L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad

Alain Resnais' seminal 1961 second feature.
This film opens with long tracking shots, over the walls, around the palace/ mansion/ hotel, with the incessant, mysterious, genuinely poetic voice beating as though drumming. As with 'Hiroshima Mon Amour', this is at once literary, but in a peculiarly cinematic sense. It is genuinely connecting sound and image, by disjuncting them. Extra images are created in the viewer's head, as the intellectual engagement demands attention, as the camera inexorably tracks along.
This film is so formally innovative, so at once complex and new, that a formal analysis is impossible in shorter than book length. Nevertheless, here are a few notable features.
This film is shot with next to no fill lights, with deeply complex shadows and patches (few washes) stretching far into the distance, a distance that is in reasonably sharp focus. Contrast of black to white is high. Due to the lack of fills, it is extremely dark, and clearly a sense of the Gothic, or should that be closer to Baroque, is central here.
The stasis of the actors, (not frozen but standing still) creates memorable tableaus, throwing shadows, as the camera continues its tracks, makes Rneoir-esque elegant turns, reframes. Their is also occassions where a preference for straight-on- framings is evident. Their is such a great variety of technqies here; a kind of close up from the bottom of the hairline to the neck, long shots (which look like 'Gertrud'), and tracking and cuts which are axial on occassion. Further, their is a frequent start of a low camera, looking up to the thin ,delicate looking sticks of people. And yet their are also a number of high angles; as said, formal analysis is distinctly more complex than can be made in this space. It should be at least correct to say that Resnais fractures the space, displaying no interest in continuity as actions cut to differnet locales and perhaps times.
The music adopts a relation to the image that at once works and couters the image. It does not interpret it, nor does it make it shocking; it does de-mystify, and give more of a sense of change. Perhaps that is the fundamental formal relation in this film; stillness in the image, movement in the dialogue. Though that is surely far too neat.
To have a stab at uncovering the ideas of this piece, we have a sense of at once a stasis, an inevitability (the uncanny game played, the repetition, the tracks over the same corridors) and a horrible sense that things have moved; you can't remember. Talk of film as a dream/memory is overdone usually, but this film certainly qualifies. A uniquely powerful film, opening new possibilities in cinema.