Summary: a man is convinced he met an enigmatic woman the previous year at the same location, and they perhaps had a flirtation. A second man, possibly the woman's lover or husband, or psychiatrist, repeatedly intimidates the first man. Their relations unfold through flashback shards that never quite fit into place, their lives a hall of mirrors that never reveal a true self.
it seems that we have met before ...
I stumbled upon Last Year at Marienbad purely by accident. Would that I could offer a more edifying account, but truth be told I was perusing one of my favorite tomes on film, DK’s excellent The Movie Book, and being on something of a French movies kick lately I turned to the New Wave section, and there it was, in a full two-page essay. I admit it was the familiar wide-angle photo of the gardens that hooked me and convinced me I had to see this movie. And I’m glad I did. By the way the Kino Lorber DVD looks absolutely smashing and confirms the film’s repute as one of the most beautiful black and white films of all time.
Marienbad’s story, such as it is, is pitifully thin: in an indeterminate time (probably the early Twentieth Century), at a luxury chateau in central Europe, a man claims he met a woman there, or somewhere, the previous year, while other well-heeled guests lurk zombie-like in the background.
In many respects Marienbad is a profoundly unsettling film – dreamlike, funny, romantic, absurdist, self-parodic, and frightening. It both challenges and plays tricks on us in the subterranean realms of our conscious and unconscious experience. In other words, it veritably dances with, through, and around, our memory. Now over six decades vintage, Marienbad has inspired hundreds of thousands, probably millions of words, ranging from the damning to the adulatory. And every possible interpretation of its enigmatic structure and content, provided by intellects far keener than mine, has been attempted: feminist, behaviorist, romanticist, Freudian, supernatural, socio-economic, political, literary, and of course purely cinematic takes have spewed forth over time. Thus those of us who have experienced its seductive powers more recently and feel the urge to write something about it are in the embarrassing position of simply belaboring the obvious or repeating what’s already been repeated before. Still, I offer my two cents.
Beginning at the end, as it were: as I make my way through Kino’s incredibly generous helping of bonus features my favorite is Memories of Last Year at Marienbad [1]. With German narration and done in eminently behind-the-scenes style, this documentary gives us an informal look at the production history of Last Year at Marienbad. Comprised of raw footage from the shooting of the film that was captured on 8mm stock and at just under 50 minutes, Memories is practically a short feature film in itself and almost as compelling and enigmatic as the original. Ranking a close second among the extras is Resnais's short film (21 min.) All the Memory of the World (Toute la mémoire du monde), which looks like a warm-up for Marienbad with its smoothly gliding camera inside a cavernous edifice. After all, what could be a better metaphor for memory than the memories contained in their tangible, albeit fragile form, books? Indeed the Bibliothèque Nationale might well claim to have 'all the memory of the world,' but aren't all libraries really caches of memory?
the greatest movie(s) of all time?
But now a digression for some editorial comment: in vain I looked for Marienbad to be listed, if not in the top ten, then certainly the top twenty, of the most recent (2022) incarnation of BFI’s/Sight and Sound’s much vaunted poll of the greatest movies of all time. I’ll try to avoid the throwaway lines that any compilation, be it made by an individual, or committee (however august) of ‘greatest movies’ is intensely subjective and more or less useless, but nonetheless always grist for lively controversy. Moreover, it’s fun and satisfying to see one’s pet favorites turn up among the listees. Anyhow as you might suspect I was intensely disappointed to discover that Marienbad didn’t even crack the top 100, and it’s cold comfort to see it listed as tied for 169th place in the critics' poll, which must qualify as a respectable honorable mention. Kudos to those seventeen critics and seven directors (from the 1,639 critics and 480 directors who participated) who voted for it [2]. Some further research yielded that Marienbad tied for 26th in the 1962 poll, which in this writer’s humble opinion is much closer to its actual artistic worth, though still underrated. By the way the films it was tied with in 1962 were: Tokyo Story, Intolerance, Pickpocket, Wild Strawberries, Night and Fog, The Passion of Joan of Arc, and Limelight. Some pretty fast company indeed [3]. That it could have slid so far in the intervening six decades is a bit of a mystery – great films are supposed to gain in stature over time. But the explanation may be that, in the intervening sixty years, thousands of feature films have been released and there’s simply more competition for the top spots, also that a larger mix of critics gives us different results. It must also be admitted that some prominent critical luminaries famously panned the film upon its initial release, and some still do, so best to simply place it all in the to-each-his-own-taste file – however questionable that taste may be.
