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.

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.