Blu-ray Features
Criterion Collection just began releasing Blu-rays this year. Criterion Collection is renowned for their treatment of art and foreign films, offering up pristine transfers in good packaging with essays on the films, and other scholarly extras. They take great pains to restore their films as well as possible.
Last Year at Marienbad comes in a beautiful, book-like package. The insert includes three essays and an introduction from the film’s screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet.
The film is presented in its original 2:35:1 widescreen aspect ratio in black and white. The restoration is near perfect. The black and white is gorgeous. The different shades of gray pop enough that you can imagine the colors. Only a few seconds of the film had scratches on it. It was not minor but it passed quickly.
There are two options for sound , the original monaural and a restored track. The original track is full of crackle and hiss. On the restored track the hiss and crackle is still there, but is indiscernible from viewing distance. The movements of the characters still sound a bit crunchy.
Extras include an interview with Resnais about the film, a documentary on the making of the film that includes interviews with a few of the crew members, an interview with film academic Ginette Vincendau on the meaning and importance of the film, and two of Resnais’ short documentaries.
The Resnais interview is not very exciting. It is presented with just his voice over slow pans of pictures related to the film. The majority of it is Resnais gushing about how talented and helpful his collaborators were. In truth it is sleep-inducing.
The making-of extra and the Vincendau interview are a bit more exciting. They are presented in the traditional interview style showing the subjects on camera and cutting away to clips. The crew tells what it was like working with Resnais. Vincendau talks about the how Last Year at Marienbad was received critically at the time, its influences and the films it influenced, and how it has been interpreted differently by different critics over the years.
A commentary track from a film scholar or a filmmaker influenced by this movie would have been nice, but I suspect that the Vincendau interview and the making-of documentary cover much of the same ground.
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