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L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad) 1961

‘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.’ Criterion

94 minutes | PG | Brief nudity

La Jetée 1962

Chris Marker's monumental La Jetée is a shining example of nuclear-inflected science fiction. The film is a dystopian puzzlebox; it tells the story of a man drafted into time travel experiments in an attempt to avert the nuclear devastation wrought by a Third World War. His almost monomaniacal obsession with a childhood memory of a woman on a jetty has granted him a unique level of mental resilience against the pressures inherent to the experiments.

Marker employs the unusual technique of using (almost) exclusively still photographs with narration. His arresting monochrome photography establishes a world shrouded in shadows and decay, set against the comparative resplendence of pre-war scenes in Paris. Despite only playing a minor role in the plot, the film's nuclear connection reveals itself in this fascination with the titanic destruction of a society and the desperate isolation of those left behind. It also engages with conceptions of memory, guilt, and trauma.

28 minutes | M