Last Year at Marienbad screening at 7pm this Friday

Want to see a film that changed cinema?  Critics have hailed it as one of the most influential films of all time; it created a worldwide sensation when it was released in 1961, and long lines of people waited to see it in cities across America. If you've ever wondered if there's more to movies than formulaic plots and Hollywood sameness, you owe it to yourself to see Last Year at Marienbad.  And it's screening for free this Friday, April 30, at 7 p.m. at the 12th South Sanctuary!  Drinks and snacks will be provided with discussion to follow after the film. 

Here's the Criterion description:

Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad) has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, gorgeously fuses the past with the present in telling its ambiguous tale of a man and a woman (Giorgio Albertazzi and Delphine Seyrig) who may or may not have met a year ago, perhaps at the very same cathedral-like, mirror-filled château they now find themselves wandering. Unforgettable in both its confounding details (gilded ceilings, diabolical parlor games, a loaded gun) and haunting scope, Resnais’ investigation into the nature of memory is disturbing, romantic, and maybe even a ghost story.


Here's a review that was published in the New York Times when the film was first released in this country:

http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/review?res=9b05e4de1f3de53bbc4053dfb5668389679ede



Dan Schneider, one of many critics who credits the film with influencing everything from Bergman and Kubrick to Roger Corman and perfume commercials:

http://www.cosmoetica.com/B737-DES608.htm



Carter Horsley, a critic who ranks it the sixth greatest sound film of all time:

http://www.thecityreview.com/lastyr.html



Here's perhaps my favorite synopsis of the film, including a brief description from the screenwriter:

http://www.allmovie.com/work/last-year-at-marienbad-28413



Jim Hoberman for the Village Voice:

"Hopelessly retro, eternally avant-garde, and one of the most influential movies ever made.... [It] eludes tense. The movie is what it is—a sustained mood, an empty allegory, a choreographed moment outside of time, and a shocking intimation of perfection."

- J. Hoberman, Village Voice
 
Lastly, the trailer: