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116-595: The core narrative of the film portrays the last months in the life of Serge Alexandre (Stavisky), from late 1933 to January 1934. We see glimpses of his operations as a "financial consultant", setting up a mysterious company to deal in international bonds, his 'laundering' of stolen jewellery, and his juggling of funds to stave off the discovery of fraudulent bonds that he has sold through the Crédit Municipal in Bayonne (municipal pawnbrokers); we see his activity as

232-524: A narodnik (revolutionary agrarian socialist populist ), he initially opposed Marxism but was won over by his future first wife, Aleksandra Sokolovskaya . That same year, he graduated from his high school with a first class honours. According to his relative, Valery Bronstein, his father had intended for Trotsky to become a mechanical engineer after leaving modern school. Trotsky briefly attended Odessa University studying engineering and mathematics . He dropped out in early 1897 to help organize

348-723: A Marxist and Leninist , his thought and writings inspired a school of Marxism known as Trotskyism . Born into a wealthy Jewish family in Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire , Trotsky joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898. He was arrested for revolutionary activities and exiled to Siberia , but in 1902 escaped to London, where he met Lenin and wrote for the party's newspaper Iskra . Trotsky sided with Julius Martov 's Mensheviks against Lenin's Bolsheviks after

464-657: A "unification" conference of social democratic factions in Vienna in August 1912 (a.k.a. "The August Bloc") and tried to re-unite the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks into one party. The attempt was generally unsuccessful. In Vienna, Trotsky continuously published articles in radical Russian and Ukrainian newspapers, such as Kievskaya Mysl, under a variety of pseudonyms, often using "Antid Oto", a name chosen at random from an Italian dictionary, with Trotsky joking that "wanted to inject

580-527: A close working relationship with Alexander Parvus in 1904–07. During their split, Lenin referred to Trotsky as "Little Judas" ( Iudushka , based on the character from Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin 's novel The Golovlyov Family ), a "scoundrel" and a "swine". The unrest and agitation against the Russian government came to a head in Saint Petersburg on 3 January 1905 ( Julian Calendar ), when

696-562: A compromise figure when elected as the head of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. He was a lawyer that stood above the political factions contained in the Soviet. However, since his election, he proved to be very popular with the workers in spite of the Bolsheviks' original opposition to him. Khrustalev-Nosar became famous in his position as spokesman for the Saint Petersburg Soviet. Indeed, to the outside world, Khrustalev-Nosar

812-568: A conspiracy. This was later confirmed by Russian police records listing the number of known militant radicals found among the dead. Following the events of Bloody Sunday, Trotsky secretly returned to Russia in February 1905, by way of Kiev . At first he wrote leaflets for an underground printing press in Kiev, but soon moved to the capital, Saint Petersburg. There he worked with both Bolsheviks, such as Central Committee member Leonid Krasin , and

928-623: A curtain in the theatre, upon the outbreak of fascism in Europe and the Second World War." Stavisky made Monte Hellman ’s top-10 list in the 2012 Sight & Sound polls of the greatest films ever made. For his role as Baron Raoul, Charles Boyer was given a special tribute by the jury at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival . He also won a Best Supporting Actor award from the New York Film Critics Circle . It

1044-526: A daughter in Russia. Suffering also from tuberculosis and depression , Zinaida committed suicide in 1933. Aleksandra disappeared in 1935 during the Great Purges under Stalin and was murdered by Soviet forces three years later. Until this point, Trotsky had used his birth name: Lev (Leon) Bronstein. He changed his surname to "Trotsky", the name he would use for the rest of his life. It is said he adopted

1160-455: A dream, and claim the structure of the film may be understood by the analogy of a recurring dream, or even that the man's meeting with the woman is the memory (or dream) of a dream. Others have heeded, at least as a starting point, the indications given by Robbe-Grillet in the introduction to his "ciné-novel" of the screenplay: "Two attitudes are then possible: either the spectator will try to reconstitute some 'Cartesian' scheme—the most linear,

1276-473: A fragmented narrative (previously explored by Resnais among equally elegant surroundings in L'Année dernière à Marienbad ) was identified by a more sympathetic American reviewer, though with some reservations about the density of the historical background: "The difficulty of knowing what is true, of discovering what really happened, ripples throughout Alain Resnais's "Stavisky" — a spell-casting mood piece that

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1392-494: A modern replica of the film's garden. For Chanel's spring–summer 2023 collection, designer Virginie Viard reused Lagerfeld's idea of basing a collection around the film. On 23 June 2009, The Criterion Collection released Last Year at Marienbad in the United States, on both Region 1 DVD and Blu-ray . Alain Resnais participated in this release, and he insisted it include an unrestored soundtrack in addition to

1508-478: A performance of Coriolanus . His office is adorned with theatrical posters.) Location shooting took place in and around Paris and in Biarritz during autumn 1973. Resnais said that he wanted to film and edit the motion picture in the way that a 1930s film-maker would have done it, using only the camera set-ups and movements that might have been seen in 1930. He also acknowledged an influence from silent cinema in

1624-631: A petition against Morris' order. Back in Russia, after initial hesitation and facing pressure from the workers' and peasants' Soviets, the Russian foreign minister Pavel Milyukov was compelled to demand the release of Trotsky as a Russian citizen, and the British government freed him on 29 April 1917. He reached Russia on 17 May 1917. After his return, Trotsky substantially agreed with the Bolshevik position, but did not join them right away. Russian social democrats were split into at least six groups, and

