Monday, April 30, 2012
"She's a force of nature that results in cataclysms."
In countless interviews, several excerpted on The Criterion Collection two-disc edition DVD of Jules and Jim, François Truffaut repeatedly admits that what attracted him to the story in Henri-Pierre Roché's semi-autobiographical novel lay in the concept of a love triangle where a film portrayed neither man involved as better than the other. He tells the interviewer questioning him at any given time that intrigued him because the cinematic tradition always paints one of the suitors as inferior. The film critic turned director certainly succeeded with his third feature film, aided immensely by those he cast as the triangle: Oskar Werner (his first name spelled as Oscar in the credits) as the Austrian Jules, Henri Serre as the French Jim and, most indelibly, the intoxicating Jeanne Moreau as Catherine, the French-English object of the title characters' affections. What wows you about Jeanne Moreau's performance though is that for all the brash acts that Catherine commits, Moreau doesn't play Catherine as a stereotypical nut. That "calm smile" referred to that relates Catherine to that statue exists in her performance most of the time as well. When you try to think of new ways to describe her work, it doesn't help when her director used to be a film critic and gave a great summary of it in a 1965 interview: "Jeanne Moreau's acting was like a slalom run against all the possible clichés. I left her free like the other actors to do as she saw fit." Man, I wish I'd written that. It wasn't enough that he made an all-time great film, he has to come up with better review lines as well?
Things move fairly swiftly once Moreau's Catherine enters the picture even though the film does cover a great expanse of time almost from the moment she appears. After the dinner, the narrator informs us that Jules more or less vanishes for a month, spending every day with Catherine, only encountering Jim at the gym. In a steam room meeting, Jules finally invites Jim to hang out with him and Catherine and as the two head up to see her, Jules admits that she inquires about Jim quite often, wondering what he's like. Despite the fact that Jim has been nothing if not generous to Jules when it comes to women, Jules makes a point of stopping him before they go in to meet her and says the line that originally made the film speak so personally to me, "But
not this one, Jim. OK?" I almost spoke those exact words to someone, not that it mattered, and my antennae proved to be tuned correctly to pick up that signal far in advance of my real-life story (of which you will receive no further details). Upon that first "real" meeting, Catherine seems eager to join the boys' club, losing her dress to put on the costume of a man who Jules calls Thomas. She wants to see if she can fool others out on the street so the three depart and, sure enough, before too long a man asks "Thomas" for a light. For many, it would be easy to leap to a feminist interpretation of this scene, seeing it as Catherine's bid to be treated as a man's equal back in 1912 and to be judged by the same rules, but once you've seen Jules and Jim in its totality, that conclusion doesn't quite ring true. Catherine (a) doesn't get judged by anyone within the film and (b) operates under her own set of rules, unique to her and her alone. As the trio continues to wander, "Thomas" thinks that a bridge offers a great spot for a footrace and challenges Jules and Jim. She makes her first mention of rain or water, as Catherine also frequently bring associations with fire. Truly, the woman represents an elemental force (or a James Taylor song). To watch the clip of the race, I suggest going full screen because the image plays very tiny. YouTube offers other clips of the scene but so many of them lack subtitles, I thought it best to go with this one.In that clip, though we'd earlier seen Jules express a mild fear that Jim could woo Catherine from him, we see that it doesn't matter much what Jules or Jim wants — the great friendship has become a threesome and Catherine controls what the group does, immediately deciding that all three will be departing for the shore the next day and selecting Jim to help her get her bags to the train station. (It's also telling that she not only proposes the foot race, but she cheats in it to win as well.) The clip cuts off before we get a few more important lines courtesy of our omniscient narrator who says, "Jim considered her to be Jules' and didn't try to form a clear picture of her. Catherine once again wore that calm smile. It came naturally to her and expressed everything about her."
When Jim shows up at Catherine's apartment, she hasn't completed packing yet and still wears her flowing white nightgown, telling Jim she must put her dress on. Catherine chastises him immediately for not following the superstition and placing his hay on the bed. "Never put a hat on a bed," she chides. First, other things need taking care of before they depart. She dumps a pile of crumpled papers onto the floor from a porcelain bowl and requests a match from Jim who complies and asks what she's doing. "Burning these lies," she tells him. It's not stated explicitly, but I've read references that identify the papers as love letters but doesn't identify either the author or recipient. The pile quickly turns into a tall blaze that leaps on Catherine's nightgown, but Jim leaps to extinguish the flames rapidly. We had the first reference from Catherine to rain, now we have her first connection to fire. She goes behind her
changing screen and asks Jim to hand her the dress hanging on the wall by her bed. When changed, Catherine realizes that she almost forgot to add a bottle to her suitcase. Jim inquires what liquid it contains. "Sulfuric acid, for the eyes of men who tell lies," Catherine explains. Jim warns her that the bottle could break in transit and end up burning through her things. Besides, she can get sulfuric acid anywhere. Reluctantly, she empties the bottle down the sink. "But I promised I would only use this bottle," she tells him as he gathers her luggage. She places hit hat back atop his head and affixes her own to hers and they head off for the train station to join Jules. I can't say with any sense of certainty how many times in the past 25 years I've watched Jules and Jim, but each time I notice something new or view a scene in a new light and that's a trait common to many of the greatest cinematic gifts we've been handed. For instance, I don't recall observing the large number of locomotives, actual, figurative or near where trains run. We've seen Thérèse show off her "steam engine" skills and heard the sounds of a train nearby before Catherine selects the bridge beneath the track for the foot race. We see obvious stock footage of a train rolling by the countryside. Once again, Michel Subor describes the journey to us. "They searched up and down the coast before finding the house of their dreams. Though too big, it was isolated, imposing, white inside and out, and empty."That describes the house but none of those adjectives remotely apply to the movie itself. Many of the greatest films often include a magical ingredient that no matter how many times you've watched them, you forget the exact order in which scenes come. Usually though, that only applies to films that don't follow standard chronological order (the most famous and obvious example being Orson Welles'
Citizen Kane), but somehow Truffaut accomplished that trick in Jules and Jim as well and its narrative follows a straight line and contains nary a flashback. I think any movie that can pull that off should be considered a film critic's best friend since it stamps out any risk of slipping into synopsis. As I prepared for this tribute, taking my notes and marveling at the available YouTube clips, part of me wanted to make sure that I wasn't showing scenes out of order, forcing me to check my chronology again and again. Finally, there came a point where I said, "What the hell am I doing?" First off, I want people to watch Jules and Jim. Secondly, while I'd love to show all these great scenes and repeat the memorable lines, I'd much rather readers discover them for themselves (or be reminded again if they choose to pay a return visit to the film). To give you the briefest update of what occurs after the three settle in at the house, Jules almost immediately asks Jim if he thinks he should propose to Catherine. Jim expresses skepticism, wondering if Jules pictures Catherine as a wife and mother. "I'm afraid she'll never be happy on this earth," Jules responds. He goes ahead and pops the question to Catherine anyway, telling her that if she doesn't answer, he'll ask her again every year on her birthday. "You haven't known many women, I've known lots of men. It balances out. We might make an honest couple," Catherine replies. It isn't exactly a yes or a no, but eventually they do wed. Soon though, The Great War intervenes to separate all three of them.
