Alain Resnais
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Certified Copy (2010)
Directed by Abbas Kiarostami
influenced by Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Themes Visuals
I kept thinking of Alain Resnais’s mysterious couple in Last Year at Marienbad, and also Richard Linklater’s clock-watching twosome in Before Sunrise.
Similarly, it's entirely possible that James and She have never existed before the movie started and are now, like the narrator in Last Year at Marienbad, inventing different histories for themselves to see if any one sticks.
Far from the solipsism of failures interesting ( Timecrimes ) and not ( Primer ), different from marginal successes like 12 Monkeys and Déjà Vu , Duncan Jones's sophomore feature (after the similarly thorny Moon ) plays most like a child of Last Year at Marienbad and a companion piece to Abbas Kiarostami's contemporaneous Certified Copy.
This starts out like My Dinner With Andre (1981), morphs into Who�s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), and ends up more like the quintessential French Art film, the inscrutable Last Year at Marienbad (1961).
James returns to the table, and his relationship with She takes a surreal turn that recalls Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad" (1961), minus the chic clothing and setting.
I am not often a big fan of modern cinematic fantasy-reality games, and "Certified Copy," which stars Juliette Binoche and opera-singer-turned-actor William Shimell , does not always escape the pitfalls of the genre (and it is a genre, one which stretches, to take an arbitrary measure, from "Last Year at Marienbad" to " Inception ").
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2008)
Directed by Mark Herman
influenced by Night and Fog (1956)
Themes
NO fictional piece can ever match the horrific reality so vividly chronicled in Resnais' Night and Fog .
For a concentrated overview of Nazi horror, Resnais' poetic thirty-minute Night and Fog remains definitive, but for the hardy, Shoah relentlessly uncovers facets that viewers will never forget, posing questions about just what it means to be a human being in this crazy universe.
Claude Lanzmann's 1985 Shoah is so indebted to this film that it never could have been conceived, much less made, without Resnais' example, and Schindler's List is a cartoon alongside it.
In practice, it competes only with Alain Resnais's nightmarish 1955 short Night and Fog to be the most devastating and comprehensive document about the Holocaust yet produced.
If the first option had been realized so perfectly in Alain Resnais’ brief but powerful 1955 film, Night and Fog, and the second option too vulgar for everyone but the Americans, what were filmmakers who wanted to explore the millions of stories of the Holocaust to do? Claude Lanzmann, a French filmmaker and contemporary of philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, spent eleven years exploring a third option.
The Age of Adaline (2015)
Directed by Lee Toland Krieger
influenced by Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Visuals
With Adaline as both cipher and constant, the film darts back and forth across eras with a sense of the uncanny; faces and incidents recur in slightly altered form, recalling—theoretically, at least—the unreliable memory of Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad and the more explicit time-cutting of his indelible Je’taime, Je’taime.
Inception (2010)
Directed by Christopher Nolan
influenced by Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Themes Visuals
They feature none of the emotions and feelings dreams causefear, elation, sadness, arousaland are rendered outright impostors next to way superior, far more accurate films set in dreamlike states, from 1961's "Last Year at Marienbad" to 1984's "…
Back in 1970, more than 30,000 people responded to a Sunday newspaper questionnaire about the films that most closely resembled dreams, the top 15 ranging from Last Year at Marienbad and 2001 to Belle de jour and The Seventh Seal.
There are any number of film and literary influences found in Inception, the most compelling being Last Year at Marienbad, the classic brain screw by French director Alain Resnais that set a potentially dangerous romance inside an unsteady realm of doubt and intrigue.
What's The Deal: Take The Matrix's commitment to techy visual achievements, those trailer moments that make you go "Whoa" all Keanu-style, then take Last Year at Marienbad's hypnotic mindbendiness and commitment to destabilizing your ability to watch a movie without stopping every few minutes to ask yourself, "Okay, where are we now?
Vierny made his reputation shooting the hypnotic Last Year at Marienbad and Muriel for Alain Resnais, that standard-bearer of the most experimental movement of the French New Wave.
There can be no doubt that Greenaway, working as usual with veteran cinematographer Sacha Vierny (who shot both "Hiroshima Mon Amour" and "Last Year at Marienbad" for Alain Resnais), is an exceptional visual stylist with an aesthetic that prides itself on being self-consciously artistic.
