[L'Année Dernière à Marienbad] is a study in persuasion, and one which involves the audience as much as the people on the screen; and it is a work in which the technique and the action are quite literally fused. If it were not told in this particular way, the film would not exist….

[All] it can declare is itself—or, rather, the invitation to experience it contains.

L'Année Dernière opens, like Hiroshima mon Amour, with a sustained and elaborate introductory passage; in Hiroshima Resnais called it the 'opera'—here it is certainly not less than the overture. The music behind the credits fades, and before the last names come up on the screen a voice is heard, impersonal, grave, and at first very quiet. The voice becomes clearer as the first images appear: the long corridors of a big hotel, empty of people but suggesting...