Of course, at that time whether one was in a cultural backwater like Miami or in New York City, French films defined the territory. The up-dated Louise Brooks look was in, everyone who aspired to intellectualism of any kind wore black and was learning French. Of our generation I suppose the embodiment of female intellectual was Susan Sontag (a closet lesbian). She defined the formula for how to write about art and culture for decades. Her projected persona was a total turn on with that white streak in her free flowing black hair and her black leather jacket dropping idiomatic French she was riveting--a role model for many young women writers and artists.
I suppose in my last post the thing that I liked best about the Korean film poetry was the directors attempt to create cinema not entertainment.
In choosing to review Alain Resnais' 1961 film I put myself in a critical frame of mind. What is me was the play of memory and how arbitrary it is in retrospect. When I thought about going to the Museum of the moving image which by the way, is spectacular for those of you who haven't seen it, and made the journey to Queens, I hesitated because I remembered it as being terribly long, tedious and boring. Of course I was 18, so did not have the film experience or life experienced truly appreciate the film for what it is in a word, is a masterpiece.
The cinematography remains strikingly visual and aesthetically supeior. What help me appreciate the film more fully was Voelker Schlondorff's video memory of it, which was shown in conjunction with Resnais' film. L'Annee Derniere A Marienbad requires patience and a commitment to see the film through. It is about prismatic thinking and the filmmakers ability to create a continuity. This is a collaboration that is complex. Requiring incredible skills and teamwork. Written by the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet,photographed by the extraordinary Sasha Vierney and edited by Jasmine Chasney and Henri Colpi . It is a tour de force of the creative imagination. A kind of psychological game puzzle that is never fully unraveled, which is what makes it so fascinating. We never know exactly whose point of view this is really taking place from. It is supposed to be about eight constant lover who has made a promise to a woman he met at Marienbad a year ago that he would wait for her to make up her mind to leave her husband and go away with him. However, we are never sure that this actually happened or if it is all in his imagination when he sees this woman. In the film. All of this action is projected on the magnificent actress Delphine Seyrig. She is a kind of human screen upon which all of these men project their desire.
For the director of the film she is a combination of Gloria Swanson, Louise Brooks, and herself (a lesbian) as seen by Resnais through his film -addicted I-eye and love of silent films. For the writer it is a matter of imagining the it's your object of desire and for the cinematographer. It is the challenge of creating a visual narrative that complements the text.
For the actors. It is a matter of making themselves into whatever the director chooses for them to be.
And for the writer trying to come to terms with the limitations of what he has imagined and what can be shown through other media. When we add to this mix the spectator and his/her impressions we have the stuff that makes for cinema rather than entertainment. We are forced to think about the exterior picture in the interior monologue going on in the characters mind. What we visualize and what is actually there and how we remember it.
For me, this film holds up much better than many others of the period. This being said, I didn't like Renais' last film because for me it was too sentimental and smacked of a certain kind of the nostalgia that was not engaging. This may be a function of age is the director is 80 and coming to the end of the road that he like many of us has traveled for so long. It is a matter of summing up and taking the long view on our journeys and where they have taken us.
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