The war and post-war sections interested me the most in this viewing with the intercutting of stock footage (which isn't actual World War I footage, since there wasn't a lot of filming in that conflict so Truffaut had to use clips from re-creations of the fighting from old films)
with scenes of Jules and Jim — fighting on opposite sides — worrying about accidentally killing the other during a battle. It's with relief that Jules writes Catherine that he's being transferred to the Russian front which he figures makes it less likely he'll face his friend in battle. Everyone returns from the war safely. Jim spends some time visiting some war memorials and cemeteries before eventually reuniting with Jules and Catherine, who have added a third — their young daughter Sabine (Sabine Haudepin, who still acts to this day, mostly on French television, and appeared in one of Truffaut's final films, The Last Metro). Jules confides that his home isn't as happy as it appears, though he has accepted Catherine's frequent infidelities. He just fears the thought that she'll leave sometime and not return. Jim assures him that she'll always come back to Jules because she loves his "Buddhist monk quality." However, the war has changed Jim and it's easy to tell it's more difficult for him to maintain his distance from Catherine for the sake of his friend. One of the more interesting post-war sequences occurs when Jules and Jim chat about the experience of war, joined by Albert (Serge Rezvani/Boris Bassiak), who has been one of Catherine's recurring lovers.Jules and Jim provides so many points of entry, so many possible paths for discussion, that you could choose a topic a day and keep busy for quite some time. That's partially why it's taken me so long to complete this piece. The rest of the blame falls on illness and the calendar. Honestly, if I could put myself into a self-induced coma for the last couple of weeks of April each year, I would. One final clip I'd like to share (which again works better if you watch it full screen) doesn't have as much importance plotwise as it does in terms of filmmaking and one of Truffaut's trademarks.
On the Dec. 2, 1965, episode of the French television program Cinéastes de notre temps titled "François Truffaut ou L'esprit critique," Truffaut spoke at length on the topic of freeze frames and this particular use. He pointed out that in part the scene poked fun at Moreau's previous roles in films such as Antonioni's La Notte that tended to be deadly serious. However, the process isn't as easy as one might think.
"It was hard freezing her expressions there. In the editing room, it looked very sharp and nice so I did it elsewhere in the film, but it can quickly get to be a habit. I stopped doing it after a few films. I stopped using it as a visual effect. Now I use freeze frames only for dramatic effect. They're interesting providing viewers don't notice. You sense them, but an image is only perceptible — it takes eight frames for a shot to register. Fewer than eight frames and it's virtually unreadable, unless it's a tight close-up."
One thing I've noticed while comparing the various YouTube clips (when they actually have subtitles) and the Criterion version of those scenes is how frequently translations differ, For example, in the clip above when Catherine asks for someone to scratch her back, Jules replies, "Scratch and Heaven'll scratch you." On the Criterion translation, his response reads much better and, I imagine, more accurately, "Heaven scratches those who scratch themselves."
I keep thinking back to the comment François Truffaut made in 1977 about being "too young" when he made Jules and Jim. If he'd made it at any other age, it wouldn't be the same movie and probably wouldn't hold the same appeal for so many. Granted, critics of an older age appreciated and praised the film at its release, but for Jules and Jim to grab you, really grab you, and maintain that grip over the years, I think you need to be young when you see it the first time, and that's why Truffaut, not yet 30 but captivated by the novel since 25, had to be young as well. I found this clip on YouTube and knew I had to include it. It's the great actor John Hurt extolling the virtues of Jules and Jim and what an impression it made on him. He was 22 when it opened.
As for Truffaut himself, I don't know what attracts me to him as a filmmaker so much. The obvious answer would be the critic-turned-filmmaker aspect, but it's not as if he stands as the only film critic who made that leap and I certainly don't carry affection for the others as I do him. I'm very mixed on Godard and think Peter Bogdanovich made a single masterpiece. It might be that he seems as if he's the heir to Jean Renoir. On the other hand, my list of favorite filmmakers runs on awhile and few resemble the others exactly. I did think of one connection to another director that I never would have thought of before when watching Jules and Jim this time (or more specifically its extras). As Truffaut time and time again referenced his love of literature and film and why he felt the need to include as much of the novel's prose in the form of narration as he could, that may mark the first time I connected Truffaut to Scorsese, specifically with his wondrous adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, where Joanne Woodward served the Michel Subor role.
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Labels: 60s, Antonioni, Bogdanovich, Criticism, Foreign, Godard, John Hurt, Movie Tributes, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Scorsese, Truffaut, Welles
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Tuesday, March 13, 2012
There are things in that paper which nobody knows but me, or ever will
By Kevin J. Olson
Through a Glass Darkly is interesting if for no other reason than Bergman didn’t seem to really care for it all. One could chalk it up to the usual case of the artist’s self-deprecation, but when reading his book Images: My Life in Film you understand that Bergman had a different film in mind before he shot Through a Glass Darkly, and the result — which is certainly one of the most seminal foreign films of the ‘60s — was not to his liking. I think Bergman is too hard on himself and critiquing the movie he had in his head instead of the one he actually filmed. What’s important about this film, aside from helping Americans ingratiate themselves into the foreign film world (along with Fellini and Antonioni), is that it marks a shift in tone for the auteur. With Through a Glass Darkly, Bergman worked out the kinks and used its aesthetic and its themes as a catalyst for what would be the Bergman tableau that everyone recognizes today.
Sparse seems the appropriate way to describe the film — Bergman himself declared the film a “chamber film” with its use of only four actors, minimal sets and essentially no music apart from the occasional chord of Bach’s “Sarabande from Suite No. 2 in D minor” (which is used effectively). Bergman and frequent collaborator Sven Nykvist use the film as a kind of practice round to establish the kind of aesthetic they would become known for, especially in terms of close-ups and two-shots that have an eerie way of simultaneously having the effect the shot is supposed to have but also being able to show the distance between two characters or a character and inner turmoil.
This is a “chamber film” due to its simplicity. It doesn't establish where or even who these characters are; they simply emerge from the waters, hand-in-hand, in the film's opening shot. The characters are a family that consists of Karin (Harriet Andersson), her husband Martin (Max von Sydow), her somewhat estranged father David (Gunnar Bjornstrand) and her brother Minus (Lars Passgard). The family is vacationing somewhere off the Swedish coast, and it is here that I will stop for a moment to recognize the film’s setting. There’s an opaque beauty to the location and sets (the broken-down ship being my favorite set piece). Nykvist always was a master at shooting anything anywhere, but these characters inhabit a real sense of place here. The film’s location actually was Fårö, which would be the setting for future Bergman pictures and, eventually, his home. The austerity of the island — its remoteness — seems an apt place for the director to call home.
Back to the plot: The film's events take place over 24 hours as we learn about Karin in the opening scenes as she walks along the shore with her brother. Karin has been released recently from a mental hospital where we find out that she endured electroshock therapy. While on the island, the family celebrates David’s birthday during his visit before he must run off again. Running off to do other things is somewhat of a habit for David, and we soon learn that he always was distant with Karin and her mother — and apparently Minus, who tells Karin that all he wants is to be able to talk to his father — and that he really is using this time on the island with his mentally unstable daughter to overcome a bad case of writer’s block. Disgusted by this, Martin confronts David who confesses his intention of exploiting his daughter’s illness. One night, Karin hears a distant foghorn and follows it up to the attic. As she stands in the middle of the attic, she begins to hear things that cause her to collapse; it’s the voice of God — and it’s coming from behind the wallpaper. And so it goes for Karin as she slowly devolves before she finally gives up and admits to Martin and her father that she can’t go on living between two realities.
The film has an eerie light to it — most everything happens during daylight adding to this effect — and it reminded me of what Roger Ebert says in his “Great Movies” review where he likens Nykvist’s lighting to being “another character,” and that you could “freeze almost any frame of this film and be looking at a striking still photograph” that mirrors the disconnect and unreliability of what our heroine sees and hears. Even when characters talk in close-up, something still is visible just enough in the background that is canted or split or decaying (my favorite set piece being the ship Karin finds herself retreating to near the end of the film; it’s one of the most perfect set pieces in all of Bergman’s films). It’s a perfect example of how Bergman and Nykvist were masters of stark mise-en-scene; despite its seemingly simplistic aesthetic, there’s something profound in every shot.
