Last Year at Marienbad

Falling back on what Professor Shaviro mentioned in class, I have a tendency to see Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad in somewhat Deleuzian terms. The film works as a sort of "apparatus-brain" where a type of thought-image is constructed. The film works in terms of a "presence" that amalgamates (and conflates) various elements (space, time, movement, objects, etc). The film's ambiguities, and disjointed false continuities resemble that of a thought-image (i.e., something akin to the so-called day-dream, an abstract internalized image, a mental image). It is not so much a reconstruction of remembrance, although it appears that way on the surface, but rather a film that works in terms of image construction. The film works to display these thought possibilities and thought constructions through the way it works with the ensemble of elements. Take, for instance, the way the many outside or supporting models (actors) freeze in the various scenes. This frozen pose is similar to that of a constructed thought-image. The apparatus-brain conceives of these events in terms of the main characters, the man and the woman (at times her "husband"), and not these other figures of the film. These figures are mere setting, there are embedded in the space, as much as the statues and paintings of the mansion. This idea of the mansion, with its various doors and corridors, is analogous to the dark recesses of the mind, the constructions and memories of the mind. Yet, there is veracity in these main characters according to the apparatus-brain; this is because, as it is in the thought-image, we have, like the apparatus-brain, a sort of invested affection and conviction for our own thoughts, whether they are fictitious constructions or not. As an apparatus-brain, in the thought of the image, there are tendencies for us to try and perfect our constructions. We may, for instance, conceive of things and then later erase them because maybe they are not the perfect thought-image we want. It is this constant reconstruction of the thought-image that cycles through the film over and over. Secondly, the images, the supposed "memories", are being worked out in this apparatus' "presence". It is in a sort of "real time" that the images are composed in tandem with the voice over. So that when the male or apparatus mentions that the woman's hand was resting on the balcony she moves her hand toward the balcony and rests it there. The thought-image is a strange phenomenon. It uses our own milieu to take us away from it, and to create it anew (perhaps hoping for an ideal or perfected situation). This resolves itself in the end when the thought image reaches its pinnacle, the man and the woman leave together. The apparatus-brain reaches its own ideal scenario. The false constructions like that of a day-dream end up in a void (the black screen), they are complete, the dream is over, the desire to recreate the ideal is done. It is from this point that we end up with an absence (the supposed internal "desire"/ideal is no longer desired). Like a day-dream we do not merely ponder the same privileged images over and over ad infinitum, and if we do then our ideal or our desire is merely unattainable (which is not to say that our ideals are attainable, but in thought we can sometimes attain those things, those "ideals", which we may not be able to in any external world). This visual perusal of the internal world of the thought-image is precisely what Resnais captures. And he finishes off the whole bit with a finally perfected ideal; the apparatus-brain achieves what these so-called "memories" strived for, the union, the embrace.

Perhaps for some this seems like a far-fetched reading. However, to me, it seems a fairly reasonable read for such an abstruse film as this one.