“It is not my job to give explanations,” he says with brusque finality, cutting the interviewer’s question off at the head. The man stands beside a gilded floor-to-ceiling mirror, his well-tailored reflection pronouncing the same answer. He smiles then, Alain Resnais, at the simplicity of his maneuver, the truth that it holds. He continues, stating that no explanation can be made for his film that is absolutely correct or absolutely incorrect. Ambiguity, it would seem, is his choice sleight of hand. Perhaps it is the way that he carries himself when he says this, with decidedly academic certainty, or perhaps it is the confidence he stakes in this murky unknowing, but many are those who have tagged the director and his film with such cold-hearted words as “self-important” and “pretentious.” The interviewer, rather than volley the matter back, chuckles off Resnais’ response, abandoning the hope of a clean answer to the riddle of Last Year at Marienbad, and the interview turns another corner. The year is 1961.

The greatest wonder and compliment, I feel, to the brilliance of Resnais’ second feature-length narrative—and here we must use the term “narrative” loosely—is that nearly half a century after the above interview with Cinepanorama was conducted, we can still do nothing better than throw our hands into the air and chuckle when asked about its meaning. Many people find this elusiveness frustrating, and the refusal of the film’s director, now bitten with the frost of his winter years, to submit any clues of authorial intent (not surprising, the film was penned by Alain Robbe-Grillet) only adds to its mystique. However, I submit that this mystery is not a thing to be glowered at, a bad thing. Quite the opposite: this uncertainty is a thing to be reveled in, a good thing. For you see, reader, all joy is lost in explanation.

Last Year at Marienbad, like Resnais’ first feature-length film, Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959), an existential love affair set against post-atomic angst, has as one of its primary concerns the intersubjective experience of reality: how objective reality is created, or not, by a triangulation of many individuals’ subjective perceptions. For events occurring on a massive scale, such as the bombing of Hiroshima, this reality is created quite easily and its features are, by so many points of reference, undeniable. However, events on a smaller scale, for instance in Hiroshima, Mon Amour the female protagonist’s recalling that her first love died in her arms on a deserted riverwalk, or the trist that informs the narrative of Last Year at Marienbad, suffer from a lack of intersubjective credibility. For these events, there is no consensus. There is only the wandering of a single mind, which has nothing to use but its own refracted image as a point of cross-reference. The result is a corruption of intersubjective certainty, and the individual memory begins to run away with itself. In both films, these personal recollections, though dubious, are presented to the viewer as genuine to the films’ cinematic reality. There is no visual cue, no change in tone or presentation for the audience to differentiate between what is factual and what is not. In the same way, it is not possible for the character whose memory we enter to differentiate between the emotional impacts of a true recollection versus a false one; both are felt with the same degree of intensity and conviction. Objective and subjective realities are here impossibly confused, and the audience is in no small way to blame. By the logic of intersubjective construction, Resnais has made the viewer, simply through the act of viewing his film, the second point of reference by which these faulty memories gain validity and burst into objective reality! We are, in Last Year at Marienbad, all parties to the murder.

Of course none of this play between reality and unreality would be possible without Resnais’ shattering treatment of time, which can be attributed to the collision between the director’s own documentarian background and Marienbad co-creator Alain Robbe-Grillet’s position within the Nouveau Roman literary movement. From his fifteen years working as a documentarian, Resnais gained a sense of the mechanics of history and developed an eye for the patterns that compose its seemingly linear progression. What he saw, and he certainly was not the first, was that history moves in cycles. But more than this he came to evince a sense of the omnipresence of history, that in the human mind all of history is condensed within the present moment, like an infinite series of transparencies (or strips of celluloid) stacked atop one another. This theory presents itself most startlingly in Resnais’ award-winning documentary Night and Fog (1955), where black-and-white footage of Holocaust concentration camps is cut with modern color footage of the bucolic Polish countryside, the effect being a potent sense of dread and an obliteration of the comfortable distance we place between the past and ourselves. This method of condensing time functions in Last Year at Marienbad in similar fashion, where though we experience the disjointed narrative across a runtime of 94 minutes, for the protagonist immersed in the double exposure of past and present, the story might take only a few seconds to tell, or a few minutes, a few hours, a few months, an eternity. We cannot know, and the film refuses to provide an answer. It only gives us the sensation of time rising slowly above our heads like an uncontrollable flood.