1740-544: A political engagement with contemporary issues, Marienbad focused principally on style. Commenting on this departure, Resnais said: "I was making this film at a time when I think, rightly, that one could not make a film, in France, without speaking about the Algerian War . Indeed I wonder whether the closed and stifling atmosphere of L'Année does not result from those contradictions." Contemporary critical response to

1856-439: A reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. From 1904 until 1917, Trotsky described himself as a "non-factional social democrat". He tried to reconcile different groups within the party, which resulted in many clashes with Lenin and other prominent party members. Trotsky later maintained that he had been wrong in opposing Lenin on the issue of the party. Trotsky began developing his theory of permanent revolution and developed

1972-421: A second man who may be the woman's husband. The characters are unnamed. In an ornate baroque hotel populated by wealthy individuals and couples who socialize with each other, a man approaches a woman and claims they met the year before at a similar resort (perhaps at Frederiksbad, Karlstadt, Marienbad , or Baden-Salsa) and had an affair, but she responded to his request to run away together by asking him to wait

2088-441: A solo organ), and a scene near the end of the film in which the screenplay explicitly describes a rape, whereas the film substitutes a series of repeated overexposed tracking shots moving towards the smiling woman. In statements by the two authors of the film in the decades after its release, it was partly acknowledged that they did not entirely share the same vision of it. According to Resnais, Robbe-Grillet used to insist that it

2204-661: A strike broke out at the Putilov Works in the city. This single strike grew into a general strike, and by 7 January 1905, there were 140,000 strikers in Saint Petersburg. On Sunday, 9 January 1905, Father Georgi Gapon knowingly led a procession of radicals mixed within larger groups of ordinary working citizens through the streets to the Winter Palace to supposedly beseech the Tsar for food and relief from

2320-559: A theatre impresario in Paris, his casino gambling, his purchase of influence among the press, the police, and politicians, and always his extravagant lifestyle and desire to impress; we see his devotion to his glamorous wife Arlette, his exploitation of her beauty to lure funds from a Spanish revolutionary fascist, his contradictory accounts to his friends of events in his own past, and gleams of political idealism - which may yet be just expedients to create further webs of deception. Interposed in

2436-518: A usurpation of his newspaper's name that in April 1913, he wrote a letter to Nikolay Chkheidze , a Menshevik leader, bitterly denouncing Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Though he quickly got over the disagreement, the message was intercepted by the Russian secret police , and a copy was put into their archives. Shortly after Lenin's death in 1924, the letter was found and publicized by Trotsky's opponents within

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2552-647: A very successful newspaper in the revolutionary atmosphere of Saint Petersburg in 1905. Just before Trotsky's return, the Mensheviks had independently come up with the same idea that Trotsky had: an elected non-party revolutionary organization representing the capital's workers, the first Soviet ("Council") of Workers. By the time of Trotsky's arrival, the Saint Petersburg Soviet was already functioning, headed by Khrustalyev-Nosar (Georgy Nosar, alias Pyotr Khrustalyov). Khrustalyev-Nosar had been

2668-408: A year. The woman insists she has never met the man. He attempts to remind her of their shared past, while she rebuffs him and contradicts his accounts. Between interactions with the woman, a second man, who may be her husband, asserts his dominance over the first by repeatedly beating him at a version of Nim . Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorienting shifts of time and location, the film explores

2784-455: Is a version of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, that it represents the relationship between patient and psychoanalyst, that it all takes place in the woman's mind, that it all takes place in the man's mind and depicts his refusal to acknowledge he has killed the woman he loved, and that the characters are ghosts or dead souls in limbo. Some have noted the film has the atmosphere and the form of

2900-472: Is also factually frustrating. Ideally, it should be possible to relish this fascinating movie on its own. But, since so little French history of the nineteen-thirties is provided, it's likely to send you flying to the library.... Despite its mystifications, Stavisky is one of the most rewarding films I've seen this year—and also one of the most intelligent." Robert Benayoun , Resnais's commentator and friend, writing some years later, felt that his intentions in

3016-412: Is not a portrait of Stavisky, but of the rôle he sought to play. It is not a study of character, but of a performance. It is not an image of reality, but the analysis of an illusion. By starting precisely from these 'false appearances' which Resnais can liken to those of the pre-war political establishment, what he speaks of here is quite simply the death of an era whose false splendours will be lifted, like

3132-560: The 34th Academy Awards in 1962 and, though it was not chosen as one of the five nominees for that award, Robbe-Grillet was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay the following year for his work on the film. The film was also nominated for a Hugo Award in the Best Dramatic Presentation category. Numerous explanations of the film's events have been put forward, among them: that it

3248-697: The Mensheviks , argued for a bigger and less disciplined party where people who assisted would also be seen as members. In a surprise development, Trotsky and most of the Iskra editors supported Martov and the Mensheviks, while Plekhanov supported Lenin and the Bolsheviks . During 1903 and 1904, many members changed sides in the factions. Trotsky left the Mensheviks in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to

3364-672: The People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs (Defence Minister); he founded the Red Army and led it to victory in the Russian Civil War. He was an honorary president of the Third International . In 1922, Trotsky and Lenin formed an alliance against the growing Soviet bureaucracy ; Lenin proposed that Trotsky become his Deputy Chairman and preside over economic management , but he declined. Trotsky led

