L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad)

Jean-Louis Leutrat, Paul Hammond

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781838716752
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Film et vidéo

A quintessential work of 1960s European art cinema, L'Année dernière à Marienbad ( Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) was a collaboration between director Alain Resnais and 'New Novel' enfant terrible Alain Robbe-Grillet. Three people, known only by their initials, move through the sprawling luxury of a mysterious hotel and its ornamental gardens. Perhaps M is A's husband and X her lover. Perhaps, 'last year', A promised X she would leave with him. Or is there something more terrible in the past? An abstract thriller, a love story, a philosophical puzzle, 'the film's deviations are', for Jean-Louis Leutrat, 'as complex as those of the human heart'.

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A CONTROVERSIAL WORK

At the time of its release L’Année dernière à Marienbad had its fierce critics as well as its staunch supporters. Among the former was Michel Mourlet: ‘No notion of acting, no grasp of the rudiments of décor, no feeling for narrative, nothing but pathetic little intellectual games which solemnly play at being cinema.’¹ Years later this text would echo in Jacques Lourcelles’s dictionary entry, where it states that Resnais’s film, ‘one of the most insane the cinema has ever produced’, is not of ‘notable ’ interest, which is tantamount to saying that it has none.²

In the other camp, Jacques Brunius wrote in 1962 in Sight and Sound that L’Année dernière à Marienbad was ‘the film I had been waiting for during the last thirty years’, adding: ‘I am now quite prepared to claim that Marienbad is the greatest film ever made, and to pity those who cannot see this.’³ In 1963 the magazine Artsept published a collection of writings on the film, which opened with an extract from the letter an ‘incredibly moved and dazzled’ Michel Leiris had written to Alain Resnais on 20 May 1961:

Subdued by the images and imbued by all the words he hears, the viewer willingly enters into the film (or allows himself to be penetrated by it!) and finds himself transfixed by an endless stream of prodigious tableaux akin (in their eternal fixity of purpose and their power of fascination) to those that memories and desires can offer him at the most intense moments of his daily life – something very close, in short, to what Sartre describes as ‘privileged situations’.⁴

Philosophers in particular were instantly enamoured of Resnais’s film. In 1963 Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, an expert on Descartes and Malebranche, published a text called ‘Mirror of My Thought’ which ends with a superlative analysis of the long ‘bleached-out’ tracking shot:

An absolutely cinematic language is elaborated here which reaches the intellect only when it has first passed through the senses, as the philosophers would say. This is the paroxysm of desire, the vertigo of amour fou, an invention particular to Resnais, rather than the unacceptable fantasy of rape described in the screenplay. … Is this not, indeed, the blinding spark which ultimately links the poles X and A?⁵

In 1968 Gilles Deleuze alluded in Différence et répétition to Resnais’s film as ‘bearing witness to the particular techniques of repetition which the cinema employs, or invents’.⁶ Fifteen years later this analysis was extended and widened in the already classic pages of L’Image-temps devoted to ‘undecidable alternatives between layers of the past’.⁷

If Resnais’s film has today entered history it is still by no means a familiar work. Furthermore, traces remain of the old rivalries between cinema lovers of a generation which, with every passing day, becomes more distanced in time: these rivalries are a sign of the passions cinema excited, of the immaturity of certain ‘commentators’, and the blindness which can strike spectators otherwise endowed with sensibility.

The names in the L’Année dernière à Marienbad credits are presented in relief letters on a grey background, as on certain visiting or invitation cards. We are being summoned to a ceremony, or to a soirée: the characters are dressed accordingly, they will express themselves in rather formal language; we are invited to adopt this posture in advance, ‘out of pure convention’. There are works created which lean towards the formal, and some may find them boring and academic.

