Editing Last Year at Marienbad (section)

==Interpretations==
Numerous explanations of the film's events have been put forward, among them: that it is a version of the [[Orpheus#Death of Eurydice|Orpheus and Eurydice]] myth, that it represents the relationship between patient and psychoanalyst, that it all takes place in the woman's mind,{{sfn|Armes|1968|p=184}} that it all takes place in the man's mind and depicts his refusal to acknowledge he has killed the woman he loved,<ref>{{cite book |last=Ward |first=John |title=Alain Resnais, or the Theme of Time |location=London |publisher=[[Secker & Warburg]] |year=1968 |page=39 |isbn=978-0-4360-9867-3}}</ref> and that the characters are ghosts or dead souls in limbo.{{sfn|Leutrat|2000|pages=28–30}} Some have noted the film has the atmosphere and the form of a dream, and claim the structure of the film may be understood by the analogy of a recurring dream,{{sfn|Brunius|1962|pages=124–6}} or even that the man's meeting with the woman is the memory (or dream) of a dream.{{sfn|Benayoun|1980|pages=99–100}}

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, 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."{{sfn|Robbe-Grillet|1962|p=14}} As a suggestion of how one might view 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."{{sfn|Robbe-Grillet|1962|p=10}}

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."{{sfn|Benayoun|2008|loc=pp. 105–106: "Ce film est pour moi une tentative, encore très grossière and très primitive, d'approcher la complexité de la pensée, de son mécanisme."}}