3480-680: The Red Terror and suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion , scholarship ranks Trotsky's leadership of the Red Army highly among historical figures, and he is credited for his major involvement with the military , economic , cultural and political development of the Soviet Union. Leon Trotsky was born Lev Davidovich Bronstein to David Leontyevich Bronstein (1847–1922) and Anna Lvovna (née Zhivotovskaya, 1850–1910) on 7 November 1879,

3596-509: The "old guard" led by Plekhanov and the "new guard" led by Lenin and Martov. Plekhanov's supporters were older, and had spent the previous 20 years together in exile in Europe. Members of the new guard were in their early 30s and only recently emigrated from Russia. Lenin, who was trying to establish a permanent majority against Plekhanov within Iskra, expected Trotsky, then 23, to side with the new guard. In March 1903 Lenin wrote: I suggest to all

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3712-459: The 1920s had created the costumes, and asked members of his team to look at other silent films, particularly G. W. Pabst 's Pandora's Box (1929), as he wanted Seyrig's appearance and manner to resemble that of Louise Brooks in that film. The style of silent films is also suggested by the manner in which the characters who populate the hotel are mostly seen in artificial poses rather than behaving naturalistically. The film creates ambiguity in

3828-684: The 83rd most acclaimed film in history, and it received 23 votes in the British Film Institute 's decennial Sight and Sound polls. Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa cited it as one of his 100 favorite films. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes , Last Year at Marienbad holds an approval rating of 93% based on 57 reviews, with an average rating of 8.2/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "Elegantly enigmatic and dreamlike, this work of essential cinema features exquisite cinematography and an exploration of narrative still revisited by filmmakers today." The film

3944-813: The Bolsheviks were waiting for the next party Congress to determine which factions to merge with. Trotsky temporarily joined the Mezhraiontsy , a regional social democratic organization in Petrograd , and became one of its leaders. At the First Congress of Soviets in June, he was elected a member of the first All-Russian Central Executive Committee ("VTsIK") from the Mezhraiontsy faction. Last Year at Marienbad Last Year at Marienbad ( French : L'Année dernière à Marienbad ), released in

4060-669: The Bolsheviks. As chairman of the Petrograd Soviet , he played an important role in the October Revolution that overthrew the Provisional Government . In Lenin's first government , Trotsky was appointed as the People's Commissar for Foreign Affairs (Foreign Minister) and led negotiations for the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk , by which Russia withdrew from World War I . From 1918 to 1925, he served as

4176-538: The Communist Party to portray him as Lenin's enemy. The 1910s were a period of heightened tension within the RSDLP, leading to numerous frictions between Trotsky, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The most serious disagreement that Trotsky and the Mensheviks had with Lenin at the time was over the issue of "expropriations", i.e., armed robbery of banks and other companies by Bolshevik groups to procure money for

4292-458: The End " parodies the film, with frontman Damon Albarn as X and guitarist Graham Coxon as M. The film inspired a brief craze for the variation of Nim played by the characters. Marienbad served as the main inspiration for Karl Lagerfeld 's Chanel spring–summer 2011 collection, as Coco Chanel designed the costumes for the film. The setting for Lagerfeld's show consisted of a fountain and

4408-665: The European social democratic parties, primarily the German party. As a war correspondent for the Kievskaya Mysl , Trotsky moved to France on 19 November 1914. In January 1915 in Paris, he began editing (at first with Martov, who soon resigned as the paper moved to the left) Nashe Slovo ("Our Word"), an internationalist socialist newspaper. He adopted the slogan of "peace without indemnities or annexations, peace without conquerors or conquered." Lenin advocated Russia's defeat in

4524-654: The Marxist antidote into the legitimate newspapers". In September 1912, Kievskaya Mysl sent him to the Balkans as its war correspondent, where he covered the two Balkan Wars for the next year. While there, Trotsky chronicled the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbian army against the Albanian civilian population. He became a close friend of Christian Rakovsky , later a leading Soviet politician and Trotsky's ally in

4640-460: The Musée Grevin, and immediately saw the potential of Belmondo to portray him as a mysterious, charming and elegant fraudster. Semprún described the film as "a fable upon the life of bourgeois society in its corruption, on the collaboration of money and power, of the police and crime, a fable in which Alexander's craziness, his cynicism, act as catalysts". Resnais said: "What attracted me to

4756-535: The Party. These actions had been banned by the 5th Congress, but were continued by the Bolsheviks. In January 1912, the majority of the Bolshevik faction, led by Lenin, as well as a few defecting Mensheviks, held a conference in Prague and decided to break away from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party , and formed a new party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks) . In response, Trotsky organized

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4872-561: The Russian government to some extent and wanted them to win the war, while Trotsky's ex-colleague Parvus, now a defencist, sided against Russia so strongly that he wanted Germany to win the war. In Switzerland, Trotsky briefly worked within the Swiss Socialist Party , prompting it to adopt an internationalist resolution. He wrote a book opposing the war, The War and the International, and the pro-war position taken by

4988-668: The Saint Petersburg Soviet Council of Workers Deputies, which was meeting at the Technological Institute in the city. Also attending were some 200,000 people crowded outside to hear the speeches—about half of all workers in Saint Petersburg. After his return, Trotsky and Parvus took over the newspaper Russian Gazette, increasing its circulation to 500,000. Trotsky also co-founded, together with Parvus and Julius Martov and other Mensheviks, "Nachalo" ("The Beginning"), which also proved to be

5104-734: The South Russian Workers' Union in Nikolayev. Trotsky's university colleague and a prominent engineer who served as the Technical Director of the Baltic Shipyard had noted that he displayed an exceptional gift for mathematics. Using the name "Lvov", he wrote and printed leaflets and proclamations, distributed revolutionary pamphlets, and popularized socialist ideas among industrial workers and revolutionary students. In January 1898, more than 200 members of