In any event, and getting back to the film itself: inasmuch as Marienbad’s influence has been discussed, at length, in the critical and scholarly literature, less attention has been paid to its antecedents, i.e. the films that anticipated its lush, dreamlike glory. The poetic aspects and surreal visuals recall Cocteau’s Orphée and La Belle et La Bête, and the visual poetry even brings to mind Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne. Marienbad also mirrors Dames’ comedy-of-manners tone in which the well-turned supporting characters float, trance-like, around the principals. Moreover, the relationship between the hero and heroine in Marienbad has parallels to the relationship between Paul Bernard and Élina Labourdette in Les Dames and that of Jean Marais and Josette Day in La Bête. The sumptuous, baroque design qualities have an obvious precedent in L'Herbier’s L'Inhumaine. And here and there we even see traces of, of all films, Metropolis. The symbolic game of cards and matchsticks recalls the chess duel in The Seventh Seal, and indeed it’s not so much of a reach to see Marienbad as a Bergmanesque film. Other precursors might include Kurosawa’s Rashomon and of course Citizen Kane [4], each film being, among other things, a meditation on the shifting perception of memory, recollection and indeed reality itself. And the references to Hitchcock's Vertigo (which appeared only a couple years prior) are almost too obvious that I don't have to mention them - but I will. Or does Marienbad's pedigree go back even further, much further? Some see Marienbad as a rerun of the Orphic legend from Greek mythology.
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The floating, somnambulist vibe of the characters (both major and minor), the relentlessly prowling camera, and the general disjointedness of the narrative recall the experimental fantasies of Maya Deren from the 1940s. Similarly, there’s a whiff of John Parker‘s noirish nightmare of a film, Dementia/Daughter of Horror, which likewise plays tricks with recall, repression and the nature of reality [5]. Echoes of Marienbad’s dreamlike, surreal ambience even find their way into American television shows of the era like One Step Beyond and The Twilight Zone (especially the 'After Hours' episode). But for me the two films that are conjured up when I watch Marienbad bookend it a year apart in either direction: La Dolce Vita and Carnival of Souls [6], the latter right down to the creepy organ music backdrop.
But ultimately the film must be accepted on its own terms and stand on its own merits, which are considerable if far from universally accepted. Some complain that Last Year at Marienbad is all surface and no substance, and this opinion isn’t too far off the mark, and maybe that’s exactly the point: that the most pleasurable way to experience Marienbad is simply to marvel at the incredible visual (and aural) beauty of the film, the smoothly gliding camera work, Chanel’s scrumptious wardrobe for Delphine Seyrig, and the other innumerable, purely stylistic, felicities, and leave the cosmic insights to someone else.
That the film is a masterpiece is excruciatingly, even dismayingly, self-evident. Nonetheless, it would be terribly elitist and condescending to say that those who dismiss, ridicule or outright hate the movie simply don’t understand it, so I won’t say it. But herein is the great irony: there’s not that much to understand about the film. Permanently frozen in a (probably) 1930s gestalt that’s at once modern, timely and timeless, Last Year at Marienbad is at heart a very simple movie.
[2] Interesting bit of trivia: in the 2012 poll a nearly exact same number (sixteen critics and seven directors) voted for Marienbad. Does this imply a solidifying of its (still undervalued) reputation by those in the know?
[3] Fast company is right, well, maybe. It’s a mixed verdict of how these once-formidable movies have fared in critical esteem in the six subsequent decades. In the 2022 critics’ poll, the films cited from 1962 placed, respectively: Tokyo Story 4 (ranks #4 in the directors’ poll as well); Intolerance, tied 225; Pickpocket, tied 136; Wild Strawberries, tied 108; Night and Fog, not ranked [among the top 250]; The Passion of Joan of Arc, tied 21; Limelight, not ranked.
Getting back to Marienbad, there'a certain ironic justice in that Delphine Seyrig, who plays our mystery woman, is the lead in the (at least for the time being) officially anointed 'greatest movie of all time,' Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (2022 critics' poll).
[4] It’s probably not too much of an exaggeration to cite Orson Welles as the great unseen presence on so many black and white films (including French New Wave) from the classic era of roughly 1940-1965.
[5] A novel, if not unique, interpretation of the film is that Marienbad is more or less a ghost story in which the characters are ghosts who wander about in a purgatorial netherworld, though whether they know they are ghosts or not, and exactly where they’re all headed is a bit unclear. The ghost story meme is reinforced by the mortuarial organ music which the film shares with the above-referenced American horror cult classic Carnival of Souls, which appeared at almost the same time and similarly has a spectral incognizance subtext.
My own rather idiosyncratic but probably not totally original take is that the film is basically visualized poetry: our narrator’s sing-song delivery and the vague, poetic nature of the words he speaks suggest this. In this regard we may see his narrative as poetry disguised as prose and the film itself as poetic imagery disguised as narrative film. Some might see it as a filmic representation of a dream, but aren’t all movies to some extent?
[6] Such seemingly unlikely choices are, on further reflection, eminently (if arguably) apropos in the context of comparison with a film that's itself about hazily recalled confluences and connections.
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