When the image loses its meaning, can a movie still be called a movie?
We may have all had such doubts. At the moment when we are used to strong stories and coherent plots, the quality of a movie seems to be completely equivalent to whether it tells a good story. However, in the face of pure and extreme images, the existing system of criticism has suddenly lost its foothold. Perhaps only by returning to the images themselves can we find the "meaning" that has been neglected. De" gave me reflections.
The "story" takes place in a huge and empty hotel, with luxurious and charming interior Baroque architecture, patterned with grey flower branches, gilded parapets, and standing servants. Unnamed guests were doing nothing, everyone was talking, and everyone was whispering. They strictly abide by all kinds of illusory rules, go to dance parties, communicate with blank faces, and repeat mental games with punishment over and over again.
In this airtight and suffocating space, a strange man followed the woman, trying his best to tell her his love for her, trying to convince her of the oath between the two of them last year. The woman joked about him and saw him as just another rhetorical courtier. But what the man said was so real, consistent, and more and more irrefutable, the present and the past were intertwined like teeth.
In the end, she gave in. In fact, she had already given in. She tried to escape for the last time: she hoped that this strange man in front of her could become the character she was looking for, and she would be willing to join him in finding those indescribable things, love, reality, meaning , even death...
The above is the result of my attempt to materialize and characterize this film. It is indeed quite abstract and incomprehensible. This is a counter-example to prove that "Last Year in Marienbad" is not a film that can be visually described by language. In order to understand the connotation of a film, one must observe the image itself—because from the very beginning, the creator's intention was to completely separate "content" from "form".
The film was directed by Alain Resnais, the director of the New Wave "Left Bank", and written by Alain Rob-Grillet, the founder of the French "New Novel". At the beginning of the concept, the two showed a high degree of consistency in the way the script and video were presented.
As a representative of the "Left Bank", Resnais prefers the academic image style compared to the "New Wave" directors represented by Godard and Truffaut. He is interested in people's spiritual activities, people's thoughts and people's heart, so his films show a highly formalized style on this level .
And Greer is a pioneer of formalism. He strictly abides by the theory of the "new novel" created by himself in his creation, and strongly advocates the separation of people and things in the material world. He opposes the novels created by Balzac. The realistic tradition of creation blurs the theme, discards the coherent plot, erases the emotions of the characters, focuses only on objective and calm descriptions, and cancels the boundaries of time and space . Therefore, the creation of "Last Year in Marienbad" by the two can only be said to be the evolution and deepening of each other's creative theories, rather than grandstanding.
"Last Year in Marienbad" consciously created the creativity of narrative. Under the hegemony of Hollywood's classic narrative model, not only the creator, but also the audience have become accustomed to and gradually accepted the step-by-step narrative routine. The process, the climax, the ending, each process has been reproduced or evolved countless times, gradually limiting the narrative of the film and the audience's acceptance within the established rules.
But in fact, the creation of the film caters more to the logical activities of the brain's thinking. In fact, the thought does not advance according to the classic narrative mode of the film, but is fast, slow and even full of changes. These jumping, blank and even some It is helpful for the existence outside normal thinking to be accurately captured and visualized, creating a pure spiritual time and space in the film . In the film, the narrative attempts to construct itself through the image, but it is never implemented.
The film opens with a "pre-narration" method. The camera moves freely in the castle without any characters or characters involved. As our eyes move, we swept across the smooth walls, magnificent ceilings and empty corridors. Gradually, they held their breath, stood still, or whispered. A voice appeared in the space outside the painting in the form of a monologue, and murmured poetic language along with the movement of the camera.
It was in this ambiguity that the characters suddenly had an independent consciousness. They talked or quarreled loudly, forming a small circle in groups of three or five, and the narrative began to come alive.
"Last Year at Marienbad" is intended to demonstrate and present a weakened narrative whose role in the film is no longer obvious, or even constitutes an element of image-building, but merely ready to be replaced or summoned like color or light The presence.
As the narrative goes away, meaning is not always "present," as Derrida said: meaning will linger forever.
For Resnais, meaning is obviously not a necessary condition for the display of images. What he has to do is to re-examine the relationship between image and meaning. With a modernist approach, he returns to the charm of film since its birth— - The function of the image as a simple record has been reintroduced, and under the endless scheduling and movement of the mirror, it has moved to the other extreme of the mainstream commercial film narrative.
Fragmented, irrational, and dreamy expressions are deliberately not integrated and woven into the grand narrative. Each fragment has no beginning or end, and the dialogue is incomprehensible and illogical, in order not to satisfy the sense of security that the audience can obtain in a complete story: this sense of security has been in the story since the age of human mythology. .
As a typical stream-of-consciousness film, excluding meaning means mobilizing more elements of filmmaking itself.
In expressing the dreamlike entanglement between the past and the reality, the value of editing is demonstrated. The "dual reality" of the brain and material time that Renai wants to present is entirely due to the effect of editing.
Time and space are artificially compressed, traditional intervals (such as fades) are replaced by simple and crude jump cuts, and time sequences are combined into flashbacks, interludes and even non-linear expressions in the editing. One shot after another is repeatedly combined to form a cyclical effect, and there is no complete logical and visual correspondence between shots, thus reflecting the complexity of "reality".
In fact, the practice of stream-of-consciousness narrative did not start with the film. In his 1959 work "Hiroshima Love", Lei Nai already had an arrangement of reversing the sequence through flashbacks. The clip mobilizes one's own imagination, and even if each scene lacks the necessary explanation, it actually gives the viewer great autonomy.
In addition to editing, the use of off-painting space undoubtedly practices a unified aesthetic concept. From the poetic monologue of the man at the beginning of the film, the narration constitutes the main off-painting space. Beyond that, we could hear their murmurs as the camera swept across the gathering in twos and threes, all muttering repetitive lines like the elusive ambient sounds.
Someone once compared this film to Schoenberg's "atonal" music , which in my opinion is very appropriate, and the soundtrack also echoes this atonal practice, with the melodious pipe organ intermittently, It seems that there is no polyphonic structure, and it is difficult to hear related themes, only constant repetition and breakthrough, back and forth without trace.
In my opinion, rather than seeing the film as a avant-garde image that leads the times, it is better to see it as a complete reinvention of realism.
Castles, murals, motionless guests, and long corridors constitute a huge and silent "installation", in which the objective material existence is once again presented as itself, without any additional purpose or given. Meaning, as the Lumiere brothers did at the beginning of cinema: the image as a perception of reality is only as a record. But "Last Year at Marienbad" shows a more ground-breaking value in addition to its objective presentation - it is the culmination of modernist art, and it contains Freud's theory on dreams and the unconscious. , is the presentation of existentialism through the strong sense of alienation and distorted perception on both sides of the conversation, the irrational "intuition feeling" that Bergson said, and it is also a Brecht-style alienation technique.
In this way, with such a film, if we try to explore the continuity of the plot, the connection of the characters, or the integrity of the story, it will not achieve the effect we expect .
And once we take the opposite attitude, we go into the film with the extraordinary image presented in front of us, with the voices of the actors, with the music and the narration, with the rhythm of the cuts, with the emotional changes of the characters. , then we can enjoy the pure feeling from the image itself, which requires us to mobilize sight, hearing and feeling to form a unified synesthetic response, and is also highly susceptible to infection.
When the meaning is delayed, it does not mean that we have lost everything. Beyond the meaning, there is the hidden image itself.
2020.4.10
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