murderer of time
by Douglas Messerli
Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenwriter),
Alain Resnais (director) L’Année derniére à Marienbad (Last Year at
Marienbad) / 1961
As I have hinted in my discussions
of The Erasers and The Voyeur, there is a significant amount of humor
in Robbe-Grillet’s work. The ineffectual investigations of the detective Wallas
in The Erasers and the highly organized but internally rambling journeys
of Mathias in The Voyeur may result in intellectually arresting conundrums,
but the tensions that arise from their actions or lack of actions present us
with several humorous twists of reality. Our very confusion in both of these
works is based, in part, on the multiplicity of detail deflected by minds that
can make no sense of the reality the are witnessing. The details overwhelm any
sense of coherent narrative.
One
can almost imagine, accordingly, when film director Alain Resnais begin filming
Robbe-Grillet’s script L’Année derniére à Marienbad the glee the two
took in creating a work that so purposely confuses its audience. Indeed the
film has absolutely nothing to do with Marienbad, being filmed almost entirely
at the Nymphenburg and Schleissheim Palaces. X suggests to A only the
possibility that they may have met at Marienbad. Moreover, except for the vague
whisperings and fragments of conversation, the only coherent sentences uttered
by X as he repeatedly recounts the background of “Empty salons, Corridors,
salons. Door. 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….” A says very little as X attempts to convince her—in a kind of maddened
version of the
Using 18th and 19th-century dramatic conventions, such as melodramatic
music that sounds as if it had been composed for a silent movie, and tableaux
vivants in which numerous visitors to the hotel are gathered in small
groups and frozen in space as the camera passes, Resnais creates a landscape
that is almost hilariously stylized, at one point even painting in shadows for
his characters trapped between shadowless, manicured trees—as if to point up
the fact that the characters of this film are so insignificant that they cannot
even cast their own shadows.
Early in the film we observe the hotel guests attending a play announced
as Rosmer, presumably a production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm of
1887, a work centered upon a dialectic between the opposing forces of Rosmer
and Rebekka West, the first a representative of conservatism and idealism, the
second of radical reality. Accordingly, we have evidence early on in this film
that X and A are polar opposites, she clearly a passive dreamer, wandering
through space, while X attempts to bring her into a real world where they might
rediscover their love—or at least transform his apparent rape of her into
something in which she equally participated.
We also recognize in the Rosmersholm connection that Last Year
at Marienbad is not so much a story about a man and a woman who may or may
not have had a previous affair, as it is about a couple trying to uncover their
own reality in a world that seems to have no solid past, present, or future—in
a landscape which destroys time. All the guests have come here, we are told,
for relaxation: no business is allowed. In such a desultory place, games such
as Nim (a game based on mathematical principles, in which the first player
inevitably wins) and target shooting are the primary activities, reminding one
of Renoir’s Rules of the Game, just as in that film, the only other
entertainment available to the bored and wealthy guests is the game of love.
Finally, one perceives in the reference to Ibsen’s play that this is an
extremely literary work, what film critic Thomas Beltzer has described as “an intertextual
meditation,” a story not so much about a couple attempting to uncover love,
but, just as do authors, to create a world in which they might survive. Beltzer
argues that the script is based, in part, on Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy
Casares’ The Invention of Morel, a work, published in 1940, that was
itself influenced by H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr. Moreau.
In The Invention of Morel, a fugitive trapped on an island falls in love with a woman, Faustine, controlled, it appears, by a tennis player, Morel. As in Robbe-Grillet’s script, when the fugitive attempts to speak to Faustine, she does not react, and the many other tourists around her seem not to notice him. Ultimately, he discovers that the figures he is seeing are holograms created from the original beings, now destroyed, trapped in an eternal mechanical reality that is repeated again and again.
Bioy Cesares has, in turn, admitted that his character Faustine if based
on the actress Louise Brooks, who, as he put it, “vanished too early from
movies.” And, in fact, throughout Resnais’ film we see the actress Delphine
Seyrig as a kind of Brooks-like beauty, as she positions herself in various
divans and beds.
Beltzer, moreover, goes on to cite other works that relate to Last
Year at Marienbad, creating what he describes as a kind of “ontological
vertigo.” Yet the critic naively argues that Robbe-Grillet and Resnais refused
to make public the relationship between their work and Bioy Cesares’ because
they are “Eurocentrics who think art should have nothing to do with the genre
of science fiction/horror.” By not revealing the possibility that the characters
in Resnais’ film are holograms, Marienbad becomes, in Beltzer’s words, “merely
surreal art for art’s sake.”
Obviously, he has read little of the great Argentine writer’s work, and
has no perception that in Europe Bioy Cesares if far better known and respected
than in the US. And I would hardly describe his metaphysical tales (or The
Invention of Morel) as belonging only to the genre of science fiction or
horror tales. I would suggest, rather, that Robbe-Grillet refused to tie his
script down to a single work, or even multiple sources, simply because he
sought to make Marienbad a kind of Borgesian library (Bioy Cesares wrote
many works with Borges), to position it as a work which calls up numerous other
fables of desperate love.
It is odd, given Beltzer’s own adjectival descriptions, that he does not
link Last Year at Marienbad, for example, to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo,
released just three years before Marienbad. Yet both movies deal with a
relationship that previously existed, in which the male rediscovers his lover,
but is yet somewhat uncertain that it is actually the same woman. X must almost
convince himself in his repetitious descriptions of their previous affair that
A is, in fact, the same being. Like Scottie in Vertigo, X has despaired
of ever finding her again, but has believed all along that their reunion was
inevitable. X’s passionate despair strongly resembles the kind of madness
Scottie has had to endure after the apparent suicide of Madeline Elster.
Throughout Marienbad, in Seyrig’s long narcissistic-like reveries,
suggesting themes of love lost and rediscovered, and the attempt to make the “new”
woman over into the one in the past, there are similarities to Vertigo.
But then, of course, those elements exist in many stories of love lost and
found.
That is just what makes Robbe-Grillet’s and Resnais’ work so powerful.
In the world they present, time has become warped and so shifting that there
can be no reality. The characters cast no real shadows because they are ghosts
who share their reality with numerous other figures of literature and art.
Los Angeles, July 12, 2008
Reprinted from My Year 2008: In
the Gap by Douglas Messerli.
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