Sound is used to great effect in the film: the sound of rocks being walked upon, water breaking against the shore and, most significantly, of the foghorn that beckons Karin to the wallpaper where she begins to wait for something — a god or God — to emerge from the walls. I love the scene where Minus simply looks out at the sea, hears the foghorn and utters, “God.” I think for Bergman, God does seem that distant here; Like the boat, God makes Its presence known in a way that almost mocks the characters, letting them know via foghorn that something exists out there — you just can’t see it snd it won't intervene. Multiple sounds such as that echo in the film, and that’s one of the things that always affects me most about Bergman’s films: his attention to silence accentuates even the most mundane sounds so they become haunting.
The aesthetic and its sparseness is a bit showy (there’s a reason why the sometimes super-serious Bergman is so easy for people to riff on), but I’ve always loved Bergman for that. In no way does he shy away from big ideas and his aesthete aims. In today’s cinema, it would be hard to get a film such as this made without the filmmaker being tempted to at least let a little bit of irony seep in (but, hey, that's postmodernism for ya, and I think that's part of the reason why so many people are uncomfortable with a film such as The Tree of Life because of Malick's super-serious pretensions). Sure, the final set piece in the decaying ship is showy, on-the-nose and pretentious. But so what? What’s wrong with being overtly arty? It’s a beautiful metaphor for Karin’s own dug-out and decaying psyche, and I think in today’s cinema the crucial mistake that would get made — and the reason people would jump all over its pretentiousness — would be that too much attention would be given to the metaphor and not enough to the subjects. Here, the ship works perfectly because we’re invested in Karin as Andersson is just absolutely brilliant in the final moments of this film as she confronts her father about their relationship and how it’s been affected by her illness.
Through a Glass Darkly would retroactively be a part of a trilogy that included The Silence and Winter Light. What would become known as the “faith trilogy” set the tone for what would be Bergman’s darkest decade and his increasingly harsh explorations into spiritual wrestling. Bergman himself declared the film’s part of a trilogy only after he saw similar themes running through the films: "These three films deal with reduction. Through a Glass Darkly — conquered certainty. Winter Light — penetrated certainty. The Silence — God's silence — the negative imprint. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy." The ‘60s are the decade of Bergman's work I appreciate most, perhaps because this period if Bergman’s films often reflect my own uncertainties surrounding religion. Not everyone loves Through a Glass Darkly the same way they revere other Bergman films. I think that Bergman's own quote explains why as the movie's ending displeased himh — a kind of trite addendum that too neatly explained things, but I think in the light of how Bergman describes the “trilogy” above, Through a Glass Darkly still holds a tremendous amount of truth and power. Sure, “conquering” certainty isn’t nearly as interesting a thesis as penetrating it or looking at it though a nihilistic lens (I suppose that’s the juicier stuff), but I think love is a pretty interesting theme, and I like the biblical approach Bergman takes at trying to understand love.
Bergman felt uneasy about the film, even when it was released, as he felt it let viewers off a little too easily:
“Through a Glass Darkly was a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy: God is love and love is God…So here we started with a falsehood (on the part of the filmmaker), largely unconscious, but a falsehood nevertheless. In a weird way, the film floats a couple of inches above the ground. But falsehood is one thing; the weaving of illusions is another.”
His initial plans for the film were really to focus the lens on schizophrenia, specifically how schizophrenia affects someone with religious tendencies. The film's working title was The Wallpaper, suggesting that perhaps Bergman was going for more of a Charlotte Perkins Gillman feel for the film. In his notes on the film, Bergman states, “Karin wants Martin, her husband, to worship the god; otherwise the god might turn dangerous. She tries to force Martin to do so. He finally gets David to help him give her an injection. Then she disappears into her world behind the wallpaper.” Bergman later goes on to describe that he wanted the film to be more about Karin pulling Martin into her descent in order for him to understand the god behind the wallpaper better. Martin is a character who needs the tangible to understand, and so Karin’s schizophrenic downfall is a lonely one because Martin’s attempts to understand what she sees and hears and feels are in vain. The tone of these notes is eerier than the tone the film produces; however, that’s not the product on the screen, and I think what Bergman did put on there is profound and moving, and somewhat eerie, too.
I didn’t find anything false about the theme, no matter how simplistic it may be, of love. Bergman brilliantly juxtaposes the mission of modernity (there is a moment where, prior to David and Martin setting out to fish in the cold, they say, “if it’s good enough for Hemingway…”) with the mission of love. For David and Martin, confronting and dealing with Karin's schizophrenia requires an unending kind of love; the kind of love Paul talks about in 1 Corinthians (the book of the Bible from which the film gets its title), and completely
flies in the face of the modernist “go get what’s yours” mentality. David, as the struggling writer, seems at first OK with the exploiting his mentally ill daughter in hopes of finding some material for his latest bout with writer's block. This theme appealed most to Bergman. He himself states that he sees himself — the artist, the filmmaker, the writer — in these scenes, and it is not surprising when one looks at the film now to see Bergman so nakedly explicate this territory on screen; however, Bergman didn’t see the performance of David by Bjornstrand as something representative of himself. Bergman says, “The character of David […] became a problem. In him, two forms of unconscious lying came together: my own and actor Bjornstrand’s. Our combined efforts created a dreadful stew.” Bergman didn’t like the way Bjornstrand portrayed David (Bjornstrand himself recently had converted to Catholicism) and thought the performance was “poorly played” while Bjornstrand thought that his interpretation of the character was “splendid.” The truth is I don’t remember much of Bjornstrand’s performance because Andersson is so damn good here she trumps everyone else in the film. Andersson's portrayal of Karin seems to be the only thing, according to his notes, about the film that pleased Bergman. His notes on the film and its handling of Karin: “Don’t sentimentalize Karin’s illness. Show it in all its ghastly glory.” Because of Andersson’s performance and what she goes through, I buy the film as having something more to it than merely being the "safe" film with the toothless ending that Bergman thought he made. By the end of the film, David somewhat atones for his sins of misapplied love as he assures his son — after Karin has been helicoptered off the island back to the mental hospital — that the reality they live in is different than the one Karin does; and yet, they can help her — cure her in their own way — by loving her. As the apostle Paul writes:
"Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become sounding brass or a clanging cymbal. 2 And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have allfaith, so that I could remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing. 4 Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; 5 does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; 6 does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; 7 bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. 8 Love never fails. But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part. 10 But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. 12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known. 13 And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love."
It seems to me that that is why, even 50 years later, Bergman’s film still holds up. It doesn’t move me the same way that Winter Light or The Silence moves me, but it’s an important film nonetheless because it marks a clear shift in Bergman’s tone; a shift toward the Bergman who wrestles with polarities: the darkly nihilistic and the light of grace — the kind of love — that saves.
So, yes, I don’t quite understand Bergman’s distaste with the ending. Sure, it may seem a little trite to some in how it so cleanly mitigates the problems the characters go through but, like the title of the film suggests — and what many Greek scholars talk about when they talk about Paul’s famous letter to the Corinthians — love, or better to understand God vis-à-vis love, is a riddle; there isn’t an easy answer just as one cannot look clearly through a murky mirror or dark glass. And so I like the dual endings presented in the film because it allows for the viewer to explicate those murky waters: is Karin, and our interpretation of God is love, “safe” because she’s surrounded by the people that love her most making it easy to better understand the pain she goes through, or do we understand God to be a passive one that allows for Karin to be haunted by some kind of demiurge shaped like a spider that will continue to emerge from walls, crawl up her body and possess and haunt her mind?
Just as easily as one could say, “God is love” so too could someone say, “God is not love” because it refuses to act on Karin’s behalf. That’s why, yes, even though the ending may seem sugary-sweet and wrapped up a little too neatly compared to how Bergman would fine-tune these ideas in better films such as Winter Light and The Silence, the film packs a punch because it leaves the viewer looking through the glass from all angles, trying their hardest to spy God and any kind of answer that helps make sense of the madness that surrounds us on a daily basis. Through the wrestling with these religious and existential quandaries that we learn the most (I firmly believe this, and it’s why I respond so strongly to Bergman’s ‘60s output). Through a Glass Darkly may contain an ending that seems too neat and tidy for some, but it’s an important film because it marks the beginning of the auteur's most inspired run of films. Looking back on it after a recent viewing, I understand even more clearly why the film still holds a special place for me: that ending gets me thinking and wrestling with the question of whether or not is as simple as just “love.” I believe it is.
