Last Year at Marienbad

It is hard to speak of this film without using as my foundation the frustration it evoked in me. Whether it is something as simple as the husband (or presumed husband) winning every time he plays his proposed game, or something of a more cinematographic nature such as the strange use of time and setting jumps between shots during single conversations between characters, the frustration builds from one scene to the next. To be honest, in the initial stages of viewing the film I had all but written it off as excessively inaccessible and pretentious high-art – the kind of film that denies the viewer any solid or discernibly explicit information in order to create something whose meaning is ultimately lost, thus producing something nebulous and different altogether. For me, with obscure and abstract films like this, it is hit or miss – it is either pretentious or something pure and legitimate that has taken an obscure form for a reason. And that is the main thing I focus on – whether the abstraction or obscurity makes sense with respect to what it seems the film is tackling and not abstract simply because anything can be made abstract, and also whether it is done well.

With Last Year at Marienbad, despite my initial repulsion, I feel that the obscurity in fact works well in creating an accurate representation of the often distorted and selective nature of memory, which is an issue we spoke of in class, and one which I feel the film is predominantly focused on. It is intellectually abstracted, leaving hints here and there that there may be some linear plane upon which to place the events in order to create some sense of unity, but ultimately there is nothing concrete enough on which to base such an organization – much the same as the trouble one has in ordering every event and memory one’s own brain. A thing that interested me in this same vein was the manikin-like posture and behavior of the many minor characters filling the halls and rooms of the gigantic hotel – they often seem as if they have been suspended motionless outside of time, while the characters on whom we are focused move about freely. Again, this reflects an aspect of the nature of human memory – selectivity. We focus on the action on screen taking place between the major players of the story, while everything and everyone around them remains motionless and seemingly insignificant, at least as far as the characters are concerned. The interesting thing about this, however, is that, unlike in our memory, these motionless figures are not lost to invisibility or insignificance, but rather conspicuous and attention grabbing, which thus seems to place certain emphasis on the selectivity of human memory and the unreliability and imperfection it may imply –either unreliability and imperfection or certain self-absorption.