The Enduring Legacy of LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
CocinorMichelangelo Antonioni was famously quoted saying, “A film you can explain in words is not a real film.” While such a statement might seem hyperbolic, it holds a stronger value now than it did during his time. Successful films have become increasingly more streamlined, and the lack of a clearly detailed and explained plot is seen as poor direction and writing. The constant need for audiences to have everything explained is slowly killing the creativity and experimentation that cinema thrived on in its first fifty years, but viewers can thankfully go back to the bottomless well of classics to find new inspiration and motivation to experiment with the cinematic form.
One such classic which has influenced countless directors over the past 60 years is Last Year at Marienbad, a 1961 avant-garde film that won the coveted Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. The union between its writer and director was a match made in heaven: filmmaker Alain Resnais had already explored the unreliability of memory and the wounds of the past with the disturbing short documentary Night and Fog and his feature debut Hiroshima Mon Amour, while screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet was a novelist famed for his fractured and ambiguous narratives that emphasised emotions through repetitive descriptions rather than dialogue.
What was born out of their collaboration is one of the most enigmatic films ever made. The story hinges on a lack of clarity of what is really going on, something that is carried from the first to the last frame: during a gala event in a baroque hotel a man approaches a woman claiming that they met the year before in Marienbad, where she asked him to wait a year before deciding whether they should stay together. She does not remember this happening. Does this man really know the woman? Has she forgotten what happened, or is she lying? Did they have an affair together, or did something more sinister happen? Who is the mysterious second man, constantly asserting his dominance over the protagonist?
The alluring appeal of Last Year at Marienbad is that clear answers of any sort are never provided. Just like in Robbe-Grillet’s books, where each reader experiences something different based on what they have lived, the same applies to this film. This is a simultaneously gorgeous and eerie experience, with the repetitive lines of dialogue, unnerving organ music by Francis Seyrig and slow dolly shots through the ornate halls of the hotel, crafting a tense and unnerving atmosphere that evokes gothic romances and ghost stories. Resnais’ revolutionising use of quick cutting helps in further muddling the narrative, giving flashes of either true events or false memories that confuse the audience just as much as Delphine Seyrig’s nameless woman.
The avant-garde direction helped set apart the film from more conventional tales of romance, and the oneiric tone that Resnais built is both comforting and sinister. There are some amusing sequences, such as Giorgio Albertazzi’s man constantly losing to Sacha Pitoëff in a variation of the mathematical game of nim (further accentuating the seemingly endless loop that the characters are stuck in), as well as more distressing moments, including implications of sexual abuse and domestic violence. The beauty of unravelling the puzzle that is Last Year at Marienbad is decoding the cinematic techniques employed by Resnais, making sense of Robbe-Grillet’s cryptic dialogue and inscrutable characters, and giving in to the aesthetic beauty of two of Munich’s most elegant palaces (Schleißheim and Nymphenburg). If taken at face value, the story is impenetrable and incomprehensible; it is only by giving in to the flow of the events that different meanings start to surface on an intuitive level, which are incredibly hard to put into words yet make sense in your heart.
The style, non-linear narrative structure, and unconventional editing of this classic have been repeated, homaged, and assimilated by countless filmmakers in the past 6 decades – from the cinema of the French New Wave and New Hollywood, to contemporary experimental filmmaking and even more mainstream films. The aisles of the Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of The Shining, the Steadicam gliding around the corners, display a strong resemblance to the way cinematographer Sacha Vierny framed the corridors of Marienbad. When little Danny Torrance is confronted by the ghostly Grady twins, the quick flashes of their bodies that he sees are as emotionally jolting as the memories that Seyrig experiences throughout Resnais’ film.
The importance and unreliability of memories, key to unravelling a mystery and revealing the identity of a killer, are central to the Giallo thrillers of Dario Argento, with the band Goblin often inserting creepy organs in their energetic soundtracks. There are even instances of characters reflected in mirrors, their faces becoming part of the hotel’s decor, that bring back the disturbing reveal of the killer in Deep Red. David Lynch has made a career out of employing dream logic into his narratives, with INLAND EMPIRE having the loosest structure out of all his films, seamlessly changing perspective and locations just like when Albertazzi and Seyrig share the same conversation both inside the hotel and outside on a park bench.
Christopher Nolan, in an interview with The New York Times right before the release of Inception, revealed that he had not seen Marienbad up until then, and that “I’m ripping off the movies that ripped off off Last Year at Marienbad, without having seen the original. It’s that much a source of ideas.” The literal installation of new memories that Cobb and his team do is a more literal explanation of the psychological mind game of Albertazzi’s man. Much of this influence can be seen in his earliest films as well: both Memento and Following see their protagonists’ haunted by deceptive memories, trying to uncover a mystery where the key can be found inside their minds. William Friedkin featured Marienbad in the list of his ten favourite films for Criterion, and its influence can be seen in the shocking flashes of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist, its face resembling a diabolical version of Pitoëff’s visage.
These are only some of the most notorious examples, but there are countless others and likely many more to come. It is quite rare to find something that has had a legacy as enduring as Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad: its majestic blend of refined visuals and creepy soundtrack, purposefully-stilted performances, and impenetrable narrative is one of the closest cinema has come to truly capturing the magic of dreaming and of human thought. It is one of those films that you have to experience for yourself. In other words, a real film in true Antonioni fashion.