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Labels: 60s, Antonioni, Beatles, Books, Ebert, Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, Malick, Movie Tributes, Von Sydow
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Sunday, March 11, 2012
What's so funny about critics, taste and Marienbad?
when one did not ask of a work of art what it said because one knew (or thought one knew) what it did.
From now to the end of consciousness, we are stuck with the task of defending art."
— from part 6 of "Against Interpretation" by Susan Sontag
By Edward Copeland
For those of you who read my Wednesday tribute to Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, you already know the genesis of this post. For those who didn't, I'll try to explain briefly. In exploring my love for Marienbad, a type of film I usually don't like, it got my mind wandering to questions about criticisms and movie tastes in general. What makes a film such as Marienbad magic for some and a misfire for others? I also thought deeper because while so many of the original and later fans of Marienbad spent much time developing theories as to what Resnais' film ultimately meant, that's never concerned me. As I began working to put this post together, uncertain exactly what form it would take, how it would turn out — quite frankly how I'd allowed myself, already behind and overburdened with editing of other contributors' pieces and writing my own future posts, to promise to readers that something else related to Marienbad (but not exclusively about that film) would be coming. I even did the thing I try never to do: Promise a date, though at least I stretched it to Friday with a "maybe." (As you can see, I blew that date.) Anyone who has ever watched or read many interviews with film directors likely knows that often on movie sets, sometimes incredible moments happen "by accident." Thursday night, while searching the Web for something related to this, I experienced a happy accident of my own. I'm certain many of you out there perusing this have read Susan Sontag's 10-part essay "Against Interpretation" before, but I had not. Another one of those Burgess Meredith Twilight Zone moments for me. You know what Forrest Gump always said,
"Life is like Google's algorithms, type Manny Farber Last Year at Marienbad and you never know what you're gonna get." What I got was one helluva chocolate-covered raspberry creme candy in the form of "Against Interpretation." Part of me wanted to print Sontag's entire essay, but you can click on the link in the pullout quote above and read the entire thing if you wish. In part 6 of Sontag's essay, she wrote, "From interviews, it appears that Resnais and Robbe-Grillet consciously designed Last Year at Marienbad to accommodate a multiplicity of equally plausible interpretations. But the temptation to interpret Marienbad should be resisted. What matters in Marienbad is the pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solutions to certain problems of cinematic form." Not only did her essay tie directly into the discussion I wanted to have here, for about an hour the essay in its entirety changed how I thought about my own film criticism. Against Interpretation became the title of Sontag's first collection of essays published in 1966 so, being a stickler, I figured the essay must have been published somewhere else first and I spent a while trying to track down the when and where (especially since the place where I found the complete 10-part essay had a 1964 at the bottom). During my hunt, I found another Sontag essay called "30 Years Later" that was published to mark the 30th anniversary republication of the 1966 book. That's the punchline of this story, so I'm saving it for later while we get back on track to my original purpose for this post. Why do we feel compelled to ascribe meaning to a movie? It's not like I don't do it, it's just that when I find myself discussing a film's point (or lack of one) that usually happens because I have problems with a film (read my review of The Artist, for example), but if it has worked, I don't. (I have to swipe another bit from part 6 of Sontag's essay here as well: "It is always the case that interpretation of this type indicates a dissatisfaction — conscious or unconscious — with the work, a wish to replace it by something else.") With Marienbad, critics worked overtime trying to explain its meaning or tearing it down (reading all of the great Pauline Kael's cutting remarks on the film prompted this in the first place). The 1960s proponents of Last Year at Marienbad loved to expound on the film's surreal nature, which is why I enjoyed what Resnais himself said in a 2008 audio interview recorded for the Criterion DVD:"I don't think we were true surrealists but we certainly had very strong emotions. We didn't take ourselves seriously but when we started filming an atmosphere set in during the shoot…I was caught up in a kind of spiral, a kind of labyrinth, in which I felt like I was pushing buttons but had no control over the outcome…"
I haven't tried to assemble this type of post before, but as I've developed it, it's become clear that I should provide separate pieces: one relating specifically to Last Year at Marienbad , the second devoted to more general questions about all movies. Both posts will use thoughts from critic friends across the blogsphere and other writings that have appeared dating from the 1960s to now. I hope it's enjoyable and illuminating. Before we begin, I'm going to grab a quote that Sontag borrowed before she began "Against Interpretation."
— Oscar Wilde in a letter
In my Wednesday piece on the film itself, one of the last things I wrote about was my lifelong use and love of nonsequiturs, though usually of the quirky or humorous variety, and how, in many ways, Last Year at Marienbad was composed of 93 minutes of nonsequiturs and I wrote, "but Resnais wasn't going for laughs — was he?" When I decided to query some of my critic friends across the web about the issues, one of the first responses I received was from Matt Zoller Seitz, TV critic at New York magazine and publishes the Press Play blog on Indiewire, and part of what he sent said, "It verges on self-parody rather often, and Resnais is not known for his humor, so I suspect most of this is unintentional." Matt hadn't read what I wrote, so he didn't know I'd asked that question about whether Resnais could have been going for laughs, but the possibility of parody has been raised often in the half-century since the release of Last Year at Marienbad, by the film's devotees and detractors alike. Resnais almost hinted at that when he said that he and Alain Robbe-Grillet didn't take themselves seriously, but later in that DVD interview Resnais tells François Thomas, "It felt like we were in the realm of the conscious and the unconscious and that there were 'dark forces' guiding the mise en scene…we were almost afraid of what we were doing." What's truly funny is how many different stories you can get out of Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet, the avant-garde French novelist who wrote the film's screenplay, concerning Marienbad's origin. Granted, most of the information in my original post came from Resnais, who is pushing 90 and was in his late 80s when he recorded it, so perhaps fuzzy memory could be blame — and given the film we're talking about that would seem appropriate. How long the four story ideas that Robbe-Grillet gave Resnais changes as does the time the director took to pick one. Resnais says the producers asked him to meet with Robbe-Grillet while the novelist says the exact opposite. The puzzler comes from the amount of support they received from the producers. On the Criterion interview, Resnais specifically praises producer Raymond Froment for always standing behind the film his entire life. In an interview with Shusha Guppy in the Spring 1986 issue of The Paris Review, Robbe-Grillet said:
"The joke is that no one wanted to buy Marienbad! The producer decided that the film would never be shown, that it insulted and mocked the public, that it meant nothing. I was in a particularly awkward position, since I was “the bad Alain Robbe-Grillet” who had corrupted “the good Alain Resnais.” So for a year the film lay fallow. By chance, the Venice Film Festival saved it, and the absurd, idiotic film became a roaring success overnight."
Back to that idea of whether Marienbad could be a parody. With all the games that they play, particularly Nim, the pick-up-sticks game where only the player who goes first can win, I confess that this time I thought momentarily of Robert Altman's loony 1979 film Quintet, where on the DVD commentary Altman all but admits he made the movie as a joke on the audience, saying he enjoyed holding moviegoers hostage for two hours wondering what was going on. I can't pretend that Marienbad doesn't transfix me and lines that I jotted down I couldn't see myself laughing at in the right mood, but I've never laughed at them while watching the film. That's not been the case with others, especially critics such as Kael who disliked the film. She wrote in 5,001 Nights at the Movies, "The dialogue about whether the characters met the year before is like a parody of wealthy indolence. The settings and costumes seem to be waiting for a high romantic theme or fantasy; the people, pawns who are manipulated into shifting positions, seem to be placed for wit, or for irony. But all we get are pretty pictures." As I started searching through reviews of the film, both from the time of its release and since, it began to be difficult to find any that didn't mention parody — in either the plaudits or the pans.
