Post by captainofbeef on Mar 22, 2009 18:12:02 GMT -5
Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal visual poem has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. A surreal fever dream, or perhaps a nightmare, Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad), written by the radical master of the New Novel, Alain Robbe-Grillet, 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-bedecked 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.
DIRECTOR-APPROVED SPECIAL EDITION:
* New, restored high-definition digital transfer, supervised and approved by director Alain Resnais (with an uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
* New audio interview with Resnais
* New documentary on the making of Last Year at Marienbad, featuring interviews with many of Resnais’ collaborators
* New video interview with film scholar Ginette Vincendeau on the history of the film and its many mysteries
* Two short documentaries by Resnais: Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) and Le chant du styrène (1958)
* Theatrical trailer
* Optional original, unrestored French soundtrack
* New and improved subtitle translation
* PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by critic Mark Polizzotti and film scholar François Thomas, and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s introduction to the published screenplay and comments on the film
