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Last Year at Marienbad: The Film Script
Translated by Richard Howard
ISBN: 9780714550503
156 pages
RRP: Original price was: £8.99.£7.19Current price is: £7.19.
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET
CONTAINS 48 BLACK AND WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS
A man tells a woman that they have met before – that they became lovers but then agreed to separate for a year. The year is now up, and he has come back for her. At first, she remembers nothing, but as he relates their past together, real or imaginary, snapshots of memory appear – and she begins to believe him. As more details begin to re-emerge from the woman’s mind, the reader is shunted backwards and forwards between the past and the present, the actual and the illusory, that which is seen and that which is only glimpsed and guessed at.
The director Alain Resnais was already famous for films such as Hiroshima, Mon Amour when he asked Alain Robbe-Grillet – the author of several seminal novels, including Jealousy and The Voyeur, and the leader of the Nouveau Roman school – to write a script for him. The result was Last Year at Marienbad, a film that, as well as winning the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, has enthralled the critics, fascinated the public and become one of the greatest cult classics of modern cinema.
Part of Calder Publications imprint
REVIEWS
Everyone knows the linear plots of the old-fashioned cinema, which never spare us a link in the chain of all-too-expected events: the telephone rings, a man picks up the receiver, then we see the man who is at the other end of the line – the first man says he’s coming, hangs up, walks out the door, down the stairs, gets into his car, drives through the streets, parks his car in front of a building, goes in, climbs the stairs, rings the bell, someone opens the door, etc. In reality, our mind goes faster – or slower, on occasion. Its style is more varied, richer and less reassuring: it skips certain passages, it preserves an exact record of certain “unimportant” details – it repeats and doubles back on itself. And this mental time, with its peculiarities, its gaps, its obsessions, its obscure areas, is the one that interests us, since it is the tempo of our emotions, of our life.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
