This Year at Marienbad

Notes on the Uncurrent Cinema

Still Last Year in Marienbad. (Criterion).

Last Year at Marienbad was released in 1961 and it has polarized audiences ever since. Perhaps only Resnais’ subsequent film, Muriel, has been more intensely vilified by so many critics. Pauline Kael hated both films, denouncing Marienbad as a film about “non-people.” She was right in a way. This is a film about living ghosts, who freeze in space, as time moves own. This is a film about people whose future is all used up.

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Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3

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