Floating Against the Indeterminacy of Recall

Reconciling Memory and History in Last Year at Marienbad

By Zach Campbell. Written for Spring 2005 Cinema Studies course, 'History/Memory/Authorship.'

The concepts of history and memory form a sparring pair which many people inevitably wish to reconcile. Last Year at Marienbad is a complex expression of this “duel,” an exemplary manifestation of the “dual” practices which calcify as words into our memory and our history. We may call the former personal (yet people speak of “collective memory”), and the latter social (yet there is the history of one person’s life). See?— is there any position from which he may say something definitive about these concepts and the social and neural effects? Last Year at Marienbad makes that very question one of its central concerns. And precisely because of the complexity which it engages, the film deals with these concepts on numerous levels.

Perhaps the first and overarching level is that of the difference between ‘history’ and ‘memory,’ and the possibilities of their relationship. Last Year at Marienbad enacts on a narrative level the prolific consequences of a lack of fixity in memory and history. The first consequence is confusion: a lack of determinacy.

The trompe-l’oeil is a device that arrests a viewer, stops her dead in her tracks, forces her to reconsider her vision. In Last Year at Marienbad Alain Resnais explores a similar phenomenon—which we might call trompe-la-mémoire, for it deals with memory in a similar way. It is not déjà-vu (‘Has this happened before?’), as in Chris Marker’s La Jetée. It instead asks, ‘Can I trust my memory?’ (Trompe-l’oeil: can I trust my sight?) Whereas in trompe-l’oeil the painted fly is always fake, and the viewer simply needs to stare for a moment longer to affirm this, in the trompe-la-mémoire of Last Year at Marienbad the truth of each slippery memory is impossible to determine. We could read memory in Last Year at Marienbad as being individual (‘This is what I recall of the past’) and history as being social (‘This is what we agree happened’). The crisis of the former spurs the impossibility of the latter. The character X tries desperately to convince A of their affair from the previous year, but both their recollections of the past, their memories, are mutable and malleable.

But since memories (perceptions) are malleable, so therefore are—as this film tells us —the physical realities which we perceive. (1) This has an impact on space. Thus, a character can turn around and Resnais will cut him or her into an entirely new space: new halls and walls and statues. (2) This also has an impact on time. The time spent at the resort in the film is unknown; it is flat (or flattened). Realistically the experience at Marienbad which we see “represented” lasts only 91 minutes, not “several days” condensed into 91 minutes. (3) And finally this has an impact on the narrative process, its sequence. Thus, X can narrate the A’s story, but when love turns to violence and a rape appears to result, he can say, troubled, “No, that is not the way it happened.” If he can write his memories, he can assert more power in writing the history of which he is part—particularly the private history which that he insists he and A share.

Gilles Deleuze writes: “Resnais conceived Last Year… like his other films, in the form of sheets or regions of past, while Robbe-Grillet sees time in the form of points of present. If Last Year… could be divided, the man X might be said to be closer to Resnais, and the woman A closer to Robbe-Grillet.” (1) This observation cuts to the heart of one of the film’s central conflicts, which is not only that history and memory are difficult to reconcile, but that there are different ways of approaching the problem of reconciliation itself. (As X tells A vis-à-vis the interpretation of the statue, “Both of our theories could be right.”) The ‘truth’ of memory, and the subsequent construction of history, are always working models, and their truth may be related to their function.

That assertion—if it is indeed what the film is asserting—has a firm basis of its own in authorial history. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet were cresting a modernist wave with this film, critical of not only form but social structures. It is not insignificant that they sets this story among the idle rich, the well-heeled, those who spend summers at Marienbad (or Frederiksbad, or Baden-Baden: taking the cure). The director behind Night and Fog, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Muriel, and La Guerre est finie would be unlikely to slip an apolitical feature film in the midst of these highly serious and political works. The solipsism of the leisured classes—the lack of politics, the quality of timelessness—becomes a kind of ‘absence signifier’ for the realities of the world from which they can afford to escape. And if the functionality—rather than the truthfulness—of history and memory is a tenet upon which the film rests, then this ties ever tighter bonds between the ostensibly apolitical Marienbad and the entirely political Night and Fog, for empowered groups are the very ones who can enact the gaps (in history and memory) which Resnais’ earlier film tried to expose and excavate.

