WATCH PARTY: Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) / Last Year at Marienbad (1961) @ JNewby

We'll be on the 2nd floor in the Cloud Room, to the left as you get off the elevator/stairs. I wanted to get this first masterpiece by Alain Resnais on the schedule some how; OTOH I started watching Last Week at Marienbad at one point, but it is a truly bizarre movie.

Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) directed by Alain Resnais

RATING: Not Rated (Abe adds, “Some nudity, and scenes depicting war violence and carnage that may be disturbing”)

RUNTIME: 90 minutes

SYNOPSIS (via Criterion.com): A cornerstone of the French New Wave, the first feature from Alain Resnais is one of the most influential films of all time. A French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese architect (Eiji Okada) engage in a brief, intense affair in postwar Hiroshima, their consuming mutual fascination impelling them to exorcise their own scarred memories of love and suffering. With an innovative flashback structure and an Academy Award–nominated screenplay by novelist Marguerite Duras, Hiroshima mon amour is a moody masterwork that delicately weaves past and present, personal pain and public anguish.

BLURBS:
"'Hiroshima Mon Amour' will always be too studied a masterwork for some tastes. But Riva's performance, chief among its triumphs, remains electrifying." - Michael Phillips, Chicago Tribune

"That rare movie in which present and past meld in every frame to convey a sense of time obliterated, or a dream having a nightmare." - Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times

"Written by Marguerite Duras, the long, meandering, philosophical conversation between the two lovers has a mesmerising effect, connecting in their different agonies of war. [...] An exquisitely beautiful and harrowing meditation on war and love." - Kate Muir, The Times (UK)
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Last Year at Marienbad (1961) directed by Alain Resnais

RATING: Not Rated

RUNTIME: 94 minutes

SYNOPSIS: Not just a defining work of the French New Wave but one of the great, lasting mysteries of modern art, Alain Resnais’ epochal Last Year at Marienbad (L’année dernière à Marienbad) has been puzzling appreciative viewers for decades. Written by radical master of the New Novel Alain Robbe-Grillet, this surreal fever dream, or nightmare, 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-filled 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.

BLURBS:
"The poster child of cinematic modernism, one of those early-'60s event films that seemed to break every rule classical Hollywood ever codified." - Budd Wilkins, Slant Magazine

"Profoundly mysterious and disturbing, a para-surrealist masterpiece whose nightmarish scenario appears to have been absorbed from Buñuel and Antonioni and transmitted onward to Greenaway." - Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

"Remains one of cinema's glorious enigmas, endlessly compelling and intriguing." - Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times