Roughly speaking, there are two kinds of film-maker: Eisenstein or Sternberg on the one hand, Rossellini or Cassavetes on the other. Apropos of Alain Resnais’s film Claude Ollier wrote:

As to the interdictions pronounced in the name of ‘naturalness’ and ‘spontaneity’, they have absolutely no meaning. The only thing that counts is the rigour (hence the strength of conviction, hence the truth) with which the materials are organised, whatever their origin and the degree of artifice binding them together. … It is by pushing the ‘artificial’ to the extreme that Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet have managed to create an exemplarily true work.⁸

Added to which, humour is not absent from Resnais’s film. The person who perhaps best defined the effect this film was capable of producing (and which it perhaps still produces) is Robert Benayoun, when he wrote: ‘Slipperily hieratic, coldly dishevelled, starchily fluid, playfully lugubrious, casually deliberate, glacially frenetic’, adding:

This work-shy work, at once constructed and deconstructed, in which all was meticulously foreseen save the essential, namely the breeze that whisks it away, the grace that suffuses it, the inestimable and timeless charm it exudes, this work of which we mainly retain the frame, whatever we might do with this, one of the high points of the imaginary of our time, largely lives through the presence of the beings who populate it: they cast a shadow in places (those famous yews lopped into pyramids) where no shadow is cast.⁹

For the novelist Jean-Louis Bory L’Année dernière à Marienbad was a disturbing, obsessive and difficult film.¹⁰ Disturbing because it repeatedly calls psychological realism, and its corollaries causality and linearity, into question. Obsessive because it’s necessary to see it many times and to allow one ’s admiration to gradually give way to emotion. Difficult because it requires the spectator to make an effort to engage with it. Obsessive, it surely is. Difficult depends on the viewer. As for disturbing, the word seems excessive: if we grant to a film the possibility of having a poetic rather than traditionally fictional ambition, if we do not take the cinema to be a mechanism meant exclusively for telling stories, if we accept that a work might surprise us and propose something different to what we’re accustomed to, then this film is no more disturbing than it is obscure, something it has often been reproached for being. In L’Année dernière à Marienbad a game is made of the rules. There are pieces on a checker or chessboard, some cards, with a traditional Western setting: a chateau and a garden. The film’s deviations are as complex as those of the human heart. L’Année dernière à Marienbad demands that it be submitted to the ‘reasons’ of the heart.

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THE FILM’S BACKGROUND

Alain Resnais

Born on 3 June 1922 in the Brittany town of Vannes, Alain Resnais was the only child of an average middle-class family. His father was a pharmacist. He went to a religious school: ‘I had a very strict Catholic upbringing in Brittany,’ he has said, ‘and I hate thinking back to my childhood.’ Subject to attacks of asthma, he was of delicate health. His mother encouraged his education and would seem to have given him a taste for classical music. His parents had a property in the Golfe du Morbihan. He was to recall this landscape in Mon Oncle d’Amérique:

The island you see in the bay is in the Golfe du Morbihan. It’s one of the four hundred islands in the bay, and legend has it that there are as many of them as there are days in the year. I used to go there as a kid, keeping it a secret from my family. Secretly, because I wasn’t allowed to go sailing on the open sea, I was 8 or 10 at the time and I’d wait until my family went off before getting the dinghy out. I never saw my grandfather roasting crabs but I used to roast them myself. I adored that. My friends and I used to lark about on the sand and we even tried putting sand on the fire because the Egyptians had discovered glass that way. We never managed it though.

In 1940 he left for the Midi, with the intention of reaching Algeria. He remained in Nice, where he prepared his baccalaureate. He would evoke this period in L’Amour à mort: ‘I can remember seeing shepherds and their flocks on the Riviera at Nice.’

