New York Times: Last Year at Marienbad
Posted: Sat Jun 20, 2009 12:38 pm
I'm not exactly sure why I'm posting this, because I absolutely loathe this film, but I guess that its release on DVD is newsworthy...
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/movie ... .html?_r=1
DVDs
Indelible ’60s Memories
By DAVE KEHR
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
The French filmmaker Alain Resnais, now 87, was an honored presence last month at the Cannes Film Festival, where he presented a new movie, “Wild Grass,” and received a lifetime achievement award in recognition of his long, distinguished career.
Accepting his award in a black-tie ensemble enlivened by a bright red shirt and white running shoes, Mr. Resnais smilingly acknowledged a standing ovation from the crowd, every inch the foxy grandpa.
But there was a time when he was a much more controversial figure, as the excellent new Criterion edition of “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) reminds us. Mr. Resnais’s graceful, haunting puzzle movie, with its screenplay by the avant-garde novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and a cast of upper-class phantoms haunting a palatial hotel, sharply divided the public.
“Marienbad” won the top prize at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, and Robbe-Grillet’s script was nominated for a 1963 Academy Award (imagine that happening now), but for many critics the film represented the height of art-house pretentiousness. Pauline Kael described it as “aimless, high-style moral turpitude passing itself off as the universal human condition.”
The tale is easy enough to describe; the telling almost impossible. At a nameless society resort (pieced together cinematically from several castles in Bavaria) a handsome Italian (Giorgio Albertazzi) pursues an aloof Frenchwoman (Delphine Seyrig), insisting that they once had an affair (perhaps in Marienbad, a resort in the Czech Republic). X (as he’s called in the script) implores A (Ms. Seyrig’s character) to leave M (Sacha Pitoëff), the diabolical figure who appears to be her husband or lover. She puts X off. She has never seen him before, she says, though she may be lying or has simply forgotten.
Jean-Luc Godard said, “A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessary in that order.” But Mr. Resnais put the theory into practice. Composed of lines of dialogue repeated with slight shifts in emphasis, scenes restaged from different angles or with actors in different positions — all embedded within lengthy tracking shots through the baroquely overdecorated corridors of the hotel or its eerie formal gardens (where the human figures cast a shadow, but the shrubs and statuary do not) — “Marienbad” seems to be taking place simultaneously in the past, present and future.
There are none of the conventional signals that help viewers distinguish a flashback from a fantasy sequence, or separate reality from remembrance. And while this may have been a familiar device to the readers of modernist fiction, audiences of 1961 did not expect to meet James Joyce or William Faulkner at the movies.
The enigmas and convolutions of “Marienbad” yielded, and continue to yield, a great many graduate-student attempts to pin down the philosophical profundities of Mr. Resnais’s vision.
But there is just as much reason to think that the film was meant as something more playful. The sinister M, for example, likes to demonstrate his dominance over the other bored, well-dressed guests of the hotel by challenging them to a matchstick game that he always wins. His powers seem supernatural, but the game, called Nim, actually exists and can be won by anyone who understands the math behind it. (It involves counting in the binary system; a full explanation can be found on Wikipedia.)
For Mr. Resnais, a fan of comic books and genre fiction, the hotel in “Marienbad” belongs to a long line of Dark Old Houses, the archetypical setting for a certain kind of comic thriller that dates back at least to silent films like Roland West’s 1926 “Bat” and Paul Leni’s 1927 “Cat and the Canary” (and to the Broadway plays that inspired them).
“The Cat and the Canary,” with its elaborate dolly shots through spooky, shadowy corridors, seems like a direct inspiration, as do the opening scenes in Tod Browning’s “Dracula” (1931). The filmmaker Mark Rappaport has noted how Ms. Seyrig, with her slicked-back hair and flowing Chanel gowns, resembles the caped Bela Lugosi in Browning’s film. (And it was reportedly Mr. Resnais who urged the surpassingly elegant Ms. Seyrig to star in “Daughters of Darkness,” a lesbian vampire film in the Eurotrash tradition made by Harry Kümel in 1971.)
Photographed in widescreen black and white by the great Sacha Vierny, “Marienbad” has a visual texture that has exerted an influence over everything from Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to Ridley Scott’s commercials. One of the film’s biggest fans would appear to have been Stanley Kubrick, who dropped a spaceman down into one of the baroque bedchambers of “Marienbad” at the end of “2001” and spent much of “The Shining” trying to out-dolly Resnais through the corridors of a snowbound hotel populated by ghosts right out of the “Marienbad” party circuit. The line between high art and low is not always easy to draw. In the movies it is often impossible. (Criterion Collection, Blu-ray and standard definition $39.95, not rated)
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/movie ... .html?_r=1
DVDs
Indelible ’60s Memories
By DAVE KEHR
LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
The French filmmaker Alain Resnais, now 87, was an honored presence last month at the Cannes Film Festival, where he presented a new movie, “Wild Grass,” and received a lifetime achievement award in recognition of his long, distinguished career.
