'Marienbad' Revisited

by Walter W. Kirsch, Jr.

About ten-thirty one night not long ago, an aspiring film critic fresh from a retro-screening leaned across a crowded café booth in the Montparnasse quarter of Paris and blurted: "`Marienbad' is like sitting at an elegantly set table where nothing is ever served."

I admired the remark, but disagreed with it. For although the 1961 film "Last Year at Marienbad" (L'Année Derničre ŕ Marienbad), a French-Italian production directed by Alain Resnais with text by Alain Robbe-Grillet, does not provide much rationally linear nourishment, it does offer an abundance of food for the senses.

Realized on the screen as a tableau vivant of dazzling, often disjointed images and haunting dialogue that defy the viewer's idea of logical storytelling while appealing purely to the senses, `Marienbad' is not the product of a director's whimsy out of control, but rather the result of a carefully crafted, richly detailed screenplay from one of France's foremost novelists.

The film's story line, as it exists, concerns three characters: two men, "X" (Giorgio Albertazzi) and "M" (Sacha Pitoeff), and a woman "A" (Delphine Seyrig), who is M's wife or mistress. The three, according to their dress, are contemporaries of the 1960's who are staying (or existing) at a Baroque palace/hotel amidst a group of formally dressed guests. From the time X meets the mysteriously attractive A, he tries to convince her that they had met last year and that she promised to go away with him in one year's time. Throughout the film she resists this idea, claiming no memory of it. He insists and persists, trying to convince her. Despite M's solicitous possessiveness, A finally, resigns herself to X's relentless claims and leaves with him.

In the script, Robbe-Grillet deals with the concepts of reality and time. The reconstruction of reality or the fabrication of fantasy through the inconsistencies of memory and time are examined and explored from an aesthetic, rather than clinical standpoint. Is X telling the truth, or is he projecting his own desires? Has A forgotten her commitment or did she ever make one? Perhaps this never happened at all. Since the author blurs all distinctions of time, perhaps he is imagining a future event which might never happen.

In `Marienbad,' Robbe-Grillet treats time as a flat, planar element, not a linear one. Past, present and future are of equal scale occupying the same space -- a novel concept for a French writer whose native language has eight past, four future and four present tenses. With the concept of time, Robbe-Grillet is a deconstructivist smashing the temporal elements into fragments for Resnais to reconstruct into the cinematic present tense of ninety-three minutes.

In addition to the three main characters in his screenplay, Robbe-Grillet assigns principal status to two unlikely participants, the camera and the palace itself. Throughout the third-person narrative, active roles shift back and forth from the characters to the camera, the latter being part of the action as well as recording it:

"The camera having circled, as for the preceding groups (but quite rapidly), the frozen characters, returns quite naturally to the gallery seen at the beginning of the film and starts following it. . .

She is reading a small hard-cover book. The camera slowly approaches her from in front." 1

In addition to the camera as participant, Robbe-Grillet casts the sumptuous, but somberly suffocating palace/ hotel as a principal protagonist (read antagonist) within whose all-embracing walls, sterile gardens and mazes the film takes place. Instead of merely providing an ornate background, the architecture and furnishings of the palace become inter-active participants in the action, integrally woven into each scene.

Conversely, Robbe-Grillet reduces the roles of the other actors and extras to mere window dressing, not allowing them any direct participation in the film or with the three principal characters. Whatever dialogue these other actors deliver in partially realized vignettes is fragmented, oblique and irrelevant. To the author and his principal actors, the others are beyond the parameters of psychological cognizance.

The major on-screen voice in the film is provided by X. In X's voice-over description that begins the film, Robbe-Grillet demonstrates an impeccable ear for poetic narrative:

"Once again - I walk on, once again, down these corridors, through these halls, these galleries, in this structure -- of another century, this enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel -- where corridors succeed endless corridors -- silent deserted corridors....." 2

The running of long lines of adjectives and nouns punctuated by commas and the repetition of certain words and phrases establishes an aural rhythm that accompanies the visual pattern throughout the film.