This flood, however, would merely be standing water if deprived of novel movement and direction, and Resnais’ sense of the immense depth of history in the present moment might otherwise be subjugated by a linear narrative. Such is the case with Hiroshima, Mon Amour, where the past is waded through along a straight path of narrative progression, however open-ended. This is not to fault that film, but merely to recognize it as an intermediate step between traditional treatments of cinematic time and the afocal fugue of time achieved in Last Year at Marienbad, where neither the past nor the present is favored as the viewer’s jumping off point.

The temporal volleying in Marienbad is, by Alain Robbe-Grillet’s design, endlessly beguiling. His aim, like that of all Nouveau Roman authors, is to disrupt the A to B of traditional narrative and create a story whose meaning is pointed not in a single direction but in every direction. As Resnais remarks in the aforementioned Cinepanorama interview, no answer to this type of story is correct, and no answer is incorrect. If the effect of Robbe-Gillet’s narrative technique could translate to the art of painting it would most likely resemble a work by Jackson Pollock, whose lines constantly evolve, swooping and doubling across one another, running in every direction off the canvas and into eternity.  And yet, though both men seek to arrest a glimpse of chaos, Robbe-Gillet’s design is more precise, his lines more straightly drawn. What he achieves, and what Resnais accentuates with his direction, is a deceptive unbalance, one where the viewer does everything he can to assert traditional ideas of space and time onto the vacillating narrative only to have the plush rug pulled out from underneath him, again and again, just as he is about to gain perspective. Costume and location shift, dialogue stutters, repeats, memory and action deform one another, both with and against the protagonist’s will, and the audience is kept afloat, never knowing if the next step taken will be made of marble or paper-mâche.

If there is only one element of Last Year at Marienbad by which the audience can gain a sense of stability, one constant, it is the infinite geometry of the Marienbad chateaux. Before we achieve character, those loose allegorical molds, X, A and M, we are introduced to the space in which their shadows will be cast. Both the grounds of the chateaux and the halls of the building itself are composed of soberingly clean lines. In these hallways Resnais’ camera wanders constantly, using breathtakingly long tracking shots that examine both the baroque details of the architecture, like memories intricately crafted and instantly forgotten, and the great voids of space that lie between them. In the French garden he favors a stationary shot, one that allows the viewer’s eye to make its own progression down the main approach, wandering the hedgerows and sharply cut promenade, as both design and vision are drawn into the horizon and beyond. Such shots are frequent throughout Marienbad, in fact they bookend the film. Their immediate result is a calming effect on the viewer: a single, fluidly observed tracking shot through a hallway serves as temperance to the volatile and elusive narrative, where meaning is forcefully skewed. In their simplicity there is room for reflection, in their regularity and uniformity, a meditative pause. It is here perhaps that meaning can be found, or lack of meaning reconciled with.

Ultimately, there is no arrival in Marienbad’s geometry. No point exists where the eye may come to rest along its lines; there is only constant departure. In this perpetual motion we see reflected an endless searching, one that perfectly compliments the mechanics of the film. “Perspective,” Resnais later says in his Cinepanorama interview, “is only gained from the next point.” But it is a point that we never reach in Last Year at Marienbad. Without it, the film eschews concrete meaning, and the audience is reduced to the position of the confused, heartsick protagonist, whose simple task of remembering proves to be anything but simple.

At first glance this all seems impossible, the viewer lost in the film, caught in the progression of its straight lines, between its immutable statues and granite slabs. But this is precisely where we find ourselves. And some forty-eight years into the life of Last Year at Marienbad, no audience has been able to escape its impeccable design. Watching the film for the first time is no different than watching it for the tenth time, or, if I may extrapolate, the hundredth time. We are all still left simply wandering, tracing its lines, listening to its echoes, and losing ourselves in its night. Alone and suspended with Alain Resnais. – [DVD] [Blu-Ray]

Drama/Romance

Not Rated

DVD Release Date (Criterion Collection) – 6/23/09

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