People are iron and steel, so I don’t pretend to panic for a while

Levi 2022-01-12 08:01:29

When Adorno was talking about Schoenberg's "atonal" music revolution, he said that the significance of this revolution is that once it happens, it is impossible to look back. Of course, composers can continue to write "tonal" music, but it has lost the directness without reflection before: this kind of return to "tonal" composition can only be regarded as the "atonality". The dissatisfaction can no longer be itself. Therefore, any composer (such as Rachmaninov) who pretends that this revolution has never happened will inevitably give people a sense of hypocritical nostalgia.

This is also the revolutionary significance of Robbe-Grillet and the "New Fiction School" to Balzac's novels. Even if you write as good as Balzac, but ignoring the existing revolution, you still invade the writing of the 18th century "story" novels, which are hypocritical and insincere bad novels. This is what Gu Bin's criticism of Mo Yan meant. This is like the antique buildings that are full of streets in China. They can only be understood as dissatisfaction with the Soviet communist architectural style since 49 years. As the building itself, it can only be a bad fake.

It should not be unreasonable to say that there are many similarities between the New Fiction School and Schoenberg's music. In fact, the soundtrack of "Last year in Marienbad" is inherently atonal. The film is also made up of a large number of fragments. The lens and performance have a strong sense of form. Reality no longer evolves from a concept into an inevitable whole as Hegel asserted, but is presented in Adorno's way: Reality can only appear as a total form of "fragmented" and "fragmented".

As a famous "drowsy movie", this movie can be said to be hostile to the audience. I think its purpose is to make the audience "incomprehensible", because the audience itself is treated here as the "big other" in the Lacan sense. Fragmented, irrational, and dreamlike performances are intended to not be integrated and weaved into the narrative of the Other. Each fragment has no beginning and no end, and the dialogue is incomprehensible and illogical, just to dissatisfy the sense of security that the audience can obtain in a complete story: this sense of security has been in the story since the time when humans made up myths. bingo.

Political factors cannot be ignored. The 20th century experienced the devastation of Nazism and Communism, two special "story tellers". Philosophy and art also showed reasonable opposition to identity and rationality. The Nazis liked Wagner with a strong sense of theater and story, and Picasso threw them a fragmented "Guernica". Dreaming and madness have become personal refuges, and cannot and cannot be arranged into the story of totalitarianism.

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Extended Reading
  • August 2022-03-27 09:01:14

    To be separated from the audience is to be separated from the feelings

  • Vaughn 2022-03-27 09:01:14

    It is better for students who study architecture to understand. After all, there is a concept of space, but it is still the most boring and downright French New Wave film I have ever seen. . .

Last Year at Marienbad quotes

  • [X wanders through the hotel's corridors cataloging items he sees]

    X: Empty salons. Corridors. Salons. Doors. Doors. Salons. Empty chairs, deep armchairs, thick carpets. Heavy hangings. Stairs, steps. Steps, one after the other. Glass objects, objects still intact, empty glasses. A glass that falls, three, two, one, zero. Glass partition, letters.

  • X: I must have you alive. Alive, as you have already been every evening, for weeks, for months.

    A: I have never stayed so long anywhere.

    X: Yes, I know. I don't care. For days and days. Why don't you still want to remember anything?

    A: You're raving! I'm tired, leave me alone!