A younger critic kindly stayed behind to describe in some detail what I might have missed, even telling me that there was a reference he knew I'd have noticed to Last Year at Marienbad.
The straight paths and "rigid spaces" of the estate's neatly trimmed symmetrical gardens and long corridors belie the twisted, tangled central conflict: a man (identified in the screenplay as "X") pursues a woman (alpha female "A"), insisting that, in spite of her husband "M" (Sacha Pitoëff), "X" and "A" were lovers the previous summer, "in Karlstadt, Marienbad, or Baden-Salsa.
In the movie's production notes, he asserts the inspiration of such high-toned pictures as "Hiroshima mon amour" and Wong Kar-Wai's "Happy Together."
From Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) to David Lynch’s Eraserhead (1976) to E. Elias Merhige’s Begotten (1990), such films create a bewildering cinematic experience so that even if they are despised, as they often are, they are not easily forgotten.
Synecdoche, New York (2008)
Directed by Charlie Kaufman
influenced by Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Themes
It happened in 1961, with that high-society puzzle obscura Last Year at Marienbad, and in 2006, with David Lynch's through-the-looking-glass bore Inland Empire.
Of Jaoui's previous films, I've only seen Same Old Song, a wonderful musical comedy directed by the great Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad).
To illustrate precisely what he wanted, Resnais reportedly screened G.W. Pabst's Brooks-starring Pandora's Box for cast and crew.
And what better locale than the hermetic elements of a spa resort — a setting that unmistakably calls to mind Thomas Mann, Anton Chekhov, “Last Year at Marienbad” and “8 ½,” among many others.
The provisional nature of the hotel was put to its most haunting use in Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, in which every element from memory to topography was thrown into doubt.
The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Visuals
Anderson’s actors are not the mannequins of Alain Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, inching down stately corridors like tuxedoed snails.
You’re in a film ruled by incongruities of space and time, in which you jump from the toylike, flat animation that provides the first view of the Grand Budapest Hotel, high in the mountains of the fictitious nation of Zubrowka, to the perspectival vastness of the hotel’s lobby, which looks as if it could swallow all of Last Year at Marienbad (except that Marienbad was shot in wide-screen, and Budapest mostly uses the squarish format of 1930s films).
And if the entire movie represents some sort of dream state, it becomes impossible to distinguish which events, if any, are "real" and which are projections of the mind -- the obvious forebears of these sorts of narrative games are Akira Kurosawa's splendid Rashomon (1950) and Alain Resnais' lush Last Year at Marienbad (1961).
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)
Directed by Peter Greenaway
influenced by Last Year at Marienbad (1961)
Among his few acknowledged influences are avant-garde precisionist Hollis Frampton and French New Wave puzzlemaker Alain Resnais (Last Year at Marienbad), whose brilliant cinematographer, Sacha Vierny, he has adopted as his own.
Resnais and his cinematographer Sacha Vierny (who would later become Peter Greenaway’s favorite collaborator) construct the film out of precise compositions and slow-moving tracking shots that move throughout the hotel, making its extended hallways and cavernous rooms seem pulsating and alive, a trick that Stanley Kubrick would later employ in The Shining (1980).
Or "The Shining" without snow.
The strong influence of Last Year at Marienbad on other films is obvious: compare The Shining and Mulholland Dr. to name but two.
No coincidence, then, that one of the films most indebted to Last Year at Marienbad, Stanley Kubrick's The Shining , borrows liberally at stylistic and thematic levels, engaging in similar-seeming Steadicam shots tracking ceaselessly along the Overlook's pattern-carpeted hallways, and putting forward the uncanny suggestion that its terrible events have all happened before and likely will happen again, forever and ever and ever.
Similarly unreadable, the film has been noted as a large influence on David Lynch's bulky Inland Empire and, like Resnais' film, I have found myself less-and-less frustrated with Lynch's monster on subsequent viewings.
Documentaries like “Shoah” and Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog” suggest that you don’t, while historical epics like “Schindler’s List” insist that you must. If the latter argues that seeing is believing, the former maintains that seeing wouldn’t help — that some things are too unfathomable for the human eye to comprehend from a distance, and can only hope to be understood by their absence.