Another problem that marks the film is the indeterminacy, or erasure, of its own formal and material memory, that is, the unacknowledged literary “source” by Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel. Thomas Beltzer presents this fact as evidence that he’s proved that the (modernist) emperor has no clothes, that it is a postmodernist work which shamefully “hides” its “low” fictional source in order to masquerade as a proper modernist opus. (2) But this perhaps insists on too clear and brutal a dichotomy between modernism and postmodernism vis-à-vis their respective engagements with low culture. Fredric Jameson suggests, for instance, that the major difference is instead that postmodern “materials … no longer simply "quote;" as a Joyce or a Mahler might have done, but incorporate into their very substance [low cultural forms].” (3)

This is to say that modernism is not a movement necessarily divorced from and shielded from popular culture and mass commercial art. For instance, Resnais’ 1968 film Je t’aime, je t’aime (a film Beltzer does not mention at all) is highly modernist artwork and at the same time highly, openly engaged with science fiction tropes, which one can say it “quotes” rather than “incorporates,” in the Jamesonian sense. The same could very well be said for Last Year at Marienbad, which takes a deliberate and critical view of so much of its components (spatiality, temporality): why not also the structure of narrative adaptation? (Beltzer’s argument—somewhat spurious to my eyes—seems founded primarily upon indignation at the injustice of Casares’ lack of historical significance next to figures like Resnais—or Borges; so he presumes that since Marienbad did not obviate its literary inspiration, it did so out of Eurocentric spite and thus inevitably suffers as a film.) An enlightened viewer insists to the film: “You took this from Casares’ story.” (“We met last year at Marienbad.”) The film, like A, replies with some uncertainty: “No, no. …” How much of a story can one “adapt” from prose literature to cinema? (Perhaps a story is “adapted” only in a marketing sense. Only when its name—and the names of its characters, places, arcs—are invoked, and paid for?) It seems that in a certain way, a fence is straddled, and Last Year at Marienbad does and does not adapt Casares’ The Invention of Morel. And this is in keeping with the indeterminacy of history. The ‘truth’ of Casares’ story’s impact on the film is one thing, but the political import of deciding which “side” to take really involves functionality. Those who might sympathize with Beltzer are going to insist on an intertextual methodology; others will find that the source story has little to bear upon the Resnais/Robbe-Grillet object itself, and focus on it in an intratextual way. The interpretation of unfixed signs is precisely the activity in which A, M, and X are engaged in Last Year at Marienbad.

The film opens with a “floating” shot as the camera tracks (and cuts) through the rooms and halls of a mansion for several minutes. This is an appropriate introductory flourish, as it immerses the viewer in the rootless, ungrounded, myopic, labyrinthine structures in which the characters themselves are trapped. With every physical place changeable with a cut, with time (last year, this year) collapsed in a continuum, with every spoken word taken back by another verbal renunciation, the possibility of singular ‘truth’ wanes, and the possibility of multiple ‘truths’ increases. The raw material of memory can be “sculpted,” and thus the agreement on what happened in the past can become a game of rhetoric, of persuasion. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet are ambivalent about this resultant malleability. It might be at once liberating and oppressive. This is the dilemma, still unsolved, that marks the core of Last Year at Marienbad. History and memory are conflicted sites—battlegrounds—and the questions of certainty and correctness (not to mention responsibility and ethics) are still unresolved in the physical world as in the world of time and images.

Footnotes

1) Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 104.

2) Beltzer, Thomas. “Last Year at Marienbad: An Intertextual Meditation.” Senses of Cinema. . Accessed March 18, 2005.

3) Jameson, Fredric. “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991. 3.