Particularly effective in the above passage is the repetition of "corridor" three times within seven words. The French word for corridor, "couloir," which is found in the film has an even more concise, poetic quality.

Later, X's monotone narrative continues the rhythm:

"Empty salons, corridors, salons, doors. Doors. Salons.
Empty chairs.... 3

Finally, X's voice closes the film with:

".....where you were now already getting lost, forever, in the calm night, alone with me. 4

The English translation by Richard Howard preserves much of Robbe-Grillet's poetic intentions. However, the frequent accenting of the next-to-last pronounceable syllable in a word endows the original version with its own mysterious cadence, combining spondees and half spondees contrapuntally against iambic, trochaic and anapestic feet.

Poetic qualities can be found elsewhere either in the dialogue spoken by the main characters or in the snippets of non-sequiturs from the background cast:

X: ......but we kept meeting each other at each turn in the path behind each bush -- at the foot of each statue -- at the rim of every pond.... 5

X: Always walls, always corridors, always doors -- and on the other side, still more
walls. 6

And

M (sad, dreamy): Where are you...my lost love...

A (uncertain): Here...I'm here...I'm with you, in this room. 7

For the rest of the cast, Robbe-Grillet instructs:

"The music has gradually faded and here and there a word can be heard emerging from a chance phrase, such as: ... "unbelievable" ... "murder" .... "actor" .... "lying" ... "had to" ..."you're not" ... "it was a long time ago"... "tomorrow." 8

Or,

"Snatches of phrases are heard, their sources unrevealed: "...Really, that seems incredible...." "..." We've already met, long ago..." "... I don't remember very well. It must have been in '28 or '29..." 9

With few exceptions, the screenplay is so descriptively complete that it is likely any competent director could make a film from it. What is unlikely is that anyone other than Alan Resnais could have made `Marienbad' just this way.

In his introduction preceding the text, Robbe-Grillet points out that he and Resnais collaborated from the outset, but due to other commitments, the writer was not present during filming.

Despite his physical absence, Robbe-Grillet opens a dialogue with the director within the script by sharing with him some points the writer had not totally resolved. As in:

"Unless the director has other ideas for enlivening this somber sequence, it might be embellished...." 10

(Resnais decided in this particular instance to drop the proposed scenes altogether from the sequence and completely revise those scenes that immediately follow, resulting in a more rhythmic, visually striking passage.)

Comparing the script to the finished film reveals that Resnais faithfully augmented the writer's intended poetic rhythm through sound effects, camera movement and his highly-stylized direction of the actors. In the few instances where Resnais did make substitutions, additions or deletions, they are of minor consequence to the author's intentions.

One area where Resnais did make liberal substitutions was in the music. Where the author calls for a noisy orchestra, the director provides a lone organ moaning in a minor key. The one major exception -- and perceived mistake -- is in Resnais' following Robbe-Grillet's suggestions for opening the film:

"Opening with a romantic, passionate, violent burst of music, the kind used at the end of films with powerfully emotional climaxes (a large orchestra of strings, woodwinds, brasses, etc." 11

Perhaps Robbe-Grillet intended this opening salvo to provide a jarring counterpoint to the deliberate, haunting rhythm that follows. However, it proves more distracting than dramatic. Ironically, the once-contemporary nature of the music and the inappropriate, accompanying graphics in the opening credits are the only elements that date this otherwise timeless work.

For the rest of the music, Resnais' decisions may have been financially motivated. Yet, the economy of a lone instrument wherever possible enhances the film. In one particular sequence, the script calls for an orchestra of "classical" instruments to be playing on a stage. Instead, Resnais effectively provides only a violinist and a violist silently bowing their instruments to the rhythm of organ music that plays over the soundtrack. It seems clear that a feeling for music is much more in the director's domain (assisted by Francis Seyrig) than the writer's, as Resnais displays a sensitivity for the organ, much as Ingmar Bergman does for the cello.