In 1941 he arrived in Paris, where his asthma instantly disappeared. In 1943 the French cinema school, the IDHEC, was set up and an editor friend, Myriam, advised him to enrol. He passed the entrance exam, coming second. He thus formed part of the first intake of students, enrolling as an editor; Henri Colpi was a co-student. He took up 14 x 10 photography, specialising in portraiture. Disappointed by the teaching, apart from one lecture by Jean Grémillon, he resigned a year later. In 1946 he made three 16mm films with Gérard Philipe (they lived in the same Rue du Dragon building) and Danielle Delorme. A dozen visits with painters followed in 1947. Myriam, the film editor, got him a job cutting Le Roman d’un tricheur. He was assistant editor in 1947 on Nicole Vedrès’s Paris 1900, and subsequently editor on many films between 1952–8. Pierre Braunberger suggested he make a series of shorts. This would include Van Gogh in 1948, then Paul Gauguin and Guernica in 1950.

His output grew during the 50s. Short films in the first instance, some of which, like Nuit et brouillard (1955) and Toute la mémoire du monde (1956), brought him renown. Hiroshima mon amour (1959) was his first feature. The latter part of the 60s marked a change in his style. La Guerre est finie in 1966 appeared to deviate from his earlier ‘experimental’ work. In 1967 he directed a sequence in Loin de Vietnam and in 1968, at the request of Chris Marker, he filmed a cine-tract. May ’68 saw the release of Je t’aime, je t’aime, which was a commercial failure. Resnais received no more offers and left for New York, where he remained from 1969 (the year he married Florence Malraux) to 1971, working on a number of projects which came to nothing, notably with the comics creator Stan Lee (The Monster Maker, 1970; The Inmates, 1971). He also proposed Conan to a producer, without success. His career took off again in 1974 with Biarritz-Bonheur (or Stavisky), a work that was badly received by the critics, but which proved a success with the public.

Alain Robbe-Grillet

Like Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet is Breton in origin; like him he was born in 1922, on 18 August, in Brest. He received his secondary and higher education in Paris. He became an agronomist and worked at the National Statistics Institute, afterwards doing laboratory research in biology. In 1950–1 he was an engineer at the Institute of Tropical and Citrus Fruits. He was sent on missions to Morocco, Guinea, Martinique and Guadeloupe. He published his first novel, Les Gommes, in 1953. Two years later he became a literary adviser at Éditions de Minuit. That same year he published his first articles and his second novel, Le Voyeur, which was awarded the Critics’ Prize. Dans le labyrinthe (1959) was his third novel. In 1961 he worked on L’Année dernière à Marienbad, of which he was the script and dialogue writer. Two years later he made his first film, L’Immortelle, and published Pour un nouveau roman. Since then he has had a career as writer, film-maker and lecturer.

Structuralism and the ‘Nouveau Roman’

Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the first volume of his Anthroplogie structurale, announced the arrival of structuralism; in January 1959 a colloquium was organised around the word ‘structure’. Roland Barthes proposed a new approach to ‘classical’ writers (Michelet, for example, and then Racine). In the literary field at the beginning of the 60s, and according to the principle of the overlapping of the generations, authors like Louis Aragon, Raymond Queneau and Jean-Paul Sartre occupied pride of place, while the representatives of the ‘New Novel’ began producing their first works: Michel Butor (La Modification, 1957), Alain Robbe-Grillet (La Jalousie, 1957), Nathalie Sarraute (L’Ere du soupçon, 1956), Jean Cayrol (Le Vent de la mémoire, 1951), Marguerite Duras (Moderato Cantabile, 1958), Claude Simon (Le Vent, 1957), Robert Pinget (Graal Filibuste, 1957), and Robbe-Grillet published his programmatic statement ‘A Way Ahead for the Novel of the Future ’.

As it is, the name of Robbe-Grillet is linked to the nouveau roman, a term designating a literary movement having no leader, review or manifesto, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Dedication
• Image
• 1. A Controversial Work
• 2. The Film’s Background
• 3. The Genesis of the Film
• 4. A Description of the Film
• 5. The Two ‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’
• 6. ‘L’Année dernière à Marienbad’ and the History of Cinema
• Notes
• Credits
• Bibliography
• eCopyright