Accepting his award in a black-tie ensemble enlivened by a bright red shirt and white running shoes, Mr. Resnais smilingly acknowledged a standing ovation from the crowd, every inch the foxy grandpa.
But there was a time when he was a much more controversial figure, as the excellent new Criterion edition of “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961) reminds us. Mr. Resnais’s graceful, haunting puzzle movie, with its screenplay by the avant-garde novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and a cast of upper-class phantoms haunting a palatial hotel, sharply divided the public.
“Marienbad” won the top prize at the 1961 Venice Film Festival, and Robbe-Grillet’s script was nominated for a 1963 Academy Award (imagine that happening now), but for many critics the film represented the height of art-house pretentiousness. Pauline Kael described it as “aimless, high-style moral turpitude passing itself off as the universal human condition.”
The tale is easy enough to describe; the telling almost impossible. At a nameless society resort (pieced together cinematically from several castles in Bavaria) a handsome Italian (Giorgio Albertazzi) pursues an aloof Frenchwoman (Delphine Seyrig), insisting that they once had an affair (perhaps in Marienbad, a resort in the Czech Republic). X (as he’s called in the script) implores A (Ms. Seyrig’s character) to leave M (Sacha Pitoëff), the diabolical figure who appears to be her husband or lover. She puts X off. She has never seen him before, she says, though she may be lying or has simply forgotten.
Jean-Luc Godard said, “A film should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessary in that order.” But Mr. Resnais put the theory into practice. Composed of lines of dialogue repeated with slight shifts in emphasis, scenes restaged from different angles or with actors in different positions — all embedded within lengthy tracking shots through the baroquely overdecorated corridors of the hotel or its eerie formal gardens (where the human figures cast a shadow, but the shrubs and statuary do not) — “Marienbad” seems to be taking place simultaneously in the past, present and future.
There are none of the conventional signals that help viewers distinguish a flashback from a fantasy sequence, or separate reality from remembrance. And while this may have been a familiar device to the readers of modernist fiction, audiences of 1961 did not expect to meet James Joyce or William Faulkner at the movies.
The enigmas and convolutions of “Marienbad” yielded, and continue to yield, a great many graduate-student attempts to pin down the philosophical profundities of Mr. Resnais’s vision.
But there is just as much reason to think that the film was meant as something more playful. The sinister M, for example, likes to demonstrate his dominance over the other bored, well-dressed guests of the hotel by challenging them to a matchstick game that he always wins. His powers seem supernatural, but the game, called Nim, actually exists and can be won by anyone who understands the math behind it. (It involves counting in the binary system; a full explanation can be found on Wikipedia.)
For Mr. Resnais, a fan of comic books and genre fiction, the hotel in “Marienbad” belongs to a long line of Dark Old Houses, the archetypical setting for a certain kind of comic thriller that dates back at least to silent films like Roland West’s 1926 “Bat” and Paul Leni’s 1927 “Cat and the Canary” (and to the Broadway plays that inspired them).
“The Cat and the Canary,” with its elaborate dolly shots through spooky, shadowy corridors, seems like a direct inspiration, as do the opening scenes in Tod Browning’s “Dracula” (1931). The filmmaker Mark Rappaport has noted how Ms. Seyrig, with her slicked-back hair and flowing Chanel gowns, resembles the caped Bela Lugosi in Browning’s film. (And it was reportedly Mr. Resnais who urged the surpassingly elegant Ms. Seyrig to star in “Daughters of Darkness,” a lesbian vampire film in the Eurotrash tradition made by Harry Kümel in 1971.)
Photographed in widescreen black and white by the great Sacha Vierny, “Marienbad” has a visual texture that has exerted an influence over everything from Roger Corman’s Edgar Allan Poe adaptations to Ridley Scott’s commercials. One of the film’s biggest fans would appear to have been Stanley Kubrick, who dropped a spaceman down into one of the baroque bedchambers of “Marienbad” at the end of “2001” and spent much of “The Shining” trying to out-dolly Resnais through the corridors of a snowbound hotel populated by ghosts right out of the “Marienbad” party circuit. The line between high art and low is not always easy to draw. In the movies it is often impossible. (Criterion Collection, Blu-ray and standard definition $39.95, not rated)