In the clip above, I discuss “Last Year at Marienbad,” Alain Resnais’s second feature film, from 1961. The frozen romanticism of the film—a story of a man and a woman who meet at a castle-like hotel and may or may not actually have been a couple the previous year—is not the odd element out in the director’s filmography. Rather, its psychological intrigue and its glossy, repressed images of ornate, oppressive settings are Resnais’s way of pursuing, from different angles, themes similar to those of his other, more overtly political films.
His 1959 feature, “Hiroshima Mon Amour,” from a text by Marguerite Duras, looks at the legacy of the Second World War (in particular, the atomic bomb and French collaboration with German occupiers) from the perspective of a love affair between a French woman and a Japanese man in Japan. His third feature, “Muriel,” from 1963, from a text by Jean Cayrol, confronts France’s war in Algeria and its legacy of colonialism (and, for that matter, the devastation of France itself during the Second World War) from the perspective of a family (and a defunct romance) in the city of Boulogne-sur-Mer. In “Last Year at Marienbad,” Resnais (working with a script by Alain Robbe-Grillet) avoids any explicit reference to practical politics (and, indeed, to anything about life outside the resort where it’s set, other than the weather)—yet nonetheless evokes Europe in the nineteen-thirties. He conjures a sophisticated scene of exquisite haut-bourgeois and aristocratic comfort and refinement that, by eliding any direct reference to the brewing storm, calls attention horrifically to the role that precisely such obliviousness played in the arrival of the Second World War.
Resnais, the director of “Night and Fog,” would have been unlikely to make a film with a German city name in the title—which, moreover, he filmed largely in a suburb of Munich—without facing, somehow, the fact of Germany and its critical role in modern history and, for that matter, in Resnais’s own life. Here is the terse Wikipedia passage for a rather crucial part of Resnais’s life (he was born in 1922):
Resnais himself was one of the theatrical harlequins who adorned prewar Paris as it was about to be submerged in the Nazi horror, and who, once it arrived, managed to stay afloat, until he arrived in Germany and Austria and could no longer avoid the bodies that washed up on shore, that the theatre and the sound stage had, until then, kept out of view. “Last Year at Marienbad” converted Resnais’s own experience—of a life in art in a time of war—into a drama that reveals by what it conceals.
This speculation was brought to mind by the extraordinary documentary “The Making of ‘Last Year at Marienbad,’” which I was able to see last year (and which was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image several weeks ago). The actress Françoise Spira (whose home-movie footage taken from the set is the main substance of the film) records the day trip of cast and crew to Dachau—the suburb of Munich and the remains of the concentration camp—which was just a short ride from the chateau where “Last Year at Marienbad” was shot.
Whatever else Resnais succeeded in doing with this extraordinarily beautiful, sleek, entrancing, involutedly funny and shiveringly erotic movie, he also discovered a new way to make a political film. In “Night and Fog,” Resnais had contrasted the tranquil present day with the nearly forgotten atrocities of the recent past, as a way of seeking—by way of memory—to prevent their recurrence. With “Last Year at Marienbad,” Resnais stages oblivion in the present tense and in real time, by means of his depiction of a glossy and romantic love story on which he and his viewers were lavishing much rapt attention: he asks himself, and his viewers, what coming storm of political danger he, and they, might in fact be ignoring.
