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Drama

Last Year at Marienbad

Year
1961
Length
94 minLa Biennale ASAC 35mm catalogue record Version sources ↓

In a vast hotel, a man insists that a woman promised to leave with him last year—or perhaps in another version of the past.

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Language
French
StrangeMysteryBeautiful Best saved for later · For patient viewers Drama
Original illustration: Layered paper formal gardens, clipped hedges, colonnades, steps and empty chairs beneath the title.

Image: Monocurator · source · Original Monocurator artwork

What to expect

Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet make memory, persuasion, and architecture impossible to separate. Repetition does not solve the mystery; it changes the pressure exerted by each possible story.

How to ease in

Release the need for a final timeline. Attend to repeated poses, phrases, corridors, and the game with rows of objects; variation is the film’s form of movement.

Heads-up

A quick, non-exhaustive note Includes coercive romantic pursuit, possible sexual violence, psychological pressure, and deliberately unresolved events.
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I find the hotel most unsettling when it looks perfectly still. Its elegance gives every repeated claim the authority of architecture, even when memory refuses to cooperate.

— Momo

Momo thinking about this film

Credits & versions

Version map

La Biennale ASAC 35mm catalogue record 94 min ASAC lists 94 minutes, 35mm and black and white. Its page records both 1961 competition and 2018 restored screenings; it does not tie the 94-minute technical entry unambiguously to either event. No restoration, projection speed or exact seconds are inferred. Source: La Biennale di Venezia — L’année dernière à Marienbad Runtime reference · Checked 2026-09-24

Where to go next

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