——Alain
Resnais critic Jean de Baroncelli compared Last Year at Marienbad to Picasso's "Girls of Avignon", a "stereoscopic film". Its controversy is also double-sided. Some people think it is the "greatest movie ever made", and some people think it is "a great joy and a mystery."
"Last Year at Marienbad" is a mythical film, based on fantasy, with hypnotic visuals, a world without cars, newspapers, televisions, but a vast garden of corridors and hotels: palaces, gardens, Marble columns, chandeliers, Baroque carved walls and ceilings, gilded sculptures, fireplaces, neat garden pools, people and things that don’t know time and space in this castle and garden. All events are ambiguous and ambiguous: neither did a man meet a woman at a luxury resort that may or may not be; he may or may not have met her there a year ago; may or may not have Ask her to elope with her, from the man who may or may not be her husband; at the end, they may or may not leave the place together. Basically, it's an indeterminate story, a movie that doesn't understand cause and effect or chronology.
Time is the weird factor here, man X with a foreign accent says he met woman A last year, but what is a year? Her photo should be the past of memories, but she seems to be the present in the photo. A man M is beside her, is it her husband or not her husband? X keeps telling A about the last year (she had promised to leave her husband to run away with him), is it to evoke her memory, or to make her accept his fiction? Maybe the whole thing is just X's imagination? When the movie starts, X arrives at the hotel and A is watching a play. At the end, she stood up by the same act and left with X. Does the entire movie take place in one play? Similar ambiguous treatments of this kind of time appear endlessly in this film. Time is like a narrative in a stream of consciousness novel, and the audience can't distinguish its subjective consciousness. Is it male? Women's? Director's? screenwriter? Or the sum of the above? It is a bit difficult for the audience to even tell who the consciousness belongs to, let alone understand the content.
The space of the film is as ambiguous as time. Scholar Baldwell has made a detailed analysis in his famous theoretical book. For example, in a large garden, the characters cast long shadows on the ground, but all the conical trees have no shadows. Is this the same space? Or sometimes the sculpture is in the hall, sometimes outdoors; in the heroine's room, new furniture is constantly appearing; or shortly after the opening, a blond female guest faces the camera, when she turns around, although the hair, clothes, and posture are exactly the same as the previous shot. , the background has changed from the lobby where the guests greeted the hotel to the hotel counter; or the camera is panned to another corner of the same space by one person, but the same person is looking out the window... "The whole structure does not provide any time, or cause and effect, to help the audience understand the full story.”
Visuals in the film (ornate push shots, passing through doors, corridors, halls), sound (repetition, monotonous monologues or dialogues, narrations, dream-like definite points without time and space) , splicing (abrupt insertion, jumping, and freezing actions from time to time, indicating the relative shortness or extension of time), is a movie like a big maze of consciousness, we are not in every picture, every sentence belongs to whose subject consciousness , the atmospheric effect of montage makes Last Year at Marienbad an unverifiable reminiscence, fantasy, guesswork, oblivion. When is it now? When is the past? We have no way of knowing. We don't know if the man is chasing after the woman, if she really forgot that she wanted to run away with him. We also don't know if that spooky man who likes to shoot, who always finds someone to play poker and always has the upper hand, is the woman's husband. Everything is like a chaotic dream, with fragmented memories, definite character personalities, clear situations, but no logical narrative. It is reality, it is surreal, and it is also the reaction and refraction of consciousness.
Resnais's own words may be the key to understanding the film: "The composition of the images, the associations between periods, the dialogue that accompanies them, no longer need to be dominated by 'common sense'. When we hear a word, we don't necessarily know it. Whoever said it doesn’t necessarily know where the sound came from or what it meant, and when we watch a scene, we don’t know where it happened, or when it happened, or what he stands for.”
Screenwriter Rob Greer It is pointed out that "Last Year in Marienbad" is different from traditional movies, it narrates "what is happening, all the causes and consequences of things that cannot be predicted, can only be read down and said, just like watching the street scene in front of the window. It's everything that's happening, no plot, no characters, no reason. In addition, the audience gets rid of the stereotypes of watching movies, and don't pursue the plot, character and rationality. Get rid of stereotypes, psychoanalysis. Crude and disgusting understanding of the frame, in fact, these understanding of the frame is the most abstract."
Therefore, Renais used various film techniques to interweave memories, fantasy, reality and other illogical time and space, and encouraged the audience to go with the flow. With the image, sound, music, rhythm, into the film, a large number of light and shadow changes, black and white contrast, camera lens, incoherence. Coherent sentences, laughter, noise, long silences, dreamy music, became "modernist cinema where form completely replaces content". When talking about his free and casual nature, Resnais said that after the material is completed, "25 montage schemes can be used to deal with" the identity, plot, and story are all diluted and irrelevant. What about the audience? You can also freely choose the viewing angle, take an active participation attitude, and think synchronously with the development of the film. The viewpoints and viewpoints are also completely free. This creative method exaggerates the spontaneity and randomness of the creative process and becomes a good excuse for irrationality. But to a considerable extent, it also caused confusion and impatience of the audience, and was called "three no works with no reason, no plot, and no characters".
Films have also been adopting a paradoxical and dialectical approach to audio-visual processing. We saw the string quartet, but the accordion sounded from the vocal cords. The narrator is describing a scene or action, but the picture presents something different from the narration. This makes our thinking a complex result of sound, picture and other contradictions and ambiguities, and also opens up another possibility for cinema.
In addition to the time factor, another escape theme in the film is the contrast between real emotion and rigid artificiality. In all kinds of gorgeous and rigid environments and buildings, everyone seems to be a living prop of the walking dead, such as those sculptures, crystal lamps, and neat gardens, which are generally cold and inactive. But in these repetitive and traditional settings, subjective emotions spring to the fore, perhaps this is what the Renais (or Left Bank) generation at war expected of the world.
"Last Year at Marienbad" also raises philosophical questions about modern man and the material world. Screenwriter Rob Greer said: "The world is made of matter that is independent of man, and modern man is surrounded by matter." The film's huge castle and garden make the protagonist often squeezed beside or surrounded by Dwarfing, as if repressed by these substances, cannot be the center of the work. In this visual world, subjective emotions are unreliable, memories are unreliable, and truth is unreliable. Figures are no different from icy statues or bushes in a garden, and any search for meaning is futile.
The audience is provided with a number of clues, and constantly draws futile conclusions, but often the next play completely overturns the conclusion. Most famously, A and X stand on a step, A wants X to leave, and the step collapses. The scene came to an abrupt end, and the audience saw the steps that had not collapsed again in the next shot. Just when the audience thought the previous scene was just a dream, the camera led us to see the steps with cracks, as if they had really collapsed. So the audience gave up the dreamy conclusion again, and had to think differently, overturning their own conclusions in one question after another.
——Excerpted from "The New Wave of French Cinema: Volume 2" / Editor-in-Chief of Jiao Xiongping / Jiangsu Education Publishing House P374-378
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