Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

 Alain Resnais' "Last Year at Marienbad"

I am finding it difficult to come to some coherent point about Alain Resnais' 1961 masterpiece "Last Year at Marienbad." I keep typing up introductory sentences like "the main conceit of the film" and "what the film is trying to express" but I keep having to delete everything I write because the coherent narrative that I place onto the film doesn't seem to do the film any justice. For the first time ever, I might be unable to express a central idea I have about a film I've watched. However, I must try to examine the film through this confusion and contradiction regardless.

After witnesses such a breathtaking masterpiece, I was actually shocked to learn that the seemingly highly lauded "Last Year at Marienbad" has plenty of critics over the last 60 years slamming the film as lacking depth or as iconic film critic Paulene Kael puts it, an "aimless disaster." I was floored in reading all of this disregard over a film I would have assumed would have been met with the same reverence as I. Perhaps I am more floored by lack of context, lack of coherence, and ambiguous arbitration. That being said, there is just as many (if not so so more) critics and film historians who have given the film its just praise. The film won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar. Beyond material gestures, the film is also highly lauded by many filmmakers. William Friedkin, Akira Kurosawa, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Agnes Varda, Marguerite Duras, Jacques Rivette, Stanley Kubrick, and David Lynch have all cited it as their favorite film or have cited its influence on their work. 

Right now is the point of my assessment that I typically dive into the film's plot. I will not do this here, as explaining the plot of the film would do it a disservice. This is partially the case due to the film's complete lack of plot. But, also part of the film's confounding nature revolves around asserting your own viewpoint of the plot. I believe that whatever you believed happened in the film might not be what happened at all and might completely differ from what someone else believe happened. But on its basic premise, an unknown and unnamed man tries to convince an unnamed woman that the two of them had met previously a year before. She resists this notion and the man spends the rest of the film trying to convince her (and us) that this memory of his actually took place. 

I will firstly iterate my own personal experience with the film, then I will move past my own experience into the collective experience and regurgitate the film's known knowledge. When I began, it was almost as if the film was keen on making its foundation the knowledge of its own construction. What I mean to say is that it wanted me, right off the bat, to be aware of its artificiality. We are shown a curtain opening, lines recited over and over again, and are revealed to be watching a stage play. The film made me very aware that I was watching a film. That I was viewing an artificial reality, a construction. What happened next is the film tried to subvert those very notions it presented in the beginning. Now that I was completely aware of the artificiality I was watching, the film then tried to convince me of its own realness, just as the man was trying desperately to convince the woman of the reality he is attempting to dictate to her. Like the woman, I found myself resisting. "But no," I thought, "I've already been made aware that this isn't real." And yet, the film (and the man) continued to pull me into this fabrication and make me believe it. It was often successful, despite my mind's knowledge of its own unreality. Finally, I could either continue in my resistance to this seduction, or just submit myself over to it. With this, I became aware of my own submission. It is difficult to accept lies as truth, or an abstraction as reality, or a dream as consciousness. You know its only a dream. And yet, you find yourself submitting to the dream. But why? It is as if the film is making me aware that I am being manipulated and brought under its control. And this recognition makes me feel like I have a complete lack of control over my own conscious (or subconscious mind). In this way, I felt the post-modernism the film might have been trying to present. The film made me aware of its own artificiality and then proceeded to demonstrate how this artificiality can still manipulate and take control over me. The repetitiveness of the film almost acts as a hypnosis. It hypnotizes me and makes me aware of my own complicity in this hypnosis. 

