Alain Resnais
L'anno Scorso A Marienbad

Alain Resnais - Last Year at Marienbad (1961)

This movie is a non-film, perhaps more akin to a hallucinatory videoclip avant la lettre, given its antiquity. It resembles more closely a long stream of consciousness on silver nitrate without continuity. Born from the collaboration with screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet and winner of the Golden Lion in Venice in 1961, this elliptical and enigmatic movie like a UFO, from film reel became VHS and finally a DVD and continues to wander in the market and on some private or satellite TV, both loved and hated: the plot is replaced by a moment in the life of the protagonist, the then young actor Giorgio Albertazzi, the pretext being the meeting with a woman he had met a year before in the noble palace near the Marienbad spa. The woman, married to a certain Mr. X, is tempted by the protagonist to run away with him, as she had promised him exactly one year ago, in Marienbad. A narrator's voice, that of Albertazzi, intervenes with encyclopedic and hallucinated descriptions of the Atlas palace, memories, and ghosts. Masterpiece of filmic oneirism, an editing so meticulous and at the same time idiosyncratic as to seem the prototype of the anti-film; here editing is the meaning, more than the plot. Resnais, like many filmmakers of the nouvelle vague era, is obsessed with identity, self-knowledge, and especially with the effects of time and memory on others and on ourselves. The cinematography in the film is an incoherent and supernatural black and white like the human mind which colors the already lived scenes in a chameleon-like manner.

Indeed, here in Marienbad, the real subject is the human mind, the screenplay is a relentless whirlwind of conscious and subconscious images, the drama is the emotional tide these flashes generate: present, past, fantasy reality, are erased and recomposed not as a game, but in the certainty that this is the only honest way to represent the flow of perceptions, and the camera stylo the eye that describes them. If the imagination is vivid enough we have a new present of revisited memories, distant places, space-time expansions—think of the film's very long corridors— that each person carries in their own head and which, over time, constitute a long endless film in each of our minds, which we sometimes become aware of: in the simultaneity of fragments of current experience thus flow fragments of past, present, and even future: this is a bit the message of Marienbad and its personal obsession, almost an Augustinian search for the source of time, of an alchemical egg, of a philosophical secret with which to change the presents and futures. The material world can be understood and transformed by the mind under the impulse of desire, fear, regret, and other strong emotions; and not by a single mind, perhaps by three, perhaps by the very camera, the film seems to suggest. The alchemy will succeed for the protagonist, who in the end will manage to take the diaphanous Delphine Seyrig towards another future.

If today it were put back on the program in theaters, you wouldn't have the problem of seeing it from the beginning, from the middle, from the end, you could stay there for hours and hours, take a break and chat a bit with some usher if they weren't extinct or almost.