Alternative Film Guide

L’Année dernière à Marienbad / Last Year in Marienbad (1961)

Direction: Alain Resnais. Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet. Cast: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff

By Dan Schneider of Cosmoetica:

Forget all prior claims you’ve read about Alain Resnais‘ 90-minute, black-and-white L’Année dernière à Marienbad / Last Year in Marienbad (1961) from the bad to the good, from publicity nonsense which declaims the three main characters are named after letters (they are actually unnamed), and see it raw; for then you’ll see why greatness is its own company. That’s because the difference between this truly great film, a work of art considered a cinematic high point, and the 1962 Carnival of Souls, considered a B-horror film, are minimal. Their similarities, however, are considerable, even though I doubt that the latter film’s director, Herk Harvey, had even seen Last Year in Marienbad while making his only feature. I say this because Last Year in Marienbad truly is one of those works of art that the moment it is experienced the viewer connects with it as something they feel has always been. It is like that tune you hear that becomes a Top 40 hit, and you swear you’ve known it for years.

Thus, the fact that Last Year in Marienbad has been dubbed one of the most influential films of all time should not surprise. Perhaps only Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, Orson Welles‘ Citizen Kane, Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, and Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night can claim to have been more influential. Yet, Last Year in Marienbad is not as influential as it is a touchstone — a film that, before any other, got to a source common to the human experience.

In addition to Carnival of Souls, a number of other films were profoundly influenced by, or rather dipped their toes in the same waters as Last Year in Marienbad, ranging from George Lucas‘ THX-1138 to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001 and The Shining; from Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead. Even the brilliant 1967 British television series The Prisoner and the low-budget 1990s Canadian sci-fi feature Cube seem to have been influenced by Last Year in Marienbad in its M.C. Escherian manifolds. This is further proof that quality transcends ephemeral labeling.

Alain Robbe-Grillet’s screenplay follows the workings of a symphony, with ideas and dialogue repeated in varying patterns and degrees — softly, loudly, enigmatically, and obviously — from the actual words and intonations of speech, to the way shadows play along walls, to the repeated game of cards or sticks, a version of nim, wherein 4 rows of 7, 5, 3, and 1 card or stick sets up the tension between the two nameless male leads. The one who wins is a swarthy Mediterranean type, called in many reviews M (Sascha Pitoëff), although he is never named, and he seems to be the lover or husband of the main female lead, a beautiful (unnamed) brunette called A (Delphine Seyrig) in most reviews.

The man who loses at the game, commonly referred to as X (Giorgio Albertazzi), seems to narrate a portion of the film, taking his monologue fully made from another voice, in relay race fashion: ‘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.’ This narration. while at times overweening in its poetastry, echoes the numerous tracking shots of the hotel’s corridors, and was quoted in many shots in The Silence and The Shining, as well as the latter-day Russian Ark. Yet, it is never superfluous, because it changes intonation with its changing iteraters.

Also, there are times when what is being stated by one of the multiple narrators is directly at odds with the visuals. For instance, there will be a description of an interior while we are seeing the courtyard. The second man’s main purpose seems to be to pursue the woman at a wealthy but somnolent social gathering held at a sprawling manse or old hotel.

He approaches the woman and claims that they were lovers, last year at Marienbad, a town in the Czech Republic. The woman seems nonplussed. She denies it, claims he is in error, and then seems to recall, only to deny again, and thus begins the process of seduction and denial. Through several turns at this dance, the questioning grows more intense, and so does a series of truly brilliant flashbacks or dreams. What makes them brilliant is that they are momentarily flashed, making the viewer experience the woman’s near-recollection. Or is it not recollection, but wish fulfillment, in wanting to believe this delusional stranger?

The man claims she said she would leave her husband and run off with him. Cue the entrance of the first man, the one who always won at his game. Is this the woman’s husband? In some ways, these three protagonists seem to be the only truly alive people in the grand hotel. The other characters seem mannequin-like. As this gyre of affection plays out, sometimes it appears less complicated, as if the second man is clearly pulling things out of his ass, for the woman seems to catch him in a number of lies. Then, in another scene, he appears to have hit a raw nerve, for the flashback flickerings seems to support his claims, and the woman’s body language is that of recognition and guilt. But over what is never clear.

Then, some elements seem to repeat and time distinctions blur as if the viewer and the characters are caught in some sort of Möbius strip. Another layer of the chronological conundrum comes not only from the temporal warp, but from the fact that the film’s costuming and mannerisms, as well as a few other hints, seem to place Last Year in Marienbad in the late 1920s or early 1930s — not in the early 1960s.

