Short Analysis: 'Last Year at Marienbad': A Dream Within a Dream Within a Game Within a Hall
- Aaron Nell Millado
- May 14, 2017
- 7 min read
"I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century..." Alain Resnais', Last Year at Marienbad (1961) is one of those rare insoluble puzzles that has stumped critics and many casual movie-goers all over the world simply because it defies a single meaning. It's a story about a man (Giorgio Albertazzi)--typically named as 'X' by film scholars--trying to convince a woman (Delphine Seyrig)--named 'A' by scholars--that they have met each other before, and that they were in love and had an affair, despite A being married to 'M' (Sacha Pitoëff). The film has influenced many filmmakers--David Lynch among them; whose distinct style of filmmaking is very reminiscent of Resnais' 1961 film (and whose work I've grown increasingly interested in, as taste changes with age). Age, I believe, is one of the important factors in Last Year at Marienbad, as age, in this film, does not matter. The fascination with Marienbad is attributed to the complex and multilayered form the film takes and, most importantly how incredibly easy it is to get lost in the piece. Thus, the film becomes ageless, and through this agelessness the blurred story of Marienbad unfolds itself. Though not in the traditional "classical Hollywood" narrative style, but through a highly avant-garde lens that can only be filtered through as a 'dream.' Funny thing about dreams: almost everyone shares the same exact dream, sometimes with their own twists, and sometimes influenced by the realities of their own lives--and sometimes dreams melt into memory and we struggle to distinguish the difference between their memories and their dream.
One of the notable aspects of Marienbad is its usage of "match-on-action"-- which is a matter of carrying a single movement across a cut. One of the interesting things about this technique is that it maintains a spatial awareness and continuity on the frame. However, what makes matching-on-action powerful is its ability to also disorient the audience. In Bordwell and Thompson's sample analysis of the film, they write: "Marienbad presents many varied combinations of ambiguous space, time, and causality. An action may carry from one time and space to a different time and space" (Bordwell/Thompson, 326). Last Year at Marienbad mostly takes place in a baroque hotel or château with seemingly endless hallways that the characters can easily get lost in, and can disorient the audience. For example, there is a scene in which X and A share a conversation while walking down a hallway, walking past statues, and small groups of people either sharing a drink or having conversations themselves. In this scene, X is still trying to convince A of their past love affair. The film abruptly cuts to both characters walking down a different and empty hallway. This happens constantly throughout the whole film. The movement and their conversation remain unchanged, but their surroundings have obviously been altered. This sudden spatial shift--while maintaining some form of temporal continuity--creates an abrupt ripple in the film, which shocks the audience and places an emphasis on the suspicious circumstances and locales which our characters respectively inherit and inhabit. However, though the movement and dialogue remain unchanged, the sudden change in location suggests a temporal tampering, which questions whether the conversation taking place is of the past, present, or quite possibly the future. Whatever the case may be, it puts the audience in a situation to question the reality of the film. Is this a dream, a memory, or something else? the film, through this technique, allows for the questioning of the characters, their motives, and their states of mind. Interestingly, Last Year at Marienbad's usage of temporal and spatial tampering is not unlike a dream, in the sense that its abstract form allows the recreation of a dream--but whose dream is it?. Dreams have a tendency to displace a dreamer, while maintaining a fluent stream of thought--depending on how good a filmmaker the dreamer may be, I suppose.
"I can lose... but I always win."
