Last Year at Marienbad **
Alain Resnais, 1961
France/Germany
@ SIFF Cinema

This was the first time I've dozed off during a movie in a very long while. I suspect I didn't miss much though. It's all about repeating patterns, the same thing occurring over and over, but hoping eventually for a different outcome. Perhaps like the way in which memories mutate as you recall them over time. Ought to see this again several times.

See also: IMDb | TCMDb

Muriel **
Alain Resnais, 1963
France
@ Northwest Film Forum

From a 2000 article on the director by Greg Solman in Film Comment:

For Resnais, filmmaking is an act of orchestration... [he] lyrically plays film fragments.

Characters' lives are marked by their attempts to censor, invoke, forget or filter the past.

Resnais was first a cinematographer and a film editor - in essence, trained as a visual musical artist, insofar as editing is akin to composing music with images. Possessed by the theme of remembering, his movies work in the mysterious manner of music. They're fascinating, but often formally perplexing upon first encounter. They're considered difficult, challenging films, but yield more meaning and make more sense upon revisitation, re-encountered with the aid of memory.

See also: IMDb | TCMDb