Finally, all of these visual and narrative repetitions lead to a scene where the woman is set to meet the first man, who does not show up, and then runs off with the second man. Yet, we do not know if this is happening in the present, in the past (where she supposedly might later change her mind and set forth the ‘current’ events of the film), or in the mind or minds of one or more of the three main characters, possibly reincarnating the claim of the second man that the woman promised to run off with him that year.

Naturally, critics were divided. Some have praised it as a masterpiece, while Pauline Kael and others have loathed it. Even worse than the divided critical opinion of Last Year in Marienbad is all of the bloated, pretentious, and nonsensical critical and theoretical writing the film has engendered. Terms like ‘psychoanalytic theory,’ ‘phenomenology,’ ‘critical social theory,’ ‘Cartesian philosophy,’ ’stream of consciousness,’ and ‘aesthetic philosophy,’ are bandied about in numerous reviews, articles, and treatises on the film, while it is clear that, given the critical framework these terms are dropped into, that the claimant has no real idea what the terms mean or what they are talking about, as they often twist elements and scenes from the film to fill whatever philosophic or political niche they inhabit. Or, conversely, see far too much riding on Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s intent, utterly ignoring elements that blatantly contradict their assertions.

Perhaps the greatest misclaim about Last Year in Marienbad is that it is about memory. It is not. There are possible memories shown, and the characters each claim to have differing ideas on what memories they claim are real or unreal, but the film never directly addresses that idea, for even the flashbacks are only possible memories. They could be fabrications or wishes. Thus, memory is not the central issue — the nature of perception, the material vs. the immaterial, while related topics to memories, are clearly not the same thing. Imagine, for example, someone claiming that it did not matter whether or not The Bridge on the River Kwai was set during the Second World War or the Korean War because, after all, it takes place in East Asia, around the middle of the twentieth century. That’s about the magnitude of the difference between a claim that the film focuses on memory and that it focuses on reality and perception. The former claim is about how one can experience the latter claim, while the latter claim is the thing itself.

The second greatest misclaim about Last Year in Marienbad is that it somehow represents a progression of sorts of the characters. That is false, since the film ends with the second man and the woman merely exiting the hotel into the darkness, an ending that emotionally resonates through it like in Antonioni’s La Notte (another case of dipping into the same artistic well), released just a few months earlier. It is possible that they have escaped their Dantean hell, but it could all be fantasy since in some scenes it seems that the woman has been killed (by the first man, the perpetual game winner who, on the verge of loss, takes the ‘nuclear option’?). And it is — given the film’s nature — certainly not out of the realm of possibility and far more likely, that this very sort of scene happened a year earlier, if the second man is to be believed, and that their exit is merely a rewinding of the tape, so to speak, to set up a similar situation a year from now in which the same Möbian events again unfurl.

Thus, even though Last Year in Marienbad employs elements of Modernism (yet, we are exposed to lust), Postmodernism (though rigidly structured), Symbolism (yet, equally Baroque), and Surrealism (although emotionally realistic — obsession is often an offshoot of lust), and a dozen or more other minor schools of thought, it is none of these things alone. Few critics were able to get off their conventional critical hobby horses and address Last Year in Marienbad as it is. Perhaps the only -ism not attributed to the film is the one that makes the most sense for a work of art that looks at the same thing from multiple perspectives and then tries to parallax them all at once: Cubism.

That stated, even that critical approach can only be used with limited success in limited scenes, because all great art transcends the silly human desire to box things into a neat package ripe for a Madison Avenue pitch or slogan. With that in mind, Last Year in Marienbad offers no evolution of the plot or characters. It is a piece of Nietzschean Eternal Recurrence fit for inclusion in The Twilight Zone, or, even more aptly, the show that preceded that, One Step Beyond. There is no dramatic transformation, nor is there any transcendence. Claims to the contrary are simply evidence of a meme getting kicked about by lazy viewers and reviewers who regurgitate it ad nauseam in much the same manner they claim, without any factual basis, that the characters are called A, M, and X.

Earlier in this piece, I linked Last Year in Marienbad to Carnival of Souls, which follows a woman in a trance-like state haunted by apparitions as she travels cross country after being the lone survivor of a car accident. Carnival of Souls boasts some keen cinematography; effectively cheap special effects; a psychological dream-like component that repeats images and motifs, and ends in an old funhouse pavilion on the Utah salt flats that greatly resembles the old hotel in Last Year in Marienbad. Also, a male zombie that refuses to let the woman alone, trying to seduce her to her acceptance of her death.

