L’Année dernière à Marienbad [Last Year at Marienbad] is a black and white film of 1961, directed by Alain Resnais and scripted by the nouveau romancier (‘new novelist’) Alain Robbe-Grillet. The film is considered an example of the cinematic modernist works of the French Nouvelle Vague. It is one of a sequence of films from Resnais’s early career – including Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1955) and Hiroshima mon Amour (1959, scripted by another new novelist, Marguerite Duras) – which question the veracity of collective, historical memory. The association with this avant-garde, literary group alone could position these films in a modernistic lineage, yet it was Resnais’s editing, which evolved through this period and matured in Hiroshima and Marienbad, that was especially innovative. The plot, such as it is, concerns a man (simply referred to as ‘X’ in the script) attempting to persuade a woman (‘A’) that the previous year they met in a palatial hotel or spa and agreed to meet one year later to run away together. The modernist style ensures the narrative is elliptical and hypnagogic, which has inspired a proliferation of academic debate. For example, ‘X’, in voiceover, often suggests a shared history, which is then contradicted in the images, or repeated with differences, allowing for disparate readings. This inherent ambiguity suggests a level of human isolation and disorientation that is a prevailing theme of the art-cinema canon of the 1960s, such as in the films of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni.