A New ‘Last Year At Marienbad’ Documentary Surfaces By Volker Schlöndorff

Genuine cinephilia interest has just been piqued a few notches.

A new documentary, aptly titled “The Making of Last Year in Marienbad,” examining the production of Alain Resnais’ seminal and enigmatic 1961 picture, “Last Year at Marienbad” has begun screening for select audience members recently. The film is comprised of 8mm footage shot by cast member Francoise Spira (whose character, like all the characters in the film, lacks a name) during the production of Resnais’ mystifying classic.

It is directed by German director Volker Schlöndorff (“The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum,” “Coupe de Grâce,” and the heralded 1985 TV version of “Death of A Salesman” with Dustin Hoffman), who is also credited as second assistant director on the production of ‘Marienbad’ itself. Instead of generating new content that struggles to remember the process of filming ‘Marienbad’, the documentary chooses to let the 8mm footage lead the story.

The doc follows the cast and crew on the set of the film as well as a trip to visit the post-war site of a concentration camp near Munich. Selections from Francis Seyrig’s dark, creeping score for ‘Marienbad’ are also featured. Resnais’ film — if you haven’t seen it already — exists in a dream-like state with no real stated context to what is outside the walls of Marienbad, leaving a good deal of space for the viewer to decide on the meaning and where in reality the story takes place. Any background that the documentary can provide will put interpretations of the film at least a few steps ahead of conjecture that is based solely on when the film was produced.

The documentary footage was only recently discovered in 2008 after it went missing following Spira’s suicide in 1965. After their discovery, the reels were turned over to the film’s writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose Academy Award nominated script for ‘Marienbad’ strays so far from anything resembling a recognizable format that it almost seems like he was attempting to create a new form of literature. We wouldn’t actually recommend attempting to read it, but it definitely stands as another intriguing artifact to Resnais’ fascinating film.

The timing of the documentary is unfortunate as it sounds like it would have been a fantastic addition to last year’s Criterion Collection DVD/BD release of “Last Year at Marienbad.” The beautifully packaged collection was a huge relief after a decade plus of the DVD being out of print, but with this news it suddenly feels somewhat incomplete. Given the subject matter of the documentary, we’ll probably have to hope for some festival screenings if we ever want to get our eyes on it.

Resnais’ most recent film, “Wild Grass,” is being released by Sony Pictures Classics on June 25th in New York and Los Angeles. We recently caught the film at this year’s San Francisco International Film Festival and while it certainly doesn’t resonate with the magic of Resnais’ films at his peak (“Hiroshima Mon Amour,” “Last Year at Marienbad,” “La Guerre est Finie”) it is a welcome return of his cinematic inventiveness that was less apparent in his 2006 effort “Public Fears in Private Places.” Here’s the re-released “Last Year At Marienbad” trailer. If you haven’t yet seen this film, what are you waiting for?