In his capsule on the film in The Chicago Reader, the esteemed Jonathan Rosenbaum acknowledges both Marienbad's possibility as a tease while still recognizing its magnificence. "The overall tone is poker-faced parody of lush Hollywood melodrama, yet the film's dreamlike cadences, frozen tableaux and distilled surrealist poetry are too eerie, too terrifying even, to be shaken off as camp. For all its notoriety, this masterpiece among masterpieces has never really received its due." Long before being unceremoniously evicted from his longtime perch at The Village Voice by the dullards at New Times (oops — sorry — Voice Media Group. To think Norman Mailer helped to co-found this once glorious alternative newspaper. I digress.), J. Hoberman penned a piece on Marienbad in its Jan. 8, 2008, issue, ahead of an engagement at Film Forum. Headlined "The House of 1,000 Corpses," Hoberman began, "Back in the day, literal-minded audiences had great fun pretending to be baffled by this artiest of European art films." I have to admit — I love the idea that it wasn't Resnais and Robbe-Grillet putting the audience on, but moviegoers doing the pretending, much as The Academy acted as if they
thought Tom Hooper directed The King's Speech better than David Fincher directed The Social Network (This isn't a joke — I had to look up Hooper's name. He slipped my mind that fast). Later, Hoberman wrote, "…the spectator is similarly obliged to surrender to the movie's incantatory rhythms and sublimely maddening mannerisms — or else leave the theater.…Hopelessly retro, eternally avant-garde, and one of the most influential movies ever made (as well as one of the most reviled), Marienbad is both utterly lucid and provocatively opaque — an elaborate joke on the world's corniest pickup line and a drama of erotic fixation that takes Vertigo to the next level of abstraction." (Since Vertigo has come up, this is as good a spot as any to place a screenshot of the moment in Marienbad where Resnais placed a cardboard cutout of Alfred Hitchcock.) The word parody doesn't stand alone as an oft-repeated word in writings on Marienbad: Both those who love it and loathe it like to link it with some form of the undead. Vampires and zombies get a lot of ink (or the online equivalent) though no necks get bitten or brains get eaten. It's understandable since, as much as I love the film, acting isn't required. Dennis Lim, writing in The Los Angeles Times on June 21, 2009, to mark Criterion's reissuing of Marienbad on DVD hit on both zombies and parody. His piece said, "Marienbad, with its solemn mannerisms, geometric topiary and cast of waxwork zombies, has inspired more parodies than any other art-house hit, save perhaps for Bergman's The Seventh Seal (also just reissued by Criterion). But what often goes unacknowledged is the edge of awareness beneath the movie's straight-faced absurdity.…On one hand, it's a proudly unsolvable enigma, an attempt to resist chronology and rational analysis and instead to mimic the associative flow of dream logic. On the other, it's the driest of high-concept comedies: an elaboration on the old 'Don't I know you from somewhere?' pickup line."To finish off our Marienbad discussion (for the most part), I thought I would share a few of the interesting comments sent to me personally or that I found on the web about the film before I begin work on the second post. First, I'm going to share comments from Rialto Pictures' press notes for a re-release of the film about the various theories about what Last Year at Marienbad meant. Beginning on page seven of the booklet, it reads, "Inevitably, the authors were pressed to disclose the 'meaning' of the film. Among the possible solutions suggested have been the Orpheus-Eurydice myth; a visualization of the process of psychoanalysis (Giorgio Albertazzi as doctor pushing patient Delphine Seyrig to go deeper); Albertazzi as Death; or the whole as a kind of stream of consciousness of a single mind,
presumably the woman’s, encompassing truth, lies, and visualized what-ifs, all taking place within a few seconds of 'real time’…(As if to illustrate the general ambiguity, at one point in the film a prominent statuary group elicits three different, equally convincing, interpretations.) To this day, the authors have studiously avoided endorsing any single interpretation." For his part, Resnais actually offered an abstract explanation once, suggesting that Marienbad's purpose "is an attempt, still very crude and very primitive, to approach the complexity of thought, of its processes." Robbe-Grillet steered clear of any maps, but he did write in the introduction to the published book of his screenplay that the film only can be watched two ways and only one will work. "(E)ither the spectator will try to reconstitute some 'Cartesian' scheme — the most linear, the most rational he can devise — and this spectator will certainly find the film difficult if not incomprehensible; or else the spectator will let himself be carried along by the extraordinary images in front of him…and to this spectator, the film will seem the easiest he has ever seen: a film addressed exclusively to his sensibility, to his faculties of sight, hearing, feeling." Robbe-Grillet's second description does sound like the effect that Last Year at Marienbad has on me. More frightening, one of the old, squarest of past critics wrote of his positive reaction using nearly the same terminology.In general, during his 27-year reign as chief film critic for The New York Times, Bosley Crowther gained a reputation as a fuddy duddy and a moralizer, despite the fact the he was outspoken against McCarthyism and generally promoted foreign films. However, some of his pans (Throne of Blood, Psycho, Lawrence of Arabia, Bonnie and Clyde) put alongside his more enthusiastic picks (Ben-Hur, Cleopatra) earned him a reputation as someone out of touch. In particular, his infamous Bonnie and Clyde review signaled that perhaps his time had passed. However, Crowther happened to be present on March 7, 1962, when Last Year in Marienbad made its U.S. premiere. Resnais' film excited Crowther so much that he actually had a review in The Times the next day. His immediate, overstimulated first mash note to Marienbad starts like this: "Be prepared for an experience such as you've never had from watching a film when you sit down to look at Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, a truly extraordinary French film, which opened at the Carnegie Hall Cinema last night. It
may grip you with a strange enchantment, it may twist your wits into a snarl, it may leave your mind and senses toddling vaguely in the regions in between. But this we can reasonably promise: when you stagger away from it, you will feel you have delighted in (or suffered) a unique and intense experience. And that, it appears, is precisely what M. Resnais means you to feel — the extreme and abnormal stimulation of a complete cinematic experience. For this is no usual movie drama that he is dishing up from a script of radical construction by Alain Robbe-Grillet. This is no lucid exposition of human behavior in terms of conventional dramatic situation, motivation and plot. This is an eye-opening example of the use of the cinema device — the machinery of visual image-making, conjoined with musical sounds and the contrapuntal assistance of vocalized images and ideas — to excite the imagination as it might be excited by a lyrical poem, or, better, by the tonal colorations and rhythms of a fine symphony." In 1962, March 7 was a Wednesday. Crowther obviously didn't get all he wanted to say out of his system on deadline because he published another piece on the film (under the headline "ESOTERIC POETRY") that ran Sunday, March 11. Highlights: “In truth and beyond any question, this is the ‘furthest out’ film we’ve ever had."; "Alongside of it, such esoterica as the rare fantasies of Jean Cocteau, Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and M. Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour have the structure of fairly lucid dramas with some temporal continuity, at least." and, finally, the words that mirrors Robbe-Grillet's advice and my viewing experiences: "…if one sits down to it in a normally relaxed and pliant mood, with no rigid or stifling preconceptions of what a motion picture has to be or say, but ready to go along with it into whatever fancies it leads, one is likely — indeed, almost certain — to find it a fascinating film, productive of lovely sensations and provocative abstract ideas.” Interestingly enough, one of The New York Times' current film critics, A.O. Scott, said last year in The Times that, "I don’t feel guilty about not caring for Last Year at Marienbad."
