Sunday, April 20, 2008
The Last Year at Marienbad Ride
I wonder how many folks who came to see a new 35mm print of director Alain Resnais' and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet'sLast Year in Marienbad, were there because, like myself, they had never seen it and felt that if they probably should because it is one of those "classics" that gets mentioned a fair amount by film scholars. Someone had to do a Marienbad, which I see as an exercise in trying to create suspension in the art of film. Time, reality, space, and narrative are all shifted and suspended. There are even some exceptionally overexposed sequences that give the illusion of shifting black and white. Hypnosis is also a kind of suspension. From the very beginning, the narrative of X (the major speaker and protagonist, if one stretches the definition to call him that) and the tracking shots of walls and ceilings are intended to put the audience into a unique space, where after a fashion they accept jump cuts across time and place as three characters circle around each other in a way not unlike the overall presentation.
Once again - I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure -- of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel -- where corridors succeed endless corridors -- silent deserted corridors....."
In an online analysis Walter Kirschgives his impression of Robbe-Grillet's sense of time,
"In `Marienbad,' Robbe-Grillet treats time as a flat, planar element, not a linear one. Past, present and future are of equal scale occupying the same space -- a novel concept for a French writer whose native language has eight past, four future and four present tenses. With the concept of time, Robbe-Grillet is a deconstructivist smashing the temporal elements into fragments for Resnais to reconstruct into the cinematic present tense of ninety-three minutes."
This is the kind of statement that is only going to make sense at all to someone who viewed the the film. Even more so, what a German professor told Roger Ebert when he was a nineteen year old trying to make sense of it:
"`It is a working out of the anthropological archetypes of Claude Levi-Strauss. You have the lover, the loved one and the authority figure. The movie proposes that the lovers had an affair, that they didn't, that they met before, that they didn't, that the authority figure knew it, that he didn't, that he killed her, that he didn't. Any questions?''"
This is both a film and a puzzle. Ebert's professor friend and Kirsch are providing some potential keys to the work. Everyone who leaves the theatre will need to find their own frame of reference from the moving camera, jump cuts, and well dressed aristocrats who sometimes appear to be like the statues at the mansion and at other times quite full of human traits and emotion. An elder woman leading the theater told her companion. "My that's a strange one." Maybe that is where the response will end or perhaps it will lead to some extensive consideration. I sure couldn't fathom turning this loose on a bunch of college freshmen.
I'm glad I went, but I believe it stands up as a landmark film and not necessarily a classic film. If I wished to take a close look at the nature of dreams or or time or reality in film Marienbad would make an excellent choice of study. I don't think it has come off as timeless either in the way that many films like Antonioni do to me who also worked with the time/space/dream/reality/perception.
Although, admittedly, Blow Up! and Zabriskie Point are truly documents of their time.
Marienbad's return to the Cinema 21, felt less like going to a movie and more like an art movie ride of the late fifties or early sixties, enhanced also by the fact that it was presented in one of the most long standing of art movie theaters in the country.
posted by well-executed buffet at 4:40 PM
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