5220-574: The Soviet Communist Party. On 3 August 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, in which Austria-Hungary fought against the Russian Empire, Trotsky was forced to flee Vienna for neutral Switzerland to avoid arrest as a Russian émigré . The outbreak of World War I caused a sudden realignment within the RSDLP and other European social democratic parties over the issues of war, revolution, pacifism and internationalism, redividing

5336-463: The Tsarist government and its foreign debts: The autocracy never enjoyed the confidence of the people and was never granted any authority by the people. We have therefore decided not to allow the repayment of such loans as have been made by the Tsarist government when openly engaged in a war with the entire people. The following day, on 3 December 1905, the Soviet was surrounded by troops loyal to

5452-621: The United Kingdom as Last Year in Marienbad , is a 1961 French New Wave avant-garde psychological drama film directed by Alain Resnais and written by Alain Robbe-Grillet . Set in a palace in a park that has been converted into a luxury hotel, it stars Delphine Seyrig and Giorgio Albertazzi as a woman and a man who may have met the year before and may have contemplated or started an affair, with Sacha Pitoëff as

5568-407: The ambiguous environment and obscure motives within the film as representing many of the concerns of surrealism in narrative cinema. Another early supporter, actor and surrealist Jacques Brunius , declared that " Marienbad is the greatest film ever made". Less reverently, film critic Pauline Kael called Marienbad "the high-fashion experimental film, the snow job at the ice palace ... back at

5684-418: The arrival of Trotsky in France to seek political asylum, and his sojourn in various country houses and hotels, receiving visits from left-wing activists. These scenes appear to have no link with the main narrative (apart from two minor characters: the young German-Jewish actress who moves between both stories, and the police-inspector who monitors Trotsky's movements and then also investigates Alexandre), until

5800-429: The character of Alexandre was his connection to the theatre, to show-business in general. Stavisky seemed to me like an incredible actor, the hero of a serial novel. He had the gift of bringing reality to his fantasies by means of regal gestures." (Among many theatrical references, the film features a scene in the theatre in which Alexandre rehearses a scene from Giraudoux 's Intermezzo , and another in which he attends

5916-461: The characters are unnamed in the film, in Robbe-Grillet's published "ciné-novel" of the screenplay, the first man is referred to with the letter "X", the woman with the letter "A", and the second man with the letter "M". Last Year at Marienbad was created out of an unusual collaboration between writer Alain Robbe-Grillet and director Alain Resnais . Robbe-Grillet described its basis: Alain Resnais and I were able to collaborate only because we saw

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6032-561: The congress discussed the position of the Jewish Bund , which had co-founded the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) in 1898 but wanted to remain autonomous within the party. Shortly afterwards, the pro-Iskra delegates unexpectedly split into two factions. The split was initially over an organisational issue. Lenin and his supporters, the Bolsheviks, argued for a smaller but highly organized party where only party members would be seen as members, while Martov and his supporters,

6148-459: The doubts which were felt by critics: "No one could fail to respond to the elegance of the fashion-plate costumes, the Art Deco interiors, the gleaming custom-built cars, the handsome grand hotels, and so on, all paraded before us to the tinkling thirties-pastiche foxtrot music of Stephen Sondheim... But Resnais's and Semprún's Stavisky is just not a very interesting figure... what he represents to

6264-513: The end of the film when, in the wake of Stavisky's fall and exposure as a Ukrainian immigrant, a Jew, and a confidant of members of the left-of-centre government, Trotsky's presence is deemed undesirable and he is expelled from the country, while a new 'government of national unity' is formed. The death of Alexandre/Stavisky in a chalet in Chamonix becomes a further mystery: either a suicide by gunshot, like that of his father, or an assassination by

6380-563: The evening of 24 September, the workers at 50 other printing shops in Moscow were also on strike. On 2 October 1905, the typesetters in printing shops in Saint Petersburg decided to strike in support of the Moscow strikers. On 7 October 1905, the railway workers of the Moscow–Kazan Railway went out on strike. Amid the resulting confusion, Trotsky returned from Finland to Saint Petersburg on 15 October 1905. On that day, Trotsky spoke before

6496-591: The fifth child of a wealthy Jewish family in Yanovka, Kherson governorate , Russian Empire (now Bereslavka , Ukraine). His father, David Leontyevich, had lived in Poltava and later moved to Bereslavka, as it had a large Jewish community. Trotsky's younger sister, Olga , who also grew up to be a Bolshevik and a Soviet politician, married the prominent Bolshevik Lev Kamenev . Some authors, notably Robert Service , have claimed that Trotsky's childhood first name

6612-626: The film had been widely misunderstood, especially by those who looked for a politically engaged analysis of a crucial period in French history and found instead a retreat into nostalgia. For Benayoun, Resnais had seen in Stavisky a Faustian archetype, haunted by visions of his oncoming death, who fights to hold on to his 'empire' ("Alexander the Great"), resorting to every kind of illusion and delusion to gain more time for himself. The kaleidoscopic method of

6728-446: The film in the same way from the start; and not just in the same general outlines but exactly, in the construction of the least detail as in its total architecture. What I wrote might have been what was already in his mind; what he added during the shooting was what I might have written. ... [P]aradoxically enough, and thanks to this perfect identity of our conceptions, we almost always worked separately. The screenplay Robbe-Grillet wrote

