The Secrets of Marienbad

Everyone is of course familiar with Alain Resnais's cult film, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet and made just fifty years ago, L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad).

It happened that a young actress named Françoise Spira was on the set during the shooting of the film.

She didn't play the lead role, which was assigned the immense Delphine Seyrig, as everyone knows.

She didn't even have one of these real supporting roles that leave you with the memory of a few unforgettable scenes.

But in any case, she was there from the beginning of the shoot to the end, with her Super 8 without sound, and she filmed the film, capturing its most magical instants -- Resnais's youthful laughter, Seyrig's delightful caprices, the somber and childlike charm of Albertazzi. In short, off in her little corner and without shouting from the rooftops, she produced the "making of" of the most formal, glacial and, actually, unerring, unwavering film in the history of contemporary cinema.

But Françoise Spira committed suicide.

Her making of was lost with her.

For nearly fifty years, the few who were aware of its existence were secretly searching for it, like Harrison Ford and the lost ark.

And then suddenly, in 2008, it surfaced again as though by miracle, thanks to Jean-Baptiste Thierrée, the young suicide's last companion, who found it at the back of a cellar and gave it to Alain Robbe-Grillet. He in turn handed it over to Olivier Corpet's Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine with the rest of his archives, a few weeks before his death, and Corpet in turn gave it to me to broadcast on the website of my review, La Règle du Jeu.

The images, damaged by too long a stay in cinematic purgatory, had to be restored.

An editor had to be chosen, to make some kind of sense of the jumble of these six silent, unintelligible reels.

And especially, most important, we recalled that a certain Volker Schlöndorff, then at the very beginning of his career, was Resnais's second assistant on the film; so we went to see him to ask him to decrypt these images, bring them back to life, tell their story and, finally, write a commentary which would become the voice-over fit to the sequences.

From it all came a film of utter singularity of nearly an hour, one which is the double -- an awkward one, but all the more touching because of it -- of L'Année dernière à Marienbad.

The result was also a truly new film, the behind-the-scenes tale of this masterpiece all in hallways, mirrors, ancient and high parapets, hieratic and unwavering dialogues.

Now, after a unique screening at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the film will arrive in New York for another screening, also unique, sponsored by Diane von Furstenberg, to benefit the Maison Française of New York University.

Join us next Thursday, May 20th, at 6 :30 PM, at NYU's Cantor Film Center. We shall all be there to share this moment of memory and emotion with the film buffs of New York.