Since I never could locate those Manny Farber pans against Marienbad, the main naysayer from that era I knew of was Pauline Kael. When Pauline launched her most-targeted missile at Last Year at Marienbad, she combined it in a piece taking down Fellini's La Dolce Vita and Antonioni's La Notte in the same article. As anyone who has read Kael much knows, she doesn't write brief so you can imagine that when she is covering three films together, under the heading "The Come-Dressed-As-the-Sick-Soul-of-Europe Parties." It is part of her collection I Lost It at the Movies. I'm only picking a few choice plums relating to Marienbad such as when she wrote, "The mood of the protagonists, if we can call them that, is lassitude;
there is almost no conflict, only a bit of struggling — perhaps squirming is more accurate — amid the unvoiced acceptance of defeat.…It's easy enough to say ‘They are alienated; therefore, they exist,’ but unless we know what they are alienated from, their alienation is meaningless — an empty pose. And that is just what alienation is in these films — an empty pose; the figures are cardboard intellectuals — the middle-class view of sterile artists. Steiner's party from La Dolce Vita is still going on in La Notte, just as the gathering of bored aristocrats in La Dolce Vita is still going on in Marienbad." She finally makes the point that I made reference to in my actual piece on the film as a possible subliminal reason that I might have been swept up by Marienbad. "All these films have their source, I think, in Renoir's great The Rules of the Game [1939] — but how different his party was: it was a surreal fantasy, the culmination of the pursuit of love, a great chase, a great satirical comedy, a dance of death," Kael wrote. "The servants were as corrupt as the masters. And how different were the games — the shooting party in which almost all living creatures were the targets, and then the unplanned shooting party. But the themes were set - the old castle that seems to symbolize the remains of European civilization, and the guests with their weekend activities — sex and theatricals and games. Renoir's film was a dazzling, complex entertainment, brilliantly structured, building its themes toward a climax. These new party films are incoherent message movies."Kael, of course, earned her greatest fame once she became ensconced at The New Yorker. As luck would have it, after I wrote my original piece, Richard Brody tweeted me with links to two articles he wrote for The New Yorker in May 2010 that come the closest to convincing me that Marienbad might have had reason behind its rhyme. Brody attended an invitation-only screening of a documentary called The Making of Last Year at Marienbad that was built around 8mm footage filmed by Françoise Spira, an actress in the film who committed suicide in 1965. In the article, Brody writes how this documentary came to be, quoting what Bernard Henri-Levy, one of the film's producer, wrote on The Daily Beast.
"Jean-Baptiste Thiérrée, Spira’s last companion, found the lost work hidden in the back of a basement and gave it to Alain Robbe-Grillet, who had written Marienbad’s original screenplay. A few weeks before he died [in 2008], Robbe-Grillet passed it on to Olivier Corpet’s Institut Mémoires de l’édition Contemporaine, with the rest of his archives, and Corpet, in turn, gave it to me to broadcast on the website of my review, La Règle du Jeu."
Levy contacted director Volker Schlöndorff, who worked as a second assistant director on Last Year at Marienbad Working from his notes, Schlöndorff assembled the film reels in order and only added his own voiceover. Brody describes a particularly fascinating part of the documentary which, unfortunately hasn't been released on DVD. Brody wrote, "An extraordinarily illuminating detail emerges, in the course of the documentary, at the one point that the action departs from the set of Resnais’s film: Spira filmed an excursion by the cast and crew to the Munich suburb of Dachau. There, they visited the remains of the concentration camp (which Spira didn’t film)…I’ve always thought that the film is noteworthy for the pre-war atmosphere it conjures, with no actual calendar reference. 'Marienbad' is, of course, a German name ('Bad' means 'bath,' referring to a spa), and the title of the film could (with a tiny tweak of the French) mean the last year at Marienbad — as in, this is how life was in Germany before all hell broke loose, or even, this is the sort of passionately decadent frivolity — and the sort of breakdown of memory — that results in disaster on a historical scale." Brody goes on to make the connection my mind already had leaped to as I read the early part of his piece: Marienbad might really have that connection to Renoir's film my subconscious sensed. While Rules mostly takes the form of a human farce, the entire rabbit hunt sequence heralds the impending sounds of war in Europe. Of course, Renoir made his film before the fact. Resnais, who came from a documentary background, earning much praise for one called Night and Fog that visited the sites of Nazi death camps. Perhaps the movie without a meaning concealed one all along. Brody explored these ideas in intriguing detail when he picked Marienbad as his DVD of the Week in the March 22, 2011, issue of The New Yorker.
I did happen to stumble upon another prominent figure who didn't go for Last Year at Marienbad when the film originally came out in the early 1960s. He wasn't a critic, he was three-time Academy Award-winning director William Wyler.
“Look at Marienbad honestly. What is it? It’s just another talking radio show with pictures. Nobody acts. People stand around while the author talks about the woodwork. There is nothing clever about confusion.”
As much as I like Marienbad, I always did think those long corridors could use a chariot race. I also found that when Michael Medved offered ill-informed opinions on movies with his brother Harry, they included Last Year at Marienbad as one of the 50 Worst Films of All Times. I know — that violates my edict about the equality and subjectivity of opinions about movies, but Michael surrendered that when he switched to giving ill-informed opinions on politics. I know I promised the punchline to the Sontag story, but I'm going to have to save it for the second post. It fits better thematically there. I did have one more famous opinion on Marienbad I wanted to include part of because it's just so damn evocative. Written by Roger Ebert as part of his Great Movie series on May 30, 1999.
"Yes, it's easy to smile at Alain Resnais' 1961 film, which inspired so much satire and yet made such a lasting impression. Incredible to think that students actually did stand in the rain to be baffled by it, and then to argue for hours about its meaning — even though the director claimed it had none. I hadn't seen Marienbad in years, and when I saw the new digitized video disc edition in a video store, I reached out automatically: I wanted to see it again, to see if it was silly or profound, and perhaps even to recapture an earlier self — a 19-year-old who hoped Truth could be found in Art.
"Viewing the film again, I expected to have a cerebral experience, to see a film more fun to talk about than to watch. What I was not prepared for was the voluptuous quality of Marienbad, its command of tone and mood, its hypnotic way of drawing us into its puzzle, its austere visual beauty. Yes, it involves a story that remains a mystery, even to the characters themselves. But one would not want to know the answer to this mystery. Storybooks with happy endings are for children. Adults know that stories keep on unfolding, repeating, turning back on themselves, on and on until that end that no story can evade.
…
"'I'll explain it all for you,' promised Gunther Marx, a professor of German at the U. of I. We were sitting over coffee in the student union, late on that rainy night in Urbana. (He would die young; his son Frederick would be one of the makers of Hoop Dreams.) 'It is a working out of the anthropological archetypes of Claude Levi-Strauss. You have the lover, the loved one and the authority figure. The movie proposes that the lovers had an affair, that they didn't, that they met before, that they didn't, that the authority figure knew it, that he didn't, that he killed her, that he didn't. Any questions?'"
The bigger question that I wanted to get to was, "Should there be questions?" Especially if a film works, but we'll get to that part as I finish it up later today along with other issues related to criticism such as one inspired by this paragraph from Mark Harris' New York Times piece in January 2008:
“The chief difference between Marienbad in 1962 and Marienbad in 2008 may be how many people are willing to tolerate that distress and walk into the theater in the first place. To revisit Marienbad today is to glimpse a vanished moment when American audiences drank in European films not because they were universal or ‘relatable,’ but for their otherness, their impenetrability, their defiant contrast to the simplistic and elephantine Technicolor epics that much of Hollywood was then embracing.
By March 1962, when Last Year at Marienbad opened, the pump had been primed; New Yorkers were ready, even eager to wrestle with pictures from abroad that tested their ability to ‘read’ a film. In the preceding 12 months moviegoers had had their first encounters with L’Avventura, Michelangelo Antonioni’s story of a young woman’s disappearance that seemingly abandoned its own interest in her halfway through; with La Dolce Vita, Federico Fellini’s more user-friendly take on sexually charged European ennui; and with Ingmar Bergman’s stern, uningratiating spiritual meditation Through a Glass Darkly.”
