Friday, April 29, 2016

Last Year at Marienbad (1961)



My girlfriend recommended this one to me. Its director, Alain Resnais is known for Hiroshima, Mon Amour, and equally surreal and lyrical film.  As soon as I began watching Last Year at Marienbad I was surprised I had never explored Resnais' filmography any further.  It immediately reminded me of the experimental cinema of Maya Deren and early Luis Buñuel.

The disembodied narrator's constant voice-over is consistent with Resnais' style in Hiroshima, Mon Amour.  Additionally the disjointed love story and dark themes the film plays on are also similar to Hiroshima, Mon Amour.  Still, Last Year at Marienbad betrays some delightful eccentricities  that make it equally as brilliant.

The motion of the camera gives the film a hallucinatory, dream-like appearance.  One shot is filmed through a mirror with an ornate frame, further disorienting the viewer and separating the film from realism.

The whirling organ soundtrack contributes a creepiness that makes it all the more unsettling.Perhaps not intentional, but the version that I saw had an illusion of the camera moving slightly side to side during the more stationary shots.  It was probably a glitch in the transfer, but still, it added to the hallucinatory feel of the whole experience.

The themes of apparent secrecy and decadence of the setting remind me of the 70s art-porn film Behind the Green Door (1972), Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and the party/dream sequences in the "A, B and C" episode of Patrick McGoohan's television series the Prisoner.  It looks as though this film may have had more wide ranging influence on later film makers than I had previously known about.

Trailer:


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