subscribeRape and Murder
by Nancy Cantwell
Last Year at Marienbad is first and foremost about persuasion. Can X (Giorgio Albertazzi) convince A (Delphine Seyrig) that indeed they had an affair last year, persuade her to abandon her husband and depart, forever his? Does he make his argument by supplanting her memory or by coercion? Is this love or conquest? The audience must decide if the premise of a brief encounter followed by a promise to return is real or imagined. The characters have no inner voice, no motivation and no history beyond the walls of the decadent facades of the hotel or the confines of the all too formal gardens upon which to base conclusions. Screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet states, “…it deals with a reality which the hero creates out of his own vision his own words. And if his persistence, his secret conviction, finally prevail, they do so among a perfect labyrinth of false trains, variants, failures and repetitions!”
Dark forces are at work and because of the deliberate non-linear dramatic structure one is drawn to make conclusions about the sub or unconscious at play. In Marienbad, false and true, past and present all conspire to conceal the present tense from X, A and M (Sasha Pitöeff). Where there are gaps, obscured regions of memory, does the mind fill in the void with fodder of its own, does the seducer implant a convenient past or as Robbe-Grillet suggests, “They are imaginings: an imagining, if it is vivid enough, is always in the present.”?
Imaginings of rape and murder drive Marienbad to its crescendo. Chanel dresses Delphine Seyrig, in a most spectacular feathered robe, for both ill fated scenarios. It is here that X is at the height of his construct. Murdered first, shot by her husband, A lies in a variety of melodramatic repose. Then, in an abrupt reversal of theory she is resurrected. X: “…No, this isn’t the right ending…I must have you alive…”. The motif of violation persists and next turns to ravishment. In the original script Robbe-Grillet calls for a “Rather swift and brutal rape scene.”, but Resnais was more inclined to shoot an implied altercation. A simply recoils in horror at the encroaching X, and, as imaginings are wont to do, our protagonist again retracts his savage conjecture . X: “No, no, no! (violently:) That’s wrong… (calmer:) It wasn’t by force…Remember…”.
Because the characters have no internal psychology there is a frustration as the viewer tries to determine whether the violence is a repressed memory or delusion. And our customary desire to cast moral judgment upon rape and murder is stunted by a constant shift in frame of reference. We are destabilized in the normal perception of violence, left with mere possibilities to comprehend. Neutralized, murder and rape become devices that reflect more upon themselves than act as offerings to help us decipher character motivation or plot outcome.
So intended Robbe-Grillet. His vision was based on the ability of a cinematic media whose “essential characteristic of the image is its present-ness.” Mareinbad gives us an opportunity to experience a cinema that “by its very nature, what we see on the screen is in the act of happening, we are given the gesture itself, not the account of it.” Our instinctual efforts to “try to reconstitute some Cartesian scheme” run into roadblocks and prevent us from coming to terms with a cinema of pure subjectivities. For Robbe-Grillet, ready made psychologies made for clumsy systems of interpretation which “machine made fiction or films grind out ad nauseam, and are the worst kind of abstractions.”
‘Because the characters have no internal psychology’…
I’m not sure at all that this is so, or that it can ever be so. Unless we were to assume the figures in this landscape were robots. Its useful to compare this film with Fasssbinder’s Chinese Roulette, in which the camera expresses the emotions the characters cannot. Resnais was to my mind a far less interesting director, because in fact (as the cashier critics would have it) the mise en scene was so literal.
I also dont think we have ‘instinctual’ efforts at anything cartesian…but maybe i dont understand that entire paragraph.
sorry, that was submitted before i could finish…..
to continue……
The film on the one hand is almost an arty inside joke about ‘havent we met before’…. a hermetically sealed mausoleum for bored rich people. In that sense it actually harkens back to the best noir adaptations of Chandler………the rich are emotionally dead, and live in houses devoid of life. However, unlike a fassbinder, or even Bresson (and this would lead one to discuss both roy andersson and chiat day) the blankness seems less about the interior psychology of the characters and more about the social restraints of class and its attendant repressions.
Like peter Greenway, there is an obsessive de contextualizing and a masturbatory fixation with the geometic movements of both camera and actor. Its the end of a modernism that came to be morbid by the time Greenway started practising it, while another branch of cinema took rather from the legacy of german expressionism and the camera used to express interior\being, and not obscure it.
in any event, one can see the resnais branch leading toward kubrick, while bresson and fassbinder and ozu lead to Killer of Sheep and Brando’s One eyed Jacks. Godard and the rest of the cahiers du Cinema group, were never on the same page with Resnais (watch Melville’s army of Shadows for example, a film that has aged far better than marienbad and resisted parody more successfully). Godard and Truffaut and Melville and rivette all took a filmic lesson from john ford and film noir….from wilder and val lewton. If Dryer and ozu and bresson were (per schrader) the great metaphysians of film, then resnais ended up seeming far more like his characters than he would have ever admitted. A detached observer of style, awake in a world that seems only an historical vacuum.
final thought……….look to India Song for, in my opinion, a more engaged meditation of lust and memory — but alive under the shadow of colonial destruction.
“Cartesian scheme” are Robbe-Grillet’s words and refer the the “explanations” that permit the viewer to locate each scene in its chronological place and at its level of objective reality. “- the most linear, the most rational he can devise-”. And I agree that the mise en scene in this particular film is incredibly literal, but thats the beauty of it. I also think that the characters have about as much psychology going on as the pieces in the games they play, pretty much the same way I don’t see any psychology in the Irving Penn Small Trades portraits…they are just pictures of people, not about persons. LYAM is so obsessed with messing with your sense of equilibrium that any attempt at real lust is subjugated to numbing dialog.
I look forward to India Song, but it looks like a hard one to track down with english subtitles. I can’t believe there is a Michael Lonsdale film out there I haven’t seen. Eminently exciting!