The parallels are scary, despite other big differences in the two films’ aims and accomplishments. However, they both clearly dipped their quills into the same unconscious fountains. It is the artistic equivalent of convergent evolution, and a thing far too many critics fail to see when trying to link individual artworks in a simplistic Linnaean fashion, rather than in a deeper cladistic one.

Thus, all of the reviews based upon ideas of influence or intentions of the filmmaker and/or screenwriter are mere piffle, for they avoid what is onscreen. The meaning is the totality of the film, and despite the oddity of a chronological sequence the relationship of the three main characters remains fixed even to the end — or, possibly, the re-beginning. The score by Francis Seyrig (Delphine’s brother) is stunning in all its permutations, but especially in the organ pieces and the haunting meld of sounds after emotional outbursts (as in the shooting gallery). And this stunningness starts right from the sci-fi-like opening-credits music, which gives way to a more 1940s themed intro.

Sacha Vierny’s cinematography, combined with Jasmine Chasney’s editing, produces indelible effects. For instance, there are a few passages that swiftly intercut the seeming past with the seeming present, usually with the woman at the center of both scenes. Although the images from both times last only a second or less, the fact that one is set in dark grays and blacks, and the other in beaming whites, mesmerizes the viewer because the flashes back and forth between the two, via direct cuts, subliminally impresses the imagery deeper into the psyche, cementing it there with the strobe-like effect that acts as a cauterizing agent. Another excellent shot follows the second man and the woman into the hotel’s lush Taj Mahal-like garden, where they see sculptures of stone and tree arranged in a geometric pattern. In a manner quite similar to the shadow work in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr, made nearly thirty years earlier, the people out there cast long shadows but the sculptures do not.

Last Year in Marienbad was filmed in a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, allowing shots in which the three main characters can be seen together, each of them occupying a corner (almost as if in an old deliberate split-screen construction, but one which is organically part of the shot, not a forced imposition), the others unaware of another’s presence, thus adding depth to the drama. Additionally, there is a quickly repeated series of shots that fly down a dark corridor, as the camera appears to flow into the outstretched arms of the woman in her white boudoir — though each take is ever so slightly different from the one that precedes and follows it. (In Woody Allen’s great Stardust Memories, this technique is adapted to show the mental breakdown of one of that protagonist’s lovers.)

The Last Year in Marienbad DVD is a Region 2 disc put out by Studio Canal. The company has done great restoration work, though there are some scratches here and there. The DVD offers an introduction by Ginette Vincendeau, a theatrical trailer, a black-and-white 1956 short by Resnais called Toute le mémoire du monde, and the documentary Dans le labyrinth de Marienbad, which is a good little feature, though it often partakes in the more masturbatory interpretations of the film. Overall, it’s a solid DVD package (released in 2005), but it could have reached the heights of the best DVDs from The Criterion Collection, Anchor Bay, and Kino had it only included a good audio film commentary track. Another minor annoyance is the absence of an English language dubbed track. The white subtitles on the often blanched scenery is difficult to read about 15-20% of the time.

Last Year in Marienbad won the Golden Lion at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing — Original Screenplay. Aside from all the other schools and -isms that lay claim to it, the one it is most often lumped with is the French New Wave, even though Resnais’ film has only a marginal affinity with the early seminal works of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. In fact, Last Year in Marienbad takes deep advantage of its art form’s past, subverting those forms in wholly opposite ways from those of the aforementioned directors, as well as artistically succeeding far beyond the works of those two. In short, a difference of degree does become a difference of kind despite the sloth of some critics to knee-jerkedly lump together disparate groups of artists.

That such an utterly timeless fictive film as Last Year in Marienbad came from Resnais, who also made the hopelessly dated documentary Night and Fog, shows the results of a director’s willingness to change technique to address a certain subject. And Robbe-Grillet’s dialogue, although elliptical, has a power and depth that would open wells that later experimental films, like Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andre, would also mine.

But as I admonished at the start, heed not any claims for Last Year in Marienbad, including mine. See it for yourself, for this is one of the great works of art that also acts as a de facto Rorschach Test for the percipient. Those addicted to the drudgery and predictability of formulaic Hollywood hackery will be bored senseless by it. The remaining 1% or less of us will recognize Last Year in Marienbad as the great work of art it is. Sometimes, exclusivity has its benefits.

© Dan Schneider

Note: The views expressed in this article are those of Mr. Schneider, and they may not reflect the views of the Alternative Film Guide.

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