Last Year at Marienbad-Any Releases? (1 Viewer)

[Armin Jager]

Well, these cute little dramas have something which is called story or plot with some moderately interesting characters in it. Resnais on the contraray avoids narration as far as possible and creates a film without meaning.
You admitted yourself in this thread that you'd need a commentary to understand what's happening, but nevertheless you defend it following the dangerous logic "I don't understand it, but it must be deep, profound and insightful".
And MARIENBAD really has (intentionally) no meaning and can't be interpreted.

 

[Rich Malloy]

I've found that it's impossible to convince anyone that they should like anything... and that may be doubly true of Resnais' movies and triply true of "Marienbad"!

Is there a story? Well, yes, but not a conventional plot. It's less a three-act structure than a verse-bridge-chorus/repeat. In fact, thinking of it as poetry rather than prose may allow you to accept it on its own merits, should you think any might be merited. Is there a profound meaning at the bottom of it? Not if your definition of profound requires practicality or effability.

Consider the sketches of MC Escher. Enormously popular, but well apart from the history of narrative painting. They're representational, and yet abstract. Inherently logical, even mathematical, but ultimately absurdist, using logic and reason in order to defy logic and reason. At base, one could criticize them as lacking any emotion or profundity, as merely excercises in style. And yet there's something there, something that seems to speak to the modern condition, even if ultimately it cannot be named as it defies definition.

Something like this is at work for me in "Marienbad", something that speaks to the mysteries of love, awareness, our ways of knowing the world and ourselves, the modernist's nod to science/mathematics, and the sincere belief that something even more mysterious is at work. Perhaps this seems a bit old-fashioned to us today, but these were the predominant concerns of the cognoscenti in the 1960s. A little bit of positivism, a little bit of Proust, shaken together with a dose of Godel and Heisenberg, and rendered as a meditation on epistomology, memory, and love. Hence, the constant refrain:

"The gardens of this hotel were in the French manner, without trees, without flowers, without plants, nothing. Gravel, stone, marble, straight lines setting rigid patterns of space, surfaces without mystery. It seemed impossible – at first – to lose one's way there. At first. Among the stones, where you were, already, losing your way forever, in the quiet night, alone with me..."

 

[Rich Malloy]

"The gardens of this hotel were in the French manner, without trees, without flowers, without plants, nothing. Gravel, stone, marble, straight lines setting rigid patterns of space, surfaces without mystery."

Notice how it starts with the proposition that everything is ordered and in its place. Not merely purposeful, but linearly, mathematically precise. "In the French way", which of course meant (in gardens as well as philosophy) in that most rationalist way. "Rigid patterns of space." "Surfaces without mystery." Perfected, defined, known. "It seemed impossible – at first – to lose one's way there. At first."

This film is a reverie, but of an unusual type. It sets up a logical situation, and then subverts it. A perfectly ordered world of opulent splendor, an enlightenment-era logic, a classical universe, all of which is suddenly rendered as surreal as a Dali painting, as physically impossible as an Escher sketch. And yet the mathematics add up... or do they? You say you have an inviolable natural law? Well, here's an exception. Note that the people cast shadows, but the trees do not. Note that I know this woman, I love this woman... and yet she looks at me as though I were a stranger. And now I doubt even myself, here among the stones, where you were, already, losing your way forever, in the quiet night, alone with me...

 

[andrew markworthy]

The point I was trying to make was that Marienbad is going to be a bore unless you're on its wavelength. Actually, apologies for the tone of the earlier message. I think the Lear/Hamlet comment in retrospect sounds elitist and it wasn't meant to - 'bebop jazz' or 'Philip Glass' might have been better examples. [And my much earlier remark about a commentary being needed was my feeble Brit humour]

Arguably the way to get into Marienbad is not to look for a plot. Instead, think of a recurring memory you've had where you go over and over an important event in your past, wishing things could have worked out differently, and wondering how you could have brought this about by working through permutations of the event in your head. Now imagine that what you're watching is someone doing the same thing about an important event in their lives. This isn't all that Marienbad is about, but it may help you get into it.

 

[Ike]

Thanks for the analysis, Rich and andrew. I can't wait until Tuesday. I have a feeling that Marienbad maybe my kind of movie.

 

[andrew markworthy]

Got the new edition. Good print and sound, and a couple of excellent extras. Haven't had time to watch the bonus film with it but have seen it before and it's good.