6844-444: The film is edited creates a highly nonlinear narrative . It allowed the themes of time and the mind and the interaction of past and present to be explored in an original way. As spatial and temporal continuity is destroyed by the methods of filming and editing that are used, the film offers instead a "mental continuity", a continuity of thought. While films that immediately preceded and followed Marienbad in Resnais's career showed

6960-407: The film should be called Stavisky , a title which Resnais disliked because he thought it would suggest that the film was about the Stavisky affair which only broke out after Stavisky's death. The only concession that he was able to gain was that the title should be written with an ellipsis, as Stavisky... , suggesting something more speculative about the subject rather than a history. The screenplay

7076-414: The film was polarized. The controversy was fueled when Robbe-Grillet and Resnais appeared to give contradictory answers when asked whether the man and woman had actually met at Marienbad last year or not, as this was used as a means of attacking the film by those who disliked it. In 1963, filmmaker and writer Ado Kyrou declared the film a total triumph in his book Le Surréalisme au cinéma , recognizing

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7192-400: The film's authors is not clear... What the picture does not do is use the Stavisky affair to make any larger comment upon the drift of twentieth-century life, or capitalist society, or even human gullibility... One's ultimate impression of the film is of an immense gap between the sophistication of its technique and the commonplace simple-minded notions it purveys." The theme of uncertainty in

7308-599: The first of his several performances for Resnais, as a young inventor of the Matriscope, a device for determining the sex of a child in the womb, to which Alexandre impulsively gives his financial backing. With its high production-values and the popularity of its star actor, the film was enthusiastically received by the public in France, whereas, perhaps for the same reasons, it drew a cool response from many critics who felt that Resnais had betrayed his reputation for intellectual rigour. A British reviewer expressed several of

7424-784: The first of the Moscow show trials , and in 1940, was assassinated at his home in Mexico City by Stalinist agent Ramón Mercader . Written out of Soviet history under Stalin, Trotsky was one of the few of Stalin's rivals who was never politically rehabilitated by later leaders. In the West, Trotsky emerged as a hero of the anti-Stalinist left for his defense of a more democratic , internationalist form of socialism against Stalinist totalitarianism , and for his intellectual contributions to Marxism. While some of his wartime actions have proved controversial, such as his ideological defence of

7540-458: The government and the deputies were arrested. Trotsky and other Soviet leaders were tried in 1906 on charges of supporting an armed rebellion. On 4 October 1906 he was convicted and sentenced to internal exile to Siberia. While en route to exile in Obdorsk , Siberia, in January 1907, Trotsky escaped at Berezov and once again made his way to London. He attended the 5th Congress of the RSDLP . In October, he moved to Vienna , Austria-Hungary. For

7656-425: The government. According to Gapon himself, he led the people into a Palace Guard already on the defensive due to the crowd instigating violence against them. They eventually fired on the demonstration, resulting in the deaths of an unknown number of violent radicals, peaceful demonstrators and police caught within the melee. Although Sunday, 9 January 1905, became known as Bloody Sunday , Gapon's own biography points to

7772-540: The influence of Marienbad . Terence Young stated that he styled the pre-credits sequence of the James Bond film From Russia with Love (1963) after Marienbad . Peter Greenaway said the film had been the most important influence upon his own filmmaking (and he himself would go on to establish a close working relationship with its cinematographer, Sacha Vierny ). The film's visual style has been imitated in many TV commercials and fashion photography. The music video for English rock group Blur 's 1994 single " To

7888-433: The interiors and the gardens were the palaces of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg (including the Amalienburg hunting lodge) and the Antiquarium of the Munich Residenz , all in Munich . Additional interior scenes were filmed in the Photosonore-Marignan-Simo studios in Paris . No filming was done in Mariánské Lázně (Marienbad), nor does the film clarify which scenes, if any, are supposed to be set there. In determining

8004-468: The local Russian language socialist newspaper, Novy Mir , and the Yiddish-language daily, Der Forverts ("Forward"), in translation. He also made speeches to Russian émigrés. Trotsky was living in New York City when the February Revolution of 1917 led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II . He left New York on 27 March 1917, but his ship, the SS Kristianiafjord , was intercepted by British naval officials in Canada at Halifax, Nova Scotia . He

8120-399: The local Menshevik committee, which he pushed in a more radical direction. The latter, however, were betrayed by a secret police agent in May, and Trotsky had to flee to rural Finland . There he worked on fleshing out his theory of permanent revolution. On 19 September 1905, the typesetters at the Ivan Sytin 's printing house in Moscow went out on strike for shorter hours and higher pay. By

8236-414: The meantime, after a period of secret police repression and internal confusion that followed the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, Iskra succeeded in convening the party's Second Congress in London in August 1903. Trotsky and other Iskra editors attended. The first congress went as planned, with Iskra supporters handily defeating the few "economist" delegates. Then

8352-439: The members of the editorial board that they co-opt 'Pero' as a member of the board on the same basis as other members. [...] We very much need a seventh member, both as a convenience in voting (six being an even number) and as an addition to our forces. 'Pero' has been contributing to every issue for several months now; he works, in general, most energetically for the Iskra; he gives lectures (in which he has been very successful). In

8468-603: The middle line proposed by Trotsky. At first opposed, in the end Lenin voted for Trotsky's resolution to avoid a split among anti-war socialists. In September 1916, Trotsky was deported from France to Spain for his anti-war activities. Spanish authorities did not want him and deported him to the United States on 25 December 1916. He arrived in New York City on 13 January 1917. He stayed for over two months at 1522 Vyse Avenue in The Bronx . In New York he wrote articles for

