New on Video: ‘Hiroshima mon amour’
If the basic love story of ‘Hiroshima mon amour’ comes across as less than unique—a brief encounter between doomed lovers—Resnais’ presentation amplifies the romance to make it something special.
Last Year at Marienbad
The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part Four
THE DIGITAL ERA: REAL-TIME FILMS FROM 2000 TO TODAY 40 years before, in 1960, lighter cameras enabled a cinéma vérité-flavored revolution in street realism. By 2000, new digital cameras suggested a whole new set of promises, including telling stories that would have been unimaginable within minimum budgets for features even ten years before. In 2000, …
The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part Three
THE POST-1960S, PRE-DIGITAL AGE: REAL-TIME ONE-OFFS, 1975-1998 British filmmaker John Byrum is responsible for the first (and in some ways only) real-time period film. Inserts (1975), set in the early 1930s, is about a Boy Wonder movie director (called Boy Wonder, played by Richard Dreyfuss fresh from American Graffiti (1973) and Jaws (1975)) now washed …
The Past, Present, and Future of Real-Time Films Part Two
SIDNEY AND THE SIXTIES: REAL-TIME 1957-1966 Throughout the 1950s, Hollywood’s relationship with television was fraught: TV was a hated rival but also a source of cheap talent and material, as in the case of the small-scale Marty (1955), which won the Best Picture Oscar. These contradictions were well represented by the apparently “televisual” 12 Angry …
‘Last Year at Marienbad’ constructs a romance from lost memories
Where Alain Resnais’ first film, Hiroshima mon amour, was the unconventional story of two people haunted by the imagery of a distant war, his follow-up, Last Year at Marienbad, expanded upon the themes of troubled memory and the imagined past in a convoluted series of conversation and flashbacks between a woman and two men, all unnamed. Famous for its confounding narrative structure, the film excels at making truth and fiction indistinguishable. Its surreal, dream-like nature is at once fascinating and baffling, prompting some to call the film a masterpiece and others incomprehensible. Encompassing all the passion and pain of a love triangle and the intrigue of a mystery, Last Year at Marienbad maintains its outwardly staid atmosphere throughout to haunting effect.