HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR

Directed by Alain Resnais
Starring Emmanuelle Riva and Eiji Okada

(1959) French actress Emmanuelle Riva (2012 Oscar nominee for Amour), in Japan to make a “peace film,” finds herself, in the course of her brief affair with Japanese architect Eiji Okada (Woman in the Dunes), compulsively returning to her own traumatic post-war experiences. Asked to do an anti-nuclear documentary, Resnais opted instead for a feature exploring mutual guilts and the power of memory, written by novelist Marguerite Duras. Winner of the International Critics’ prize at Cannes, Hiroshima was kept out of the main competition to avoid offending the U.S. DCP. Approx. 91 mins.
12:30, 4:15, 8:00

“AN ENIGMATIC, HAUNTING, DOGGED VISION. Vivid visual beauty and an obsession in the peculiar workings of and necessity for memory and forgetting.”
– Jeremy Polacek, Brooklyn Magazine

“A complex yet compelling TOUR DE FORCE – as a patent plea for peace and the abolition of atomic warfare, as a poetic evocation of love lost and momentarily found, and as a curiously intricate but intriguing montage of thinking on several planes in Proustian style.”
– A. H. Weiler, The New York Times

“Visually, the movie is almost preternaturally perfect: Like few others (Days of Heaven, perhaps, or Citizen Kane), there’s barely a frame here you couldn’t extract, expand and hang on a wall. But the smooth, glassy elegance is constantly contrasted by a recurring series of archival news images depicting the aftermath of the atomic blast. The opening sequence, for example, cuts between images of bodies in ecstasy with scenes of pure apocalyptic devastation… Hiroshima Mon Amour contains some of the most graphic images of human suffering ever committed to celluloid; that they’re juxtaposed against this tender, poised and pitiful love story makes us question our own reactions to them. It’s all tied to the film’s major theme: Our scars shape us, but the only way we can keep going is to subsume and forget.”
– Tom Huddleston, Time Out New York

“Bedevilingly stylish even as it flirts with neurotic navel-gazing, Resnais’s ruminative classic is merely the first salvo in his career’s exploration of why we shape life into storytelling – and how sometimes we fail. All of his characters are contrivers of meaning, taletellers compelled to rebuild the scaffolding of memory and history as a way of insisting on their own significance”
– Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD

Directed by Alain Resnais

(1961) An ominous organ music resounds, the Scope camera tracks through the seemingly endless halls of a baroque grand hotel – as Giorgio Albertazzi tries to persuade an initially disbelieving Delphine Seyrig that they’d met the year before…With dizzying time shifts and flashbacks, real or imagined, Marienbad is considered the ultimate puzzle film. Winner, Golden Lion, Venice Film Festival. 35mm. Approx. 93 mins.
2:20, 6:05, 9:50

“AN ART-CULTURAL TOUCHSTONE! CEREBRALLY ALTERED CINEMA! Investigate[s] reality and phantasm, memory and time, stories and the mechanics of stories.” 
– Jeremy Polacek, Brooklyn Magazine

“One of a kind.”
– David Jenkins, Time Out (London)

“Hopelessly retro, eternally avant-garde, and one of the most influential movies ever made (as well as one of the most reviled), Marienbad is both utterly lucid and provocatively opaque—an elaborate joke on the world’s corniest pickup line and a drama of erotic fixation that takes Vertigo to the next level of abstraction. It’s a movie of alarming stasis—elegant zombies positioned like chess pieces in a hyper-civilized haunted house—and unsurpassed fluidity. The hypnotic dollies elaborate on those of Resnais’s earlier Hiroshima Mon Amour; the montage effortlessly synthesizes past and present, flashback and flash-forward, svelte shock cuts and shock match cuts. The movie is what it is—a sustained mood, an empty allegory, a choreographed moment outside of time, and a shocking intimation of perfection.”
– J. Hoberman, Village Voice

“I was not prepared for was the voluptuous quality of Marienbad, its command of tone and mood, its hypnotic way of drawing us into its puzzle, its austere visual beauty. Yes, it involves a story that remains a mystery, even to the characters themselves. But one would not want to know the answer to this mystery. Storybooks with happy endings are for children. Adults know that stories keep on unfolding, repeating, turning back on themselves, on and on until that end that no story can evade.”
– Roger Ebert

“Oscillates ambiguously between past, present, and various conditional tenses, mixing memory and fantasy, fear and desire. The overall tone is poker-faced parody of lush Hollywood melodrama, yet the film’s dreamlike cadences, frozen tableaux, and distilled surrealist poetry are too eerie, too terrifying even, to be shaken off as camp.”
– Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader