Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, one of the classiest, most enigmatic, and most imitated films of the 1960s, is returning to the Dryden on May 23 & 25 in a brand-new 35mm print. Resnais, who frequently collaborates with some of Europe’s most celebrated writers (including Marguerite Duras, David Mercer, and Alan Ayckbourn), directed Marienbad from a script by avant-garde novelist Alain Robbe- Grillet, who passed away in February 2008. The rather spare story is set at a baroque European hotel, where a nameless hero (Giorgio Albertazzi) tries to persuade the nameless heroine (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the previous year. But the real reason to see the film is its striking style, which moves ambiguously between past and present and features eye-popping geometrical landscapes photographed in striking widescreen black-and-white by the great Sacha Vierny.

While the film features numerous references and homages to classic Hollywood melodramas, Marienbad itself has been parodied and paid tribute to countless times in everything from commercials to music videos, and has become a major touchstone for other filmmakers from John Boorman to Charles Burnett to Steven Soderbergh.

In conjunction with Rialto Pictures’ re-release of this dreamlike work of screen poetry, we’ll also screen four seminal works from the heyday of the enormously influential Nouvelle Vague, or French New Wave, movement. In addition to the Resnais-Duras collaboration Hiroshima Mon Amour (May 22), we’ll also present Claude Chabrol’s intense and beautiful study of young working-class women, Les Bonnes Femmes (May 6); Jean-Luc Godard’s deconstructionist musical, A Woman is a Woman (May 13); and François Truffaut’s story of a fatalistic love triangle, Jules and Jim (May 27).