point where the viewer doesn't know what happened when-and that's the point. It could have happened at any time, or it could have not happened at all. This is all thanks to Resnais' exactness in pacing, editing, and shot selection. Throughout the film he adheres to a stringent set of film rules to tie the disparate scenes together.


Resnais shatters images, memories, and creates multiple interpretations of the same characters based on the relativity of memory.

The maddening precision in Resnais' mise en scene is shattered, however, when the memories of the couple do not align and the man doesn't get what he wants. Long tracking shots and picaresque symmetry give way to rapid cuts and fragments in the narrative. “No, that ending is not right, I need you alive, as you were then,” says the man, using memory to control reality and mold it in his favor. The woman has become subject to him, and her presence hear now is not as important to him as remembering her as she was then, assuring himself of their first encounter. Scenes are reinterpreted, dialogue is repeated, repetition confuses the protagonists as well as the viewers until we don't know what happened and what didn't. Maybe the characters don't even exist, but are transient artifacts of the hotel itself. There are certainly clear suggestions of this throughout. Maybe the man really did meet the woman and raped her. There are also strong insinuations of this in the way Resnais' camera attacks the woman in a climactic scene which plays out repeatedly.

And maybe for Resnais, none of this really mattered. Maybe his focus was not the story, but the manner in which he told it. To be sure, he devotes more time to interpreting the established language of cinema than he does to seeing his story through to its conclusion. In fact, the way he tells the story makes a satisfying ending impossible.

Regardless of interpretations, Last Year at Marienbad stands as one of the most important pictures of the French New Wave, moreover, of all time. In a time where his contemporaries in the movement were using popular culture, classic cinema, and literature to breathe new life into the film-making establishment, Resnais created a work that is entirely its own.

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"I want a film I watch to express either the joy of making cinema or the anguish of making cinema" -Francois Truffaut

This has been at the top of my queue for a couple of months now. The problem is that Brenda and Sarah keep asking me to add other flicks to the top. I do hope to watch this with Sarah before she goes to Prague on August 29 though.