movie tells the viewer from the beginning that words play a big role in this movie.
The beginning of the film is a gray relief, and gradually a man’s voice sounded, and he began to say something: "... a quiet room, the sound of footsteps is completely absorbed by the heavy carpet, no one can hear. Even that, in People walking in the corridor. Step on it again, through these walkways, living rooms and galleries, in this old mansion, this luxurious and gloomy house. Endless corridors followed by corridors, silent and deserted, full of darkness and coldness The woodcarvings, stucco, mosaic paintings, marbles, mirrors, gray portraits, columns..." The film picture shows the vision of a person, who is walking through the corridor.
After that, there is a continuous repetition of this passage. The endless repetition of words and the subjectivity of the film tells the viewer that this film was spoken by a man. This film is based on language, and the language here carries human subjectivity. No one can tell the viewer. The language makes the judgment, and the viewer does not know that these words are true or just the imagination of the narrator. His narration carries his emotions and thoughts, not only calm and rational narration, but also interspersed with dreams and impressionistic descriptions...These are all told by a man who is both a participant in the story and also a story. The constructor. Therefore, every scene in the movie may be true or imagined by him. We can trust him or doubt everything about this movie. We can also treat it as a sensory enjoyment, enjoying the arrangement of light and shadow in the movie. . Therefore, this film does not have the most fundamental value. Language can reflect the facts and can also reconstruct the facts. This is what the director wants to present to the viewer.
In this film, what the director wants to show is the ambiguity of memory and the reconstruction of existence by language.
We can indeed see a story: a man and a woman met and fell in love in an old mansion. The man hoped that the woman would leave with him the next morning, and the woman was married, and it might happen. Known by her husband, she lacks courage and hesitates. She hopes that the man can wait another year. The two of them met again in this building the next year. At this time, the woman deliberately avoided mentioning the past, and the man kept telling everything that happened last year in gentle words. At the end of the movie, they left together.
But this story was told entirely by the participants of the story, and he told it with passion for his lover. The story may completely match what he said, or the woman doesn't love him at all, and all the narratives become unreliable because of the confusion in his memory. Language itself constitutes existence, not a reflection of existence. This is similar to the postmodern view of language. Language is no longer an abstract superficial sign. Language itself has meaning, and language itself can construct existence.
And there is no standard that is ultimately used to judge right from wrong. God is dead, and everything is based on human perception. Everything in this movie is based on the memory of men. In other words, there is no exact benchmark, because memory is subjective, everyone’s memory is different, there is no common value, the same power of discourse has disappeared, everyone is the master of his own story and the control of his own destiny However, everyone only believes in their own memories and believes that their words have the ability to construct facts. This change stems from people's belief in reason gradually surpassing their belief in belief itself, that is, people begin to use rational considerations before deciding whether to believe.
The highly abstract and formal things in the film also show the connection between language and existence.
For example, there are a lot of still scenes in the film: For example, when the director is filming people who gather to play cards and drink alcohol, he will not let them move normally. These people are all still, they just sit around a gambling table. Before, there were cards or money gambling on the table. They were generally still, with only small movements, such as a woman’s earrings shaking gently, or the liquid in a wine glass rippling.
This large number of still scenes is also the structure of the existence of language pairs. Because a large number of still scenes cannot appear in real life, this is the director’s abstraction of life, because in the memory of a man, all his attention is focused on the intersection between him and the woman, so other characters or The existence of the scene is not important, their existence only appears as a "screen-like" scene. In order to emphasize the past fact that men’s memories revolve around women, the author makes highly abstract expressions of other scenes, and this movie grammar appears to be static.
Moreover, this static method can also be understood as the alienation of human nature, and it is also a construction of language to existence, or it can be said to be a reflection here. Because "Last year in Marienbad" tells a story about elopement, the heroine in the film is a married woman, and her escape with other men actually brings a depressive atmosphere to the whole movie. The depressive atmosphere actually has a certain alienating influence on the existence of the individual. In other words, the stillness of the people here is completely different from the human nature we usually see. Their stillness looks weird, with a certain mechanical meaning. The director achieves this effect through the use of language.
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