L’Année Dernière A Marienbad [Signed by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Alain Resnais]

Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1961. First edition on ordinary paper, after 80 copies on paper „pur fil“. 12mo (19,5×14,5cm), printed card wrappers. 172pp, [12] plates. Rough- trimmed leaves. Text in French. Wrappers with minor soiling and toning. Moderate creasing to corners and spine. A small piece at the upper corner of the blue frame on cover, seems to have been glued back on. Repair-tape at spine- tail, but no loss or defect visible. Very few underlinings with pencil on first pages, with one exclamation mark at margin, drawn with blue pencil. Signed by Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet at titlepage. About very good.

In the winter of 1959 the producers Pierre Courau and Raymond Froment approached Alain Robbe-Grillet, if he would like to meet Alain Resnais with the eventual idea of writing for him. Robbe-Grillet, by this time already one of France‘s most influential young novelists and leader of the Nouveau Roman, a movement that emerged just before the Nouvelle Vague of French cinema, agreed to a meeting with Resnais.

At this meeting, Robbe-Grillet and Resnais talked about the linear storylines of old- fashioned cinema with its chain of all-too- expected events. Both were searching for an alternative approach, more similar to the mind that skips certain passages and repeats and doubles itself. Inspired by Adolfo Bioy
Casares‘ Invention of Morel, Robbe-Grillet began to write not a story but a direct screenplay, a shot-by-shot description of the film as he imagined it, frame by frame, with the corresponding dialogue and sound.

L’Année dernière A Marienbad was shot in 1961 by Alain Resnais, which combined the Nouveau Roman with the Nouvelle Vague, breaking with traditional structures of time more radically than any other film before.