“L'ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD” 1961 | 1h34’ [FR\IT] | LIGHTS WITHIN THE CAVE XV

Conversas com Cinema© PROSA

Ciclo LUZES NA CAVERNA XIV

[LIGHTS WITHIN THE CAVE XIV Cinema Screenings] (Curadoria de Alexandre Braga)

"Como habitar uma memória?"
”How can we inhabit a memory?”

“L'ANNÉE DERNIÈRE À MARIENBAD” 1961 | 1h34’ [FR\IT]
De Alain Resnais

Sábado Dia 14/11 às 19h30 [Saturday 11/14 at 7:30pm]

Num estranho e isolado castelo, um homem conhece uma mulher e insiste que ambos já se encontraram antes. À medida que o mistério se adensa, torna-se cada vez mais difícil distinguir a memória, o desejo e a própria realidade.

In a strange and isolated chateau, a man becomes acquainted with a woman and insists that they have met before.

Spoken in French | Subtitled in English

IMDB
Trailer

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More info and reservations:
https://prosacultural.org/marienbad

There are places we return to without ever being certain that we have been there before. There are encounters that remain within us, even when we can no longer tell whether they happened exactly as we remember them. And there are memories so intense that they seem to construct a reality of their own, where the past continues to unfold.

In Last Year at Marienbad, Alain Resnais leads us through a luxurious and enigmatic hotel, where a man attempts to convince a woman that they met the previous year. She does not remember. Or perhaps she does not wish to remember. Between endless corridors, geometrically perfect gardens, mirrors, and almost motionless drawing rooms, the narrative moves forwards and backwards, repeats gestures, reshapes events, and challenges every certainty about what truly happened.
Yet perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this film is not the mystery it presents, but the way cinema constructs it.

Released in 1961, from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the film remains one of the most remarkable experiments of European cinematic modernity. Here, every camera movement, every visual composition, every silence and repetition seems to follow a rigorous architecture. Nothing is entirely accidental. And yet, the more carefully structured the film reveals itself to be, the freer the experience becomes for those who contemplate it.

It is precisely within this paradox that one of the great possibilities of cinematic language resides: the ability to construct, with extraordinary precision, a space in which the spectator can experience uncertainty.
Resnais does not seek to represent memory as an organised sequence of events. Instead, he brings us closer to the way memory exists within us: fragmented, contradictory, traversed by desires, omissions, and reconstructions. Time ceases to be a line we follow and becomes a place we inhabit.

And perhaps this is where cinema offers us something that no explanation could ever fully achieve. Rather than telling us what we should understand, it allows us to experience what it means not to know. It invites us to recognise that our lives, too, are made of stories we tell ourselves, memories we transform, and events whose meaning changes as we ourselves change.

At PROSA, we often seek this possibility of illumination that cinema offers us — not necessarily through some extraordinary revelation, but through a fleeting moment of recognition, an éclair de l'être, in which an image brings us closer to something essential about our own existence. In Last Year at Marienbad, that light may emerge precisely when we stop searching for the definitive truth of events and begin to recognise the profoundly human nature of memory.

For remembering is not simply recovering what has passed. It is also continuing to construct, in the present, who we are. And perhaps inhabiting a memory means precisely this: accepting that we live between what happened, what we believe happened, and what, for some reason, we still need to remember.

(Curatorship by Alexandre Braga)

All Cinema PROSA films will be shown on an illuminated pixel (65’’ QLED screen) in a room with a maximum capacity of 24 spectators.

Come and have a glass of wine or a non-alcoholic drink in the cinema room with us!