Those old THX ads used to shout THE AUDIENCE IS LISTENING, but is it to the movie on the screen, let alone critics? To be continued...
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Labels: Altman, Antonioni, Burgess Meredith, Criticism, Documentary, Ebert, Fellini, Fincher, Ingmar Bergman, Kael, Mailer, Renoir, Resnais, Wyler
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Wednesday, March 07, 2012
No explanations for the inexplicable Why do we feel the need to force meaning upon magic?
By Edward Copeland
A sentence, once begun, hung suspended in the air, as if frozen by the frost,
and picked up, probably where it left off — or elsewhere.
probably with a significant other, but not necessarily,
that you have again and again for years?"
How did Alain Resnais pull it off? Most films that aim for the abstract and teeter toward pretension just bore me or piss me off. One need look no further than Lars von Trier's recent Melancholia for an example of the type of film of which I speak. Now, I stand by my belief that there is no right or wrong in film criticism since all opinions are subjective (even though when reading positive reviews for films such as Melancholia I often visualize the writer struggling to convince himself of the film's worth, as if daring to say otherwise could mean the loss of her membership privileges to the hip critic tree house). Knowing my tastes, that makes my affection for Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad all the more mystifying — even to me. I can't explain my love for this film, which marks the 50th anniversary of its U.S. premoere today, but I do. It's not that I'm an across-the-board disciple of the French New Wave — a lot of Godard's work leaves me cold (though I worship Truffaut). Then Resnais differed from the other New Wavers in that he wasn't a critic first. He started out as a documentary filmmaker. Each time I see Last Year, those black-and-white images and nameless characters in its essentially plotless universe mesmerize me more than the last time. I couldn't give you a coherent explanation as to what Last Year is about and, what's more, I don't care. I just know it's beautiful and infused with the magic that only great cinema can conjure.
As I pondered what to say in this tribute, since I lack the desire to force an interpretation onto the film that would bore me to write even more than it would any reader to read and any attempt at synopsis surely would reach the higher rungs on the ladder of Fools' Errands, my thoughts drifted to more general areas of film and criticism. I loved Pauline Kael, though I'm certain if added up, I probably disagreed with her more often than not. Kael was not a fan of Marienbad. She'd bring it up frequently in reviews of other films, such as when she reviewed Antonioni's Blow-Up for The New Republic in 1967. "It has some of the Marienbad appeal: A friend phones for your
opinion and when you tell him you didn't much care for it, he says, 'You'd better see it again. I was at a swinging party the other night and it's all anybody was talking about!' (Was there ever a good movie that everybody was talking about?" Kael wrote. Of course, that review was published more than two years before I was born and I haven't been to any swinging parties (or nonswinging, for that matter) of late and I sharply disagree with her about Resnais' film (I'm more mixed, leaning to positive, on Blow-Up, though it and L'Eclisse remain the only Antonionis I truly tolerate). Despite our differing opinions on Marienbad, how can I not laugh out loud at Kael's parenthetical punchline? As Fat Tony (voiced by Joe Mantegna) said once on The Simpsons, "It's funny 'cause it's true." So while I firmly live by what I said earlier about all criticism being subjective and you should avoid what Kael called "saphead objectivity," in this world we live in today the cruder saying, be it about movies or politics or religion or whatever, rings louder than ever: Opinions are like assholes: Everybody's got one. The question writing this tribute sparked in my mind is "Why does Marienbad work for me, but not for Kael or others" and continuing along those lines, "How can a director such as Lars von Trier have either fans who think he walks on water or people such as myself who mock him mercilessly but seemingly few who look at him dispassionately from the middle ground?" Does the magic reside in the movies or within ourselves? With these conundrums circulating in my head, I decided that two posts would be necessary, since a large portion wouldn't be dealing with Marienbad directly. Therefore, today the tribute to the film, Thursday (or maybe even Friday), the broader discussion. I decided two posts were required not only because of length and the larger issues bubbling in my brain but because I thought Last Year at Marienbad deserves separate words on its anniversary, especially after devouring its two-disc Criterion DVD. One of the most interesting special features is an audio interview with Resnais by François Thomas, author of the book The Workshop of Alain Resnais, recorded specifically for Criterion in 2008. (Resnais, who turns 90 in June, maintains an active filmmaking life, having made the great Wild Grass that opened in the U.S. in 2010. It also has little in common with Marienbad and should be accessible to most.) Resnais talks extensively about the process that led him to collaborate with highly regarded French novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet and produced Marienbad as a result. Two of the film's eventual producers, Raymond Froment and his friend Pierre Courau, suggested to Resnais the idea of a partnership with the novelist. "I'd never read a book of his, not a single line. I remember my first response was 'From what I've read in the press, he's a very difficult writer whose books are quite off-
putting. I really don't know if we could collaborate on a film,'" Resnais admits in the interview. The men asked if the director would at least meet the author and so Resnais did. "(T)he meeting with Robbe-Grillet was so pleasant and friendly that I believe we spent the whole afternoon together discussing life, cinema and the arts. We realized that we had similarities as to certain (things) and even works of literature. I hadn't hidden the fact that I hadn't read his works and I wanted to read his four published books. I was as won over by his writings as I was won over by Robbe-Grillet in person," Resnais says. That sounds like a stroke of luck, but it pales compared to the actual process that occurred that produced this landmark (if you like it) film. "…Robbe-Grillet offered to write four ideas for screenplays, each a page in length, and if I found one of the four interesting enough, we could move forward with that. A week later, (he) did in fact give me four ideas and I took another 24 hours to make a decision because those four pages could easily have made four films and it was hard to decide and it was hard to decide on the most enticing and most captivating. I decided on Last Year. The words 'at Marienbad' were added later," Resnais explains. The full screenplay was written in less than two months — an extremely detailed script that had visuals on the left-hand side while dialogue and even stage directions filled the right-hand column. In fact, Resnais told Thomas that what they produced had so much spelled out, anyone could have picked it up and made the same movie. When Resnais composed his usual shot breakdown, it barely differed from the screenplay. The way Resnais conceives images on all his films turns out to be fascinating by itself. He has his screenwriters record all of a film's dialogue on tape without identifying which characters are speaking. Resnais then lies on a couch and listens to the tapes until the images come to him. While I wouldn't try to slap a meaning on Marienbad, I know what appeals to me. Part of it is its fluid nature, something best shown by this YouTube clip.Resnais insisted on real sets because he needed shadows from the "molding in the decor, on doors, or even the actor's shadows to fall on
something three-dimensional," he also says in the interview whose existence practically ensures that a first-person account of the mechanics of making Last Year at Marienbad should outlast us all. Though even as a fan, I wouldn't label this as a film about acting (Hell, the characters aren't given names, just letters), yet Resnais wanted the performers to know the tone he had in mind so he screened for the cast and crew G.W. Pabst's silent classic Pandora's Box. He also claims to have been influenced by the Stanislavsky acting
method, even though his book hadn't been published in France yet, because the female lead A (Delphine Seyrig) had studied with Lee Strasberg in the United States. Seyrig did ruin one of Resnais' plans unexpectedly. He wanted her to have her hair cut similar to Louise Brooks' look in Pandora's Box, but she trimmed it after a break ruining any chance for that. The collaboration between Resnais and Robbe-Grillet only had one disagreement — over what did happen last year between A and X (Giorgio Albertazzi). The novelist scripted the encounter as a rape, but Resnais hated that idea, but everything in the movie plays with time and memory. "To me it was a simple love story, so I like to express the emotional love, precisely the opposite of the idea of a rape. I don't know how the film is interpreted, but I know my mind when I shot it," Resnais says. As I perused many reviews of the film for my larger question, I found a couple that connected the film to Hitchcock's Vertigo. Now, I don't know whether Resnais has mentioned this a lot, but he admits its influence in the DVD interview, even acknowledging that somewhere in the film you might spot a shadow of Hitch, though I couldn't spot it. "If you glimpse Hitchcock's profile in the film, it's an homage, a friendly wink of the eye, a way of saying to Hitch if he saw the film, 'We love you,'" Resnais tells Thomas. Those French New Wave filmmakers. (You know how much this film hypnotizes me? I decided to Google search for the Hitch image and discovered I had made a screenshot of it and NOT realized it. It will be in the second post.) As for the memory of what happened, it's as good as time as any for the other clip.Since he's prominent at the end of the second clip, I probably should point out the film's third main character (main as he received a letter designation). The tall, gaunt-looking man standing at the table playing a game has been given the moniker M and presumably is A's
