July 25 – August 20  

Prompted by the availability of a number of new prints from France, we return to the subject of one of our most successful complete retrospectives, Alain Resnais, and append four impossible-to-see films by recently deceased novelist and director Alain Robbe-Grillet to reveal the connections (and differences) between these two artists, welded forever in the history of cinema by their epochal collaboration, Last Year at Marienbad, and by their shared reputations as masters of modernism.  

Like Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais radically transformed our sense of the possibilities of film. After making a series of short documentaries, including the influential meditation on the Holocaust, Night and Fog (1955), Resnais produced one of the key works of modernist cinema: Hiroshima mon amour (1959). Addressing themes that were to become his preoccupations – memory and willed forgetfulness, the subjective nature of time, the imminence of death – Resnais established in Hiroshima a narrative structure and editing style which were acclaimed for their ability to represent interior states. Some attributed the film’s radical interiority to Marguerite Duras, who wrote the script, as they would later attribute the intricacies of Last Year at Marienbad to its script-writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet. However, Hiroshima’s combination of documentary realism and formal abstraction, its conflation of public history and private memory, past and present, fact and artifice, “objective” images and “subjective” monologue, and its unconventional use of montage to replicate the obscure workings of consciousness, defined the style for which Resnais subsequently became renowned.  

Resnais’ next film, Last Year at Marienbad (1961), extended this exploration of Time and Memory into a purely psychic terrain, seemingly emptied of history, politics, and psychology. The Oscar-nominated script, by nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet, became legendary for its labyrinthine narrative and temporal mazes, and for the baroque balustrades, rococo hallways and formal gardens of the Marienbad château – shot in Dyaliscope by the great cinematographer Sacha Vierny – that became an iconic landscape of the cinema, instantly recognizable even to those who had not seen the film. Robbe-Grillet continued in this mode in his first film as director, L’Immortelle, made at the same time as Marienbad; set simultaneously