Despite the prevalence of detail in the script, the author offers very little information as to how the characters are dressed. Robbe-Grillet simply states at the beginning that:

"......many men in evening clothes, and a few women, also very elegantly dressed." 12

In the final sequence, the writer reveals that A and X are wearing elegant travel habits. 13

Over the course of the film, however, X and A continuously appear in different outfits: he, in either formal clothes or a business suit; she, in one of three different evening dresses.

At times, the actors' clothing changes within the same sequence or even the same scene. With this technique, Resnais reinforces aspects of the theme by blurring distinctions between past, present and future, reality and fantasy and the properties of memory.

In the final sequence, Resnais deletes a presumably redundant scene which has M returning to his room. Also eliminated are A rising at the first chime of midnight and the clock striking twelve chimes for a second time at five minutes past twelve o'clock, as Robbe-Grillet had written.

Resnais apparently decided to leave out certain scenes from the screenplay. One of these called for A to stand at a table and slowly rearrange fallen flower petals in the form of the film's famous match game (rows of seven, five, three and one) played indefatigably by X and M, while she is approached by an off screen X, whose imminent presence is signaled by footsteps crunching gravel. Since the men are contestants (for her), it may have seemed odd that she would be involved with the game in this way. Instead, Resnais has her mounting an ornate Baroque staircase in a long dress, her back to the camera as in a Watteau painting. As her feet sink deeply into the thickly carpeted treads, the sound of X's rock-crunching footsteps can be heard in unison as the sequence ends.

In his interpretation of Robbe-Grillet's script, Resnais seemingly took greater exception to suggestions for sound and image than for word and image. Nevertheless, it is through Resnais' own personal images, derived from his expert direction, camera work and editing that this script is realized as the important work it was intended to be.

There is some indication that a key influence for `Marienbad' may have come from the playwright Henrik Ibsen. This is particularly evident in the similarity of circumstances surrounding the mysterious relationship between X and A and that of Halvard Solness and Hilda in Ibsen's "The Master Builder." In the play, Hilda insists that she and Solness had met exactly ten years earlier and they had agreed to meet again on the present day. Solness, like A, refuses or is unable to recall the event despite Hilda's numerous attempts to convince him. Discussing the play in his definitive biography Ibsen, Michael Meyer states: "There is a close analogy with the film, "Last Year in [sic] Marienbad," in which a similar situation occurs; and in both instances, part of the fascination lies in the fact that neither the people involved, nor we, ever know the truth." 14

Further, in concluding his initial description of the interior of the palace/hotel, Robbe-Grillet notes: "Lastly, a theater poster (also framed) for a play with foreign, meaningless title, the rest of the poster illegible except perhaps for a line in larger letters: Tonight only . . . " 15 Apparently acting in a spirit of mutual discernment, Resnais, during the author's aforementioned absence from filming, chose to title the play on the poster, "Rosmer," presumably as a tribute to Ibsen's troubling, psychological drama, "Rosmersholm."

Seeing `Marienbad' more than thirty years after its initial release, it is possible -- and intriguing -- to perceive this film on a different level as well as to identify some additional influences such as: Manet, Proust, Freud, Jung, Einstein, Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy, di Chirico, Breton, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Éluard and Sartre, to name a few.

Why not Rabelais and Moličre, as well? For in France, a profound sense of the absurd is a natural trait, and satire a national treasure. At the time `Marienbad' was made, many films -- especially European films -- were allegorical and self-consciously full of partially hidden, double meanings. To have tantalized linear-oriented viewers with a chance to identify X as the "angel of death" might have proven too great a temptation.

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Endnotes:

1 Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year at Marienbad, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1962), p.60.

2 Ibid., p.18.

3 Ibid., p.58.

4. Ibid., p.165.

5 Ibid., pp.82, 101.

6 Ibid., p.102.

7 Ibid., p.157.

8 Ibid., p.29.

9. Ibid., p.32.

10. Ibid., p.70.

11. Ibid., p.17.

12. Ibid., p.22.

13. Ibid., pp. 160, 162.

14. Michael Meyer, Ibsen, (New York: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 1971), p. 699.

15. Ibid., p.20.

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