11272 Santa Monica Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90025

Alain Resnais’ legendary arthouse sensation returns. As ominous organ music resounds, the Scope camera tracks through the seemingly endless halls of a baroque grand hotel—alternately thronged with tuxedoes and gowns or echoingly deserted—as Giorgio Albertazzi tries to persuade an initially disbelieving Delphine Seyrig (in her feature debut) that they’d met the year before, even as the sepulchral Sacha Pitoëff (her husband?) hovers about. But as Albertazzi continues to repeat “Last year…,” each encounter takes place in different locations, in different costumes. With dizzying time shifts and flashbacks, real or imagined, Marienbad is considered the ultimate puzzle film. It is also a tour de force, with Vierny’s lusciously velvet black and white photography of the incredibly lavish interior of – mainly -- Nymphenburg castle in Bavaria; the horror-worthy organ score by Seyrig’s brother Francis; and an iconic performance by Delphine Seyrig, in costumes designed by Coco Chanel. Winner of the Venice Film Festival’s 1961 Golden Lion. With Oscar-nominated screenplay by nouveau roman titan Alain Robbe-Grillet, who now sits in the Académie Française. One of the most iconic and "referenced" art films of all time, Marienbad has been homaged in everything from Calvin Klein "Obsession" ads in the 80s, to Marc Jacobs' Fall 2007 collection, to British band Blur's music video "To the End."

“A GORGEOUS PUZZLE BOX OF A MOVIE… To revisit Marienbad today is to glimpse a vanished moment when American audiences drank in European films not because they were universal or 'relatable,' but for their otherness, their impenetrability, their definite contrast to the simplistic and elephantine Technicolor epics that much of Hollywood was then embracing... cinephiles may find themselves as mystified and delighted as their counterparts in 1962.” – Mark Harris, The New York Times

“Last Year at Marienbad recalls not just a style of filmmaking—glacial, intense, contemptuous of easy explanations—but a whole epoch of filmgoing, in which the burdens of European cinema were loaded into late-night discussion… Seeing the film again, and succumbing, like a dance partner, to its gliding moves, one has to ask: how could a film this beautiful ever have been thought unapproachable?” – Anthony Lane, The New Yorker.

“I was not prepared for the voluptuous quality of Marienbad, its command of tone and mood, its hypnotic way of drawing us into its puzzle, its austere visual beauty.” – Roger Ebert

Showtimes will be 5:00, 7:30, 10:00; plus Fri-Sun: 12:00, 2:30.

Official Website: http://www.rialtopictures.com/marie

Added by landmark on January 18, 2008