1961: Last Year At Marienbad

Last Year At Marienbad (Resnais, 1961) 9/10

"Haven't we met before?"

It is a staple of dating culture: a cliched pick-up line designed to enhance the aura of association between two people. Through its inquisitive language, it expresses a tone which emphasizes rememberance, interpretation, connection and history. And yet it is this much ridiculed attempt at expressing a kinetic bond, which serves as the catalyst for one of world's cinema's most serious, complex and abstract films, Last Year At Marienbad .

In 1961, Last Year At Marienbad was released onto a changing world. Audiences and critics were split over its content and context. The film won the Venice Film Prize (The Golden Lion) and became the forebearer for similar enigmatic pictures during the decade such as Federico Fellini's 8½, Ingmar Bergman's Persona and Michelangelo Antonioni's films L'Avventura and Blow-Up. Theatre owners were noted to have displayed signs or handed out pamphlets informing their audience that the film they were about to see was of a revolutionary nature: a radical break with traditional forms of cinema. Yet, countless filmgoers walked out in droves, due to the seemingly cold and pretentious nature of French New Wave director Alain Resnais's second film.

Directed by Alain Resnais ( Hiroshima Mon Amour, Night and Fog) and scripted by French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year At Marienbad was and is one of the most ambigious films to emerge from the Sixties. The interpretation over its meaning and essence is so varied that even Robbe-Grillet and Resnais were both to have drawn different conclusions about its significance. The film stars Giorgio Albertazzi as X a man who attempts to convince a (possibly) married woman named A (Delphine Seyrig) that the pair had an affair the previous year in the same baroque hotel-spa resort. Despite A's refusal to admit the pair had an affair the previous summer, X tries to resuscitate internal memories locked within her psyche; suggesting she pledged her love to abandon her lover/husband M (Sascha Pitoeff) and run away with X.

With its gorgeous black and white cinematography by Sacha Vierny, Last Year At Marienbad broke traditional cinematic logic by following the modern novel in its groundbreaking use of non-linear narratives, an unreliable narrator and an infusion of psychological complexity. Taking the elements of its plot into account, it is surprising that Hollywood has never erroneously tried to remake Resnais' film. However, it is likely that any Hollywood interpretation of the film would omit not only Vierny's dreamlike cinematography or Resnais' intellectual content, but also the film's chief focus on two individuals.

The psychological interactions between these two individuals is imperative to Resnais' film and the ambiguity that surrounds it. The three central critical debates regarding Last Year At Marienbad focus on this interplay. First, did X and A genuinely have an affair last year at Marienbad or some other spa resort? Secondly, is X simply a deviant who desires A and thus tries to concoct a counter-memory in her head? Or thirdly, is the entire film a dream or psychological experience transpiring within the head of either X or A?

Resnais' utilization of freeze-frames and supporting characters who are literally immobile enhances the film's individualization and psychological content. With Resnais' interest in the theoretics of history, one must wonder if the director was familar with works emitting from the Annales school such as l'histoire de mentalités or social historian Maurice Halbwachs and his doubts about the validity of memory due to its lack of impartiality. Halbwachs' argument suggests that memory is a flawed process, which is suspectible to changes of opinion, socio-political change and outside debate. This ability to subvert, distort or suppress memory is a theme examined by Resnais in his film.

In his conquest to steal A's heart from M, one could argue that X is simply playing upon A's personal weaknesses and frailties. Throughout Last Year At Marienbad the film utilizes imagery relating to games. Repeatedly X indulges in games of chance such as cards and matchsticks. There are paintings and floors shaped like chessboards that suggest X is utilizing A as a pawn in his erotic and intellectual game of seduction. The accentuation on mirrors advances the theory that X is simply projecting a counter-memory which suits his own passions and psycho-social desires.

There are also psycho-architectural references to doors, corridors and windows, which are either closed or open. In symmetry with the film's fluid camerawork and dialogue, X notes that sometimes these portals of memory are open or closed, when he is speaking to A: possibly musing on his ability to metaphorically penetrate her psyche with new ideas or concepts, or unearth buried memories. As a narrator X's own "memory" is possibly fallible. He repeatedly brings up the existence of clothing and paintings in A's bedroom, which she repeatedly denies. One could argue that the lack of evidence of their existence points to X's forged status as a charlatan, or X's attempts to conceal an embarrassing past.

The suppression of memory in Last Year At Marienbad is a topic recently discussed by feminist film historians. Their arguments center on the possiblity that A and X may have become acquainted the previous year and that a likely (sexually) traumatic experience between the two resulted in A suppressing her memories of their previous encounter. Another possible argument involving suppression that is rarely addressed is that X himself is simply a ghost.

Throughout the film there are repeated verbal references to "the past" and "forever;" the film also features a funereal solitary organ soundtrack; characters frozen in time like statues; as well as games which nobody can ever win- like an attempt to overcome death.While in the hotel's lavish garden, A notes that X is like "a phantom." The fractured wall along A and M's balcony that X purportedly hid upon suggests that perhaps X plunged to an accidental death, from which A has never recovered.

Other clues involve references made to a freak storm, which killed thousands within the region or Resnais' subtle emphasis on the inability to escape the hotel through references to labryniths and the fact the camera never goes beyond the forests at the edge of the hotel's grounds. Resnais' utilization of spatial concepts and mathematical approaches to time provides plausible evidence that time in the film is indeed frozen, as the hotel guests are in a permanent state of immobility through death. Furthermore, the haunting and floating nature of Vierny's camerawork and the emptiness within the cavernous hotel suggests that as well as X, perhaps A is dead also and the former is attempting to inform her of her present phantomorgasmic state.

Since its initial release in 1961 Last Year At Marienbad has divided critics, audiences and historians with its investigations into philosophical truth, memory and history. With its ambivalent nature, gorgeous cinematography, episodic editing and intense performances, Last Year At Marienbad is a film which openly defies concetre interpretation. In its abstract logic, critics have summized the film is a parody of Hollywood romantic melodramas or an anti-nuclear allegory. Yet, while for many the pretentiousness, icy personalities and liquid summarization of Resnais' film is a turn-off, others have found intrigue and suspsense in the interpretative openess of one of cinema's greatest and most complex jigsaw puzzles.

Last Year At Marienbad is available on R2 DVD through Optimum Home Video

Copyright 2007 8½ Cinematheque