Last Year at Marienbad

Started by Gamblour., February 06, 2006, 05:47:23 PM

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Gamblour.

I just saw this film today for class. Maybe it's because I was really tired, but my god. This film was horrific and redundant. Why does the narration say what's shown on screen? That organ score made me nauseous. It seemed like some depressed contemplation on nothing. Under what condition should I watch this film again? It seemed like it could've been some amazing artistic moment, but right now it's one of my least favorite films ever. Someone defend this movie.
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Sal

Quote from: Gamblour le flambeur on February 06, 2006, 05:47:23 PM
I just saw this film today for class. Maybe it's because I was really tired, but my god. This film was horrific and redundant. Why does the narration say what's shown on screen? That organ score made me nauseous. It seemed like some depressed contemplation on nothing. Under what condition should I watch this film again? It seemed like it could've been some amazing artistic moment, but right now it's one of my least favorite films ever. Someone defend this movie.

There is no way to defend that film.  One of my professors called it the furthest that cinematic language has gotten.  In other words, it subverts/improves on techniques to create an even richer vocabulary that other artists can now benefit from using.  But that's bullshit.  The story is slow and uninteresting, the cinematography evokes space and the density of black and white, but there are better films that do the same thing; I really can't think of any better film that exemplifies slow, boring and pretentious to such a heightened level. 

polkablues

You're both smoking crack.

Last Year at Marienbad is one of the most beautiful and haunting movies ever made.

Although, admittedly, the score is a problem.
My house, my rules, my coffee

cowboykurtis

Quote from: polkablues on February 06, 2006, 06:18:30 PM
You're both smoking crack.

Last Year at Marienbad is one of the most beautiful and haunting movies ever made.


agreed
...your excuses are your own...

Gamblour.

Quote from: Gamblour le flambeur on February 06, 2006, 05:47:23 PM
Someone defend this movie.

Ok, so this movie is a giant problem, in that it works so highly on an intellectual and emotional level. I think if it's so amazing people should justify the fact that 50% of this film's narrative is repetitive and redundant. I'm literally getting a headache just remembering this film. It left the worst possible impression. Even the motif of people freezing was just so incredibly annoying to me. I need to see this again.
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godardian

Oh, those important, philosophically-minded modernist problems are hard for us, with our postmodernism-addled minds, to understand. In a New Yorker article on Susan Sontag's relationship with the movies, David Denby wrote:

[In] the ineffable Last Year at Marienbad, handsome men and women in dinner clothes stand around in a vast sculpture-strewn hotel, demurely inquiring whether they met the year before. In a 1963 piece on Resnais, Sontag deplored the movie's sluggishness and the "insufferable incantatory style" of the narration. Yet she also welcomed the film as a startling formal experiment. What Marienbad meant--its content, as conventionally understood--was not the issue. "What matters in Marienbad," she wrote a year later, "is the pure untranslatable sensuous immediacy of some of its images, and its rigorous if narrow solution to certain problems of cinematic form." Resnais had pulled off a modernist hat trick: the static nature of the movie conveyed his notion of the irrecoverability of memory; the means by which the spectacle existed at all was what the movie was about. The same was true of another Sontag favorite, Antonioni's 1960 L'Avventura. . . .
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

Gamblour.

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polkablues

The comparison to L'Aventura is a good one.  Both films only contain the illusion of narrative, while using the cinematic form to create a piece of art that is about something beyond story.

In the case of Last Year at Marienbad, one review I read of it a while back said that it's "the cinematic embodiment of a dream that's fading away in those first moments after you wake up in the morning."  That summed it up pretty well for me.  What's weird is that the movie never once feels slow or dull to me, even though I know that perhaps it should; it's almost hypnotic, like watching the windshield wipers from the backseat on a rainy night.
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Gold Trumpet

Quote from: polkablues on February 07, 2006, 01:40:45 AM
The comparison to L'Aventura is a good one.  Both films only contain the illusion of narrative, while using the cinematic form to create a piece of art that is about something beyond story.

Mind you, I've never seen Last Year at Marienbad but from everything I read that while both films are similar L'Avventura separates itself because it is interested in character and Last Year at Marienbad is not. As Stanley Kauffmann said in his original review of Last Year at Marienbad, that crucial difference leant the experience of watching the film to get him to better understand Alain Resnais' art while L'Avventura made him better understand himself.

polkablues

I agree about your characterizations of the two films, but I personally felt very connected to Marienbad.  My favorite literature tends to be the sort that relies almost entirely on the style of the writer over things like plot and character.  That's a very tough thing to pull off in film, but Last Year at Marienbad to me is the purest example of that approach.  Plus, it has some of the most gorgeous shots that have ever been filmed. 

It's sort of a tough film for me to defend, because I'm honestly not sure why I like it so much.  I haven't really figured out what Resnais was trying to say or do with the film, and when I look back on it there are only bits and pieces that really stick in my mind.  But it's a movie that washes over you, and leaves its residue behind.
My house, my rules, my coffee

Gamblour.

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Lottery

Spoilers/notes

- Seriously haunting film
- Incredible cinematography/prod design
- Some really unerving sequences
- The approach to editing is really impressive
- Admittedly a bit difficult to get through
- The organist is seriously having a bad day
- This is a ghost story in my mind:
Basically an affair which ended in murder/death and basically it's about the dude ghost repeating his story. Being confused by each iteration, each year, being unsure of the events. The repetition and the narration is kinda what I'm getting at here. The end may signal a break in the cycle. He manages to leave the hotel with her.

Axolotl

It's "adapted" from Bioy Casares' novella The Invention of Morel, a brilliantly conceived science-fictional/fantastical story the basis for which was Casares' infatuation with the images of Louise Brooks on films specifically and his interest the nature and the private life of captured images generally, if adaptation is taken as substituting the novel with a half-forgotten dream about the novel and abandoning all exposition.

Thinking about this film reminds me of being scared as a child of pictures of my family taken before I was born.

Lottery

Huh, wasn't aware of that.

QuoteA fugitive hides on a deserted island somewhere in Polynesia. Tourists arrive, and his fear of being discovered becomes a mixed emotion when he falls in love with one of them. He wants to tell her his feelings, but an anomalous phenomenon keeps them apart.

I obviously haven't come across the text myself. Though a quick google search, shows it to loosely inspire some of the elements in this film. This was one hell of a creepy film, my ghost explanation- if a little mundane, makes the most obvious sense to me. I tried to remove any notions I had about this film before I watched it because people were saying that Inception ripped this off or something. My initial idea about this film was that it was going to be a bizarre but somewhat lighthearted experience with a dreamy atmosphere. I had no idea it was so nighmarish.

Find Your Magali

RELATED: The world's longest "novel," which is Marienbad related...

http://www.marienbadmylove.com/