8584-426: The most rational he can devise—and this spectator will certainly find the film difficult if not incomprehensible; or else the spectator will let himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him ... and to this spectator, the film will seem the 'easiest' he has ever seen: a film addressed exclusively to his sensibility, to his faculties of sight, hearing, feeling." As a suggestion of how one might view

8700-489: The name Lev . North has compared the speculation on Trotsky's given name to the undue emphasis given to his having a Jewish surname. The language spoken at home was not Yiddish but a mixture of Russian and Ukrainian , known as Surzhyk . Although Trotsky spoke French, English, and German to a good standard, he said in his autobiography My Life that he was never fluent in any language but Russian. Raymond Molinier wrote that Trotsky spoke French fluently. When Trotsky

8816-500: The name of a jailer of the Odessa prison in which he had earlier been held. This became his primary revolutionary pseudonym. After escape from Siberia, Trotsky moved to London, joining Georgi Plekhanov , Vladimir Lenin, Julius Martov , and other editors of Iskra . Under the pen name Pero ("quill" or "pen"), Trotsky soon became one of the paper's leading writers. Unknown to Trotsky, the six editors of Iskra were evenly split between

8932-421: The narrative are moments of flashback (to his teenage awakening to a hedonistic life, to his arrest as the petty crook Stavisky in 1926, and to his father's suicide after this family dishonour) and flash-forwards (to his funeral, and to the parliamentary enquiry into the Stavisky affair at which his friends and associates testify with varying degrees of honesty). Also punctuating the main story are scenes depicting

9048-427: The narrative, its theatricality and romanticism provided the director with exactly the tools to represent the dazzling and elusive career of this "sublime crook". He concluded that Stavisky was perhaps one of the films in which Resnais had engaged himself most personally. Another critic took up the theme of theatricality in identifying the true subject of the film, as well as linking it to the political background: "It

9164-414: The narrator's voice-over commentary. Among the notable images in the film is a scene in which two characters (and the camera) rush out of the château and are faced with a tableau of figures arranged in a geometric garden; although the people cast long dramatic shadows (which were painted on the ground), the trees in the garden do not (and are, in fact, not real trees, but constructions). The manner in which

9280-500: The newly formed Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was held. From then on Trotsky identified as a member of the party. While imprisoned in Moscow, in the summer of 1899, Trotsky married Aleksandra Sokolovskaya (1872–1938), a fellow Marxist. The ceremony was performed by a Jewish chaplain. In 1900, he was sentenced to four years exile in Siberia . Because of their marriage, Trotsky and his wife were allowed to be exiled to

9396-587: The newspaper throughout 1909. A majority of Bolsheviks controlled the Central Committee in 1910. Lenin agreed to the financing of "Pravda", but required a Bolshevik to be appointed as co-editor of the paper. When various Bolshevik and Menshevik factions tried to re-unite at the January 1910 RSDLP Central Committee meeting in Paris over Lenin's objections, Trotsky's Pravda was made a party-financed 'central organ'. Lev Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law,

9512-682: The next seven years, he often took part in the activities of the Austrian Social Democratic Party and, occasionally, of the German Social Democratic Party . In Vienna, Trotsky became close to Adolph Joffe , his friend for the next 20 years, who introduced him to psychoanalysis . In October 1908 he was asked to join the editorial staff of Pravda ("Truth"), a bi-weekly, Russian-language social democratic paper for Russian workers, which he co-edited with Adolph Joffe and Matvey Skobelev . It

9628-568: The no-fun party for non-people". The film was included in The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (1978), in which authors Harry Medved and Randy Dreyfuss lampooned its surrealistic style and quoted numerous critics who found it to be pretentious or incomprehensible. Although it remains disparaged by some critics, Last Year at Marienbad has come to be regarded by many as one of Resnais' greatest works. Review aggregation website They Shoot Pictures, Don't They has determined it to be

9744-528: The party into defeatists and defencists. Within the RSDLP, Lenin, Trotsky and Martov advocated various internationalist anti-war positions that saw defeat for your own country's ruling class imperialists as the "lesser evil" in the war, while they opposed all imperialists in the imperialist war. These anti-war believers were known as "defeatists". Those who supported one side over the other in the war were known as "defencists". Plekhanov and many other defencist social democrats (both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) supported

9860-408: The party should focus on helping industrial workers improve their lot and were less concerned with changing the government. They believed that societal reforms would grow out of the worker's struggle for higher pay and better working conditions. Others argued that overthrowing the monarchy was more important and that a well-organized and disciplined revolutionary party was essential. The latter position

9976-885: The party's Left Opposition , which opposed the concessions of the New Economic Policy . After Lenin's death in 1924, Trotsky was the most prominent critic of Joseph Stalin , but was outmaneuvered by him and lost his positions: he was expelled from the Politburo in 1926 and the party in 1927, internally exiled to Alma Ata in 1928, and deported in 1929. He lived in Turkey, France, and Norway before settling in Mexico in 1937. In exile, Trotsky wrote polemically against Stalinism , supporting proletarian internationalism against Stalin's theory of " socialism in one country ". Trotsky's theory of " permanent revolution " posited that

10092-532: The party's 1903 schism, but declared himself non-factional in 1904. During the failed 1905 Revolution, Trotsky returned to Russia and was elected chairman of the Saint Petersburg Soviet . He was again exiled to Siberia, but escaped in 1907 and spent time in London, Vienna, Switzerland, Paris, and New York. After the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew the tsar , Trotsky returned to Russia and joined