In the midst of this dream, there is uncertainty and instability. Suddenly the narrator's recounting of events begin to clash with the visual images on screen. The narrator becomes aware that what's happening in the film and what he is reciting conflict, so he begins to insist even more desperately and demandingly. Reality begins to restrict and ebb between what is being said, what is being shown, and what is being imagined. This creates an unstable effect, as nothing ever truly becomes absolutely certain. The film acts as a hall-of-mirrors as it bends and twists reality to its constructed will, or lack of will in controlling it. Does the film have a will of its own? Does the film take the plot and construct a new one? Does the plot fight back? What....is happening? This dizzying effect creates a sense of what almost feels like terror. There is a threat lurking within the film. The dream is becoming a nightmare. The man becomes dangerous and at this point, it felt as if the film itself began to feel dangerous to me. The haunted, still images of beauty and artificiality from the beginning began to swirl into a subconscious soup of images, noise, and a mélange of tones and textures that were impossible to distinguish from any coherent narrative or structure. Reality began to feel meaningless. Nothing felt safe or certain. I found myself desperate to find some haven of truth or comfort and yet none was provided to me. This bending of reality and my own desperation for safety created a self-awareness of my own dissatisfaction with uncertainty, chaos, and conflict. What was even more discomforting to me was my own desire for placate to some authority offering respite. Perhaps even the before-mentioned 'dangerous' characters of authority. I found myself almost desiring the man's creation of reality, as if ANY sense of official reality was better than the chaos my conscious mind found itself in. I found myself desperate to conform to something, anything that resembled stability, even if that stability was artificially constructed. This is the terror that lies in my retrospective viewpoint of the film. This post-modern lens provided me with clarity on how my own mind can be used against me. Through the confusion, instability, and inconsistency of narrative, I found myself being seduced by the fake construction of simplistic, grounded reality, despite completely knowing the hollowness and falseness of its construction. The film forced me to reconcile with my own fallacy of emotion. It forced me to realize my own inability to be seduced by something dangerous and my own lack of control over ceding to something completely not true for the sake of comfort. 

Now that I have espoused my own personal relationship with the film, I will regurgitate everything I have learned after-the-fact. Alain Resnais, the film's director, had just finished his other masterpiece, 1959's "Hiroshima Mon Amour," which many French filmmakers cite as being the film that popularized the New Wave movement, even though Agnes Varda's 1955 piece "La Pointe Courte" actually created the movement. Resnais collaborated with Alain Robbe-Grillet in the making of the script. Robbe-Grillet had wanted to create something called 'Nouveau Roman,' or "New Novel" for film. This 'Nouveau Roman' was already a new trend in the French literary world in the 1950s and classified a type of novel that diverted greatly from traditional literature by attempting to create a brand new style in each independent story and work. Through the screenplay, this "Nouveau Roman' style became 'Cine-Roman,' or "Cine-Novel." The screenplay was very detailed and Resnais executed it with upmost fidelity. 

With the visual style of the film, Resnais wanted to create a 'certain style of silent cinema.' The set pieces, the costumes, and the visual look of the film all were centralized around the silent film aesthetic. Resnais even wanted the film's female star, Delphine Seyrig, to look exactly like Louise Brooks in G.W. Pabst's 1929 masterpiece "Pandora's Box," hair bob and all. This was only partially achieved, however, as Syrig instead opted for a different hairstyle that became iconic in its own right. 

One of the primary accomplishments with Resnais' visual style is his ability to create an ambiguity in temporal space. The lack of spatial continuity creates in the mind of the viewer an uncertainty in the causal relationship between events. In the editing of the film, Resnais and his editors Henri Colip and Jasmine Chasney created incompatible information in consecutive shots, created impossible juxtapositions within a single shot, and repeated same events in different settings. Ambiguities are also created in mismatching visual contradictions to what is being narrated to the viewer. This creativly abstract and disorienting style of editing challenged the established classical style of narrative construction. I would argue it was way more influential and game-changing than the editing ingenuity of Godard's "Breathless" a year prior. With this construction of images, it allowed time to be interacted with by the viewer in a new, original way. With spatial and temporal continuity being completely destroyed by what Resnais is configuring, the film presents itself as more of a 'mental continuity.' 

As far as interpretations of the film go, there are a whole internet's worth of them. I will not go down the rabbit hole of theories about the film, as I am utterly satisfied with my own personal interpretation and relationship to this incredible piece of art. Really and truly, that is what I feel this film is: art. It challenges perception, alters consciousness, inspires thought, and creates a sense of dreamlike mental instability within the mind of the viewer. This film is game-changing and create a whole new landscape for film to explore.