"...suggests that memory, if not a lie, is at best only a partial truth. The fascination of this film resides almost entirely in its form and structure; that is why it is a key work of modernist cinema.. The setting is a metaphor for the structure of memory. With its corridors, rooms, mirrors and formal gardens, it translates into spatial terms the action or possible inaction of memory... Resnais mobilizes all the facilities of the film medium to create visual analogies for the operation of memory..."
Martin Auty, The Movie, 1983.An interesting assessment and probably partially true.
Q asked me what it was about once, so I described it thusly:
"Didn't I meet you last year in Marienbad?"
"No."
This is The Shining - think of the picture of the maze and work back.
When you know there's a cut-out of Hitch, it makes you more amused, if you need to be:
There's more in it every time.
That editing (particularly the force of the bar / bedroom black / white) is as powerful today as it must have seemed in 1961.
Here's my somewhat quirky review from a Sunday Cinema screening, 26 October 2008:
On a late Sunday night (18 September 2011) I watched it without bothering to read the subtitles (I couldn't disable them unfortunately), concentrating instead on the superb photography and breathtaking editing (Jasmine Chasney and Henri Colpi, who had both worked on the cinema-changing Hiroshima mon Amour for Resnais in 1959). It is one of the most beautiful black and white films ever made and reminds me of the brilliance (in the light sense) of Charles Lang. Sacha Vierny shot it and the operator is Philippe Brun, who worked on L'Armée des Ombres, Belle de Jour (also shot by Vierny) and French Connection II.
I think of this film every time I'm in a posh hotel.
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