10208-415: The relationships between the three characters. Conversations and events are repeated in different places in the building and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the hotel's corridors with ambiguous and repetitive voice-overs . No certain conclusion is offered regarding what is real and what is imagined, but at the end of the film, the woman submits and leaves the hotel with the first man. While

10324-409: The restored one, saying: Sound recording and reproduction techniques have changed a lot over the decades. If one remasters a film so as to tailor it to the standards of 2009, there is a danger of altering drastically the balance of the voices, the sound effects, and the music. By correcting so-called flaws, one can lose the style of a film altogether. It is better to respect the sound characteristics of

10440-698: The same location in Siberia: Ust-Kut and the Verkholensk in the Baikal Lake region. They had two daughters, Zinaida (1901–1933) and Nina (1902–1928), born in Siberia. In Siberia, Trotsky studied philosophy. He became aware of the differences within the party, which had been decimated by arrests in 1898 and 1899. Some social democrats known in Leninist phraseology as " economists " argued

10556-413: The screen and fill out what was absent from the script. Robbe-Grillet published his screenplay, illustrated by shots from the film, calling it a " ciné-roman " (ciné-novel). Despite the close correspondence between the written and filmed works, numerous differences between them have been identified. Two notable examples are the choice of music in the film (Francis Seyrig's score introduces extensive use of

10672-520: The section of articles and notes on the events of the day, he will not only be very useful, but absolutely necessary. Unquestionably a man of rare abilities, he has conviction and energy, and he will go much farther. Because of Plekhanov's opposition, Trotsky did not become a full member of the board. But participated in its meetings in an advisory capacity, which earned him Plekhanov's enmity. In late 1902, Trotsky met Natalia Sedova (1882–1962), who soon became his companion. They married in 1903, and she

10788-401: The security forces to ensure his silence. The film began as a commission by Jean-Paul Belmondo to the screenwriter Jorge Semprún to develop a scenario about Stavisky. Resnais, who had previously worked with Semprún on La Guerre est finie , expressed his interest in the project (after a gap of six years since his previous film); he recalled seeing as a child the waxwork figure of Stavisky in

10904-547: The socialist revolution could only survive if spread to advanced capitalist countries. In The Revolution Betrayed (1936), Trotsky argued that the Soviet Union had become a " degenerated workers' state " due to its isolation, and called for an end to Stalin's dictatorship. He founded the Fourth International in 1938 as an alternative to the Comintern . In 1936, Trotsky was sentenced to death in absentia at

11020-431: The spatial and temporal aspects of what it shows and creates uncertainty in the mind of the spectator about the causal relationships between events. This is achieved through editing by giving apparently incompatible information in consecutive shots, or within a single shot that seems to show impossible juxtapositions, or by means of repetitions of events in different settings. These ambiguities are matched by contradictions in

11136-479: The time required children to be given religious education "in the faith of their parents". Odessa was then a bustling cosmopolitan port city, very unlike the typical Russian city of the time. This environment contributed to the development of the young man's international outlook. Trotsky became involved in revolutionary activities in 1896 after moving to the harbor town of Nikolayev on the Black Sea . At first

11252-571: The time, especially as in most cases they do not disturb the viewer anymore after two minutes. The Criterion packaging of the film went out of print in March 2013. In July 2018, a restored version of Last Year at Marienbad was selected to be screened in the Venice Classics section of the 75th Venice International Film Festival . The restored version was released theatrically in France on 19 September 2018 by Tamasa Distribution, followed by

11368-411: The union, including Trotsky, were arrested. He was held for the next two years in prison awaiting trial, first in Nikolayev, then Kherson , then Odessa, and finally in Moscow. In the Moscow prison, he came into contact with other revolutionaries, heard about Lenin and read Lenin's book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia . Two months into his imprisonment, on 1–3 March 1898, the first Congress of

11484-512: The visual appearance of the film, Resnais said he wanted to recreate "a certain style of silent cinema", which he sought to produce through his direction as well as the actors' make-up; he even asked Eastman Kodak if they could supply an old-fashioned film stock that would "bloom" or "halo" to create the look of a silent film, but they could not. Resnais showed his costume designer photographs from Marcel L'Herbier 's L'Inhumaine (1924) and L'Argent (1928), for which great fashion designers of

11600-617: The war and demanded a complete break with the Second International . Trotsky attended the Zimmerwald Conference of anti-war socialists in September 1915 and advocated a middle course between those who, like Martov, would stay within the Second International at any cost and those who, like Lenin, would break with the Second International and form a Third International . The conference adopted

11716-513: The way that intertitles were used. The first screening of the film was given at the Cannes film festival in May 1974. After this performance further distribution was delayed when Stavisky's son sought to have the film seized in a legal action against the producers of the film because of its depiction of the relationship between Alexandre Stavisky and his wife. Gérard Depardieu appears in a small role,

11832-799: The work, he offered, "The whole film, as a matter of fact, is the story of a persuasion: it deals with a reality which the hero creates out of his own vision, out of his own words." Resnais, for his part, gave a more abstract explanation of the film's purpose: "For me this film is an attempt, still very crude and very primitive, to approach the complexity of thought, of its processes." The impact of Last Year at Marienbad upon other filmmakers has been widely recognized and variously illustrated, extending from French directors such as Agnès Varda , Marguerite Duras , and Jacques Rivette to international figures such as Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini . Stanley Kubrick 's The Shining (1980) and David Lynch 's Inland Empire (2006) are often cited as showing

