Cinematographer

Sacha Vierny

3: briefs
13:00: average
39 min: in total

On film.briefs3

Last Year at Marienbad

Alain Resnais · 1961

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is a French avant-garde drama directed by Alain Resnais from a screenplay by Alain Robbe-Grillet. Set in an ornate, unnamed hotel, it follows a man’s insistent claim that he and a woman met there the previous year — a claim she denies. With no named characters, nonlinear editing, repetitive dialogue and meticulously composed black-and-white imagery, it explores memory, persuasion and the instability of time. Shot in Munich palaces using Dyaliscope widescreen, it won the Golden Lion at Venice and remains a landmark of modernist cinema.

13:00

Belle de Jour

Luis Buñuel · 1967

Luis Buñuel’s 1967 film follows Séverine Serizy, a Parisian housewife who spends weekday afternoons working as a high-class prostitute. Catherine Deneuve’s performance anchors a film defined by restraint: Sacha Vierny’s cool cinematography, Michel Magne’s sparse score, and a script that refuses psychological exposition. It treats fantasy not as illusion but as a parallel system of order — one that structures time, desire, and selfhood. The ending is deliberately ambiguous, looping back into uncertainty rather than resolution.

13:00

Hiroshima mon amour

Alain Resnais · 1959

Alain Resnais’ 1959 debut, written by Marguerite Duras, traces a fleeting encounter between a French actress and a Japanese architect in Hiroshima. Through tightly composed images, fragmented flashbacks, and restrained performances, it explores how personal and historical trauma intertwine — not as metaphor, but as embodied experience. Shot in France and Japan, edited with surgical precision, and scored with near-silence, it treats love, memory, and forgetting as inseparable forces.