husband. The actor Sacha Pitoëff portrays M. Last Year in Marienbad technically proved to be somewhat of a bridge between nuts-and-bolts moviemaking in France as well. While even detractors would find it hard to make a case against the beauty of Sacha Vierny's black-and-white cinematography, the actual camera operator, Philippe Brun, insisted on using the old-style hand-cranked camera, especially impressive considering the nearly constant movement of those shots. Brun wasn't an old timer either — Marienbad marked his third film as a camera operator, though he served as a cinematographer on two films in the 1950s. He's remained a camera operator through 1991's Impromptu and included such classics as Buñuel's Belle de Jour, Jean-Pierre Melville's Army of Shadows, Costa-Gavras' Missing and Bertrand Tavernier's A Sunday in the Country. Widescreen was a rarity in French films in 1960 and in order to get the look that Resnais wanted, they created their own lenses that were cut so both foreground and background stayed in focus
simultaneously. Their modifications also allowed them to shoot split screens within the camera itself. Two of the film's most famous sequences took amazing planning. The classic room of mirror sequence required two days of rehearsals before actual shooting. The long corridor sequence looks as if it were one continuous tracking shot but they filmed it in three separate sections and at three different locations months apart. Because Resnais wanted the baroque look for the hotel and not much of that style of architecture existed in France, Marienbad filmed largely "mostly at the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich, with additional scenes at the Schleissheim Palace just outside the city," according to page five of press notes compiled by Rialto Pictures for a re-release of the film. Interesting enough, since much filming took place in Germany, one of the second assistant directors happened to be Volker Schlöndorff, who would go on to direct films such as The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, The Tin Drum and The Handmaid's Tale. Though she took no credit, Coco
Chanel designed the film's costumes, the first film she had done that for since Jean Renoir's The Rules of the Game. When they finished the film and screened it for the first time, Resnais says in the interview, the first audience openly mocked it for nearly the first half (and at 93 minutes long, there wouldn't be much left), but he tells Thomas that eventually the audience grew quiet as the film won them over. At the end, it received a standing ovation. That seems perfectly understandable to me. As much as I adore the film, I also can appreciate the potshots. That's why it's such a puzzling film for me. They submitted it to the Cannes Film Festival but (and this I find utterly ridiculous), the festival refused to accept Marienbad unless they dubbed all the dialogue of Italian actor Giorgio Albertazzi (X) with a French actor's voice. Resnais and his producers refused. The Venice Film Festival accepted it and it won the Golden Lion for 1961. It also received the best film prize that year from the French Syndicate of Critics. As it opened elsewhere in 1962, it joined 17 other nominees up for the BAFTA for best film from any source including Truffaut's Jules and Jim, Bergman's Through a Glass, Darkly, The Manchurian Candidate and West Side Story, though all lost to Lawrence of Arabia. The Oscars nominated it for best story and screenplay written directly for the screen and look at what kind of nominees joined Marienbad back then: Divorce — Italian Style, Freud, That Touch of Mink and Through a Glass Darkly. Three foreign films, a John Huston-directed biopic and one piece of fluff but no best picture nominees and certainly no piece of crap such as a Bridesmaids. Imagine that today. Unfortunately, Divorce — Italian Style, a fairly lame foreign comedy, won.It can't be an accident that Coco Chanel provides a concrete link between Last Year at Marienbad and my favorite film of all time, The Rules of the Game, because I'd thought that subconsciously, though the two films couldn't be more different, that part of the appeal of Marienbad for me came from the large gathering at its hotel reminding me of the weekend gathering at the Marquis' chateau for Andre in Rules. In a piece Kael wrote on Rules, which she loved, that I re-read while searching for her Marienbad references, that she speculated that Resnais used Rules subliminally and that's why so many embraced it. For my part, the eerie feel Resnais creates with those long trips down seemingly endless corridors couldn't help but put me in mind of David Lynch and the halls of the high school, the hospital, the sheriff's station, the Great Northern, etc., in Twin Peaks. Though by and large I'm a Lynch fan, I found it dispiriting to read this by Mark Harris in The New York Times ahead of a two-week engagement of Marienbad in January 2008:
The people who walked out (literally) of INLAND EMPIRE, David Lynch’s Marienbad-influenced 2006 film, saying 'What was that all about?' will find similar though more elegantly concise cause for discomfort here.
What the hell? I scanned about the Web and found that Harris' words weren't isolated ones. I may be puzzled as to the hold that Marienbad has on me, but I'm not confused at all as to why I found INLAND EMPIRE to be an inexplicable mess. In comparison to Lynch's film, Marienbad plays as a rather conventional story about a love triangle. There lies why this post prompted my contemplation and, more
importantly, why these issues deserve a separate forum. The influence of Last Year at Marienbad has been acknowledged by some filmmakers, seen by even more people. In Bergman's works starting with The Silence and stretching through Persona and beyond, it's been spotted. Everyone recognizes the signs in Kubrick's take on The Shining. It's set in a hotel after all. I wonder if anyone has spotted signs in the film of Neil Simon's Plaza Suite. (I know — they're referring to Kubrick's hallway shots, not the fact it took place in a hotel. Can't a fella make a joke? You all are way too Malickserious.) Some also think Kubrick sneaked some homage into the later scenes of 2001. Peter Greenaway did go on the record admitting its influence on his work. If you want to believe the list on the Inaccurate Movie Database, it popped up in an episode of I Dream of Jeannie. I do recall Don Draper watching Marienbad in the second season of Mad Men. The list even claims it influenced a video game.Now that would be appropriate. I may not attempt to snap a lid on this movie with an all-encompassing theory as to its meaning as if I was sealing it in Tupperware, but games play a key part of Marienbad. That is obvious. The characters play all sorts of games, the kind you do for fun and the type you do to toy with people. "If you can't lose, it's not a game," X tells M when challenged to a game that M says
he always wins. Within the walls of that hotel, everyone plays and everything gets debated. In a way, perhaps I'm too quick to declare INLAND EMPIRE incompatible with Marienbad when the headline I posted on my review of Lynch's film was "Film as nonsequitur" and Marienbad really runs on nonsequiturs. Anyone who knows me personally realize that my entire life I've been a fan on nonsequiturs, though mine usually lean to the comical. Those loopy lines you would hear in an Airplane! or Police Squad! or even Twin Peaks, but Resnais wasn't going for laughs — was he? I took very few notes from the film itself, but most were just lines that struck my fancy such as "These silences to which you confine me are worse than death. These days we spend here side by side are worse than death. We're like coffins lying side by side in a frozen garden." Did I find that profound or funny? In Kael's brief mention of the film in 5,001 Nights at the Movies, she refers to that very line after calling the characters "a tony variant of the undead of vampire movies." There will be time for that in the next post. Today, I celebrate Last Year at Marienbad neither for its story nor its message, its acting nor its dialogue. I celebrate it simply for its pure cinematic beauty, its mystical power to transfix, its fluid imagery, its ability to be repetitive without becoming redundant and its unusual use of sounds. I never even brought up the organ.
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Labels: 60s, Antonioni, Criticism, Foreign, Godard, Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman, Kael, Kubrick, Lynch, Mad Men, Movie Tributes, Ray Top 100, Renoir, Resnais, Truffaut, Twin Peaks, von Trier
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