11948-420: Was Yiddish Leiba . The American Trotskyist David North said that this was an assumption based on Trotsky's Jewish birth, but, contrary to Service's claims, there is no documentary evidence to support his using a Yiddish name, when that language was not spoken by his family. Both North and political historian Walter Laqueur wrote that Trotsky's childhood name was Lyova , a standard Russian diminutive of

12064-550: Was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He was a central figure in the 1905 Revolution , October Revolution , Russian Civil War , and establishment of the Soviet Union . Trotsky and Vladimir Lenin were widely considered the two most prominent Soviet figures, and Trotsky was " de facto " second-in-command during the early years of the Russian Soviet Republic . Ideologically

12180-428: Was added to the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts failed in August 1910. Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations. Trotsky continued publishing Pravda for another two years until it finally folded in April 1912. The Bolsheviks started a new workers-oriented newspaper in Saint Petersburg on 22 April 1912 and also called it Pravda . Trotsky was so upset by what he saw as

12296-625: Was detained for a month at Amherst Internment Camp in Nova Scotia . While imprisoned in the camp, Trotsky established an increasing friendship with the workers and sailors amongst his fellow inmates, describing his month at the camp as "one continual mass meeting". Trotsky's speeches and agitation incurred the wrath of German officer inmates who complained to the British camp commander, Colonel Morris, about Trotsky's "anti-patriotic" attitude. Morris then forbade Trotsky to make any more public speeches, leading to 530 prisoners protesting and signing

12412-571: Was eight, his father sent him to Odessa to be educated. He was enrolled in a Lutheran German-language school (School of the Lutheran St. Pauls Cathedral, of Black Sea Germans , which admitted students of other faiths and backgrounds, ) which became Russified during his years in Odessa as a result of the Imperial government's policy of Russification . Trotsky and his wife Natalia later registered their children as Lutheran, since Austrian law at

12528-747: Was expressed by the London-based newspaper Iskra ( The Spark ), founded in 1900. Trotsky quickly sided with the Iskra position and began writing for the paper. In the summer of 1902, at the urging of his wife, Aleksandra, Trotsky escaped from Siberia hidden in hay. Aleksandra later escaped with their daughters. Both daughters married, and Zinaida had children, but the daughters died before their parents. Nina Nevelson died from tuberculosis in 1928, cared for in her last months by her older sister. Zinaida Volkova followed her father into exile in Berlin , taking her son by her second marriage but leaving behind

12644-492: Was he who wrote Marienbad , without question, and that Resnais's filming of it was a betrayal—but that, since he found it very beautiful, he did not blame Resnais for it. Filming took place, using black-and-white film and the Dyaliscope widescreen process, over a period of ten weeks between September and November 1960. Most of Delphine Seyrig 's dresses in the film were designed by Chanel . The locations used for most of

12760-415: Was his last appearance in a French film. The film was nominated for Best Foreign Language Film by the U.S. National Board of Review . Resnais's preferred title for the film was Biarritz-Bonheur , referring to the department store which symbolised a certain luxury lifestyle seen in the 1930s, and he continued to use this title in later interviews. However, during filming the distributors insisted that

12876-627: Was refused entry to the Cannes Film Festival , reportedly because Resnais had signed Jean-Paul Sartre 's Manifesto of the 121 against the Algerian War , but it won the Golden Lion at the 22nd Venice International Film Festival in 1961. In 1962, it was chosen as the best French film of the previous year by the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics . It was selected as the French entry for Best Foreign Language Film at

12992-525: Was smuggled into Russia. The paper appeared very irregularly; only five issues were published in its first year. Avoiding factional politics, the paper proved popular with Russian industrial workers. Both the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks split multiple times after the failure of the 1905–1907 revolution. Money was very scarce for the publication of Pravda . Trotsky approached the Russian Central Committee to seek financial backing for

13108-400: Was the embodiment of the Saint Petersburg Soviet. Trotsky joined the Soviet under the name "Yanovsky" (after the village he was born in, Yanovka) and was elected vice-chairman. He did much of the actual work at the Soviet and, after Khrustalev-Nosar's arrest on 26 November 1905, was elected its chairman. On 2 December, the Soviet issued a proclamation which included the following statement about

13224-489: Was the last of any film by Alain Resnais to appear in English, as: Stavisky...: text by Jorge Semprún for the film by Alain Resnais ; translated from the French by Sabine Destree; photo editor: Jeanette Seaver. New York: The Viking Press (A Richard Seaver Book), 1975. Leon Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein (7 November [ O.S. 26 October] 1879 – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky ,

13340-417: Was very detailed, specifying not only the dialogue and gestures and décor, but also the placement and movement of the camera and the sequencing of shots in the editing. Resnais filmed the script with great fidelity, and when Robbe-Grillet, who was not present during the filming, saw the rough cut, he said he found the film just as he had intended it, while recognizing how much Resnais had added to make it work on

13456-501: Was with him until his death. They had two children together, Lev Sedov (1906–1938) and Sergei Sedov (1908–1937), both of whom would predecease their parents. Regarding his sons' surnames, Trotsky later explained that after the 1917 revolution: In order not to oblige my sons to change their name, I, for "citizenship" requirements, took on the name of my wife. Trotsky never used the name "Sedov" either privately or publicly. Natalia Sedova sometimes signed her name "Sedova-Trotskaya". In

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