Time, in the film, as mentioned earlier, is relative. The story moves forward, with X trying to convince A of their love affair, but the plot of the film becomes muddled as there are multiple shots of one specific scene that sometimes play out differently as the film progresses. For instance, as A draws closer to making a decision--whether to believe X and abscond the mansion with him, or stay with her husband, M--the scene is played out in multiple ways; interestingly these variations are scattered throughout the film, and hints to what exactly happened take form in the scenes' insinuations and whispered gossip among the other guests. At one point, we see A alone in her room when she sees a stranger enter the room and approach her. The camera--and thus, the audience--act in place of this mysterious and unwelcome guest, and lunges into a closeup of A as she screams. This shot provides the audience with a clue that A was attacked. The nature of the attack, however, is unclear, though as X's advances become more aggressive, one can assume--based on the pieces of information given to us by the director--that X was the one who attacked A; X possibly raped or murdered her, maybe even both. Then later in the film, the scene is revisited, though instead of X being in the room (or assumed to have been in the room), A's husband, M, enters. He shares with A that he is aware of her infidelity, and before he leaves he shoots her. Another variation of the scene shows M in a very sympathetic light (or so we think; throughout the film, M acts as a force of antagonism for X--where the two constantly play a game in which M always is the winner), where he is aware of A's affair--though prays for it not to be true--and puts his heart on his sleeve by saying to her: "Tomorrow I'll be alone." Now these all cannot possibly happen simultaneously, or maybe they can. The conventions the film employs sort of encourages the audience to allow for simultaneous events to occur with various factors that lead to the same conclusion. The repetition of scenes and their different outcomes make it unclear what has transpired but we do know that something has happened, and that at least of these possible outcomes is true. Resnais' choice of overlapping these repetitions creates a fraction in time, developing alternate realities and alternate possibilities that provide the audience omnipotence over the characters, yet revealing nothing about the whole truth.
"I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure of another century..."
There is another technique that Resnais employs: false perspectives, or trompe l'oeil--French for "fooling the eye." We talked briefly about the baroque hotel's vast size; and within this castle, you can find multiple walls painted with perspective paintings of hallways. These walls are scattered throughout the film and create an atmosphere of infinite possibilities, or paths, the characters can choose from. Incidentally, these perspective paintings suggest some form of loop--spatial or temporal--as they appear similar to the hallways which our characters may or may not have already visited. Though false perspectives imply a vast space, in Marienbad, they come to represent and imply psychological trait of claustrophobia, which the mansion exhibits--implying that the hallways in which our characters spend most of their time getting lost in are not real, but are actually walls painted with images of realistic hallways to trick the wanderer and create a sense of confinement with no hope for escape. As X becomes more aggressive in his pursuit of A, who finds herself cornered--and no matter where she turns--and finds that there is no escape, as she becomes trapped by the walls while X trails just behind. "Marienbad teases us to try to fit its parts into a coherent whole, yet at the same time it provides several indications that such a constructed unity is impossible" (327). Resnais constructs Last Year at Marienbad almost like an M.C. Escher painting: where on perspective bleeds into another, forming a loop or a distortion of space and time, which transforms the piece as a whole into a series of seemingly impossible tessellations between reality and surrealism. By distorting what the audience sees, the effect of distorting the narrative story and plot--as well as trying to make sense of the film's actual narrative whole--as Bordwell and Thompson suggest, is futile, because the distinction between what is real and what is imagined become imperceptible and by actively trying to piece together what little information the audience is given, the only puzzle pieces they gain are tessellating pieces that create a different and unexpected image that may or may not be related to the pieces, or the whole, in question. In addition, it allows for the torture of the characters by entrapping them within a closed, albeit infinite, space.
Watching this film is like playing M's game, in which a viewer will try to win the key to Marienbad's story by arranging the scenes in a clear distinct narrative order; but when they do, the film turns itself on its head and leaves you with pieces you neither want nor comprehend the importance of. "Marienbad broke with conventional expectations by suggesting, perhaps for the first time in film history, that a film could base itself entirely on a gamelike structure of casual, spatial, and temporal ambiguity, refusing to specify explicit meanings and teasing the viewer with hints about elusive implicit meanings" (328). Resnais plays with his audience as if he's M, challenging the audience who take the role of X, in an effort to win the key that will unlock and help us better understand the true meaning of Last Year at Marienbad. It leaves people fascinated and keeps spectators suggesting different explanations of how to win the game. Except, we all know that, at the end of the day, no matter what, M always wins.
RESOURCES
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 3rd Edition. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2004. Print.
