Resnas on se!

L'ANNE DERNIEREA MARIENBAD

TRAN5LATED BY PAUL HAMMOND

Publishing

First published in 2000 by theBRITISH FILM INSTITUTE

21 Stephen Street, London W1P 2LN

Copyr1ght Jean-Louis Leutrat 2000TranslatlOn copynght Paul Hammond

The Brtish Film Institutepromotes greater understanding

and apprec1ation of, andaccess to, film and moving image

culture in the UK.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication DataA catalogue record for this book lS available from the British Library

ISBN 0-85170-821-8

Series design byAndrew Barron & Collis Clements Associates

Typeset In Fournier and Franklin Gothic byD R Bungay Associates, Burghfield, Berks

CONTENT5

1A Controversial Work 7

2The Film's Background 10

3The Genesis of the Film 17

4A Description of the Film 28

5The Two 'L'Anne dern~re aMarenbad' 52

6'L'Anne derniere aMarienbad' and the

History of Cinema 62

Notes 68

Credits 70

Bibliography 71

n memory ofmyfiuherB F I F I

1A CONTROVERSIAL WORK

th,'t,mp oLitsre1ease L'Anne derniere a Manenbad had ts fiereeas well asits staunch supporters. Among the former was Michel

lVlc)lll:let::'JL'IIO notion of aeting, no grasp of the rudiments of deor, nonarrative, nothing but pathetic Httle intellectual games which

solemnly play at being cinema.'1 Years latel' this text would echo inJ .... - . .-, ... ,.~ Loureelles's dictionary entry, where it states that Resnais's film,

most insane the cinema has ever produced', is not of 'notable'is tantamount to saying that it has none.2

In the other eamp, Jaeques Brunius wrote in 1962 in Sight and.\,;,m" th"t L'Anne derniere aMarienbad was 'the film 1had been waiting

during the last thirty years', adding: '1 am now quite prepared to claimthat Marienbad is the greatest film ever made, and to pity those whoeannot see this.'3 In 1963 the magazine Artsept published a eolleetion ofwritings on the film, whieh opened with an extraet from the letter an'ineredibly moved and dazzled' Michel Leiris had written to AlainResnais on 20 May 1961:

Subdued by the images and imbued by all the words he hears, theviewer willingly enters into the film (or allows himself to bepenetrated by id) and finds himself transfixed by an endless stream ofprodigious tableaux akin (in their eternal fixity of purpose and theirpower of fascination) to those that memories and desires can offer himat the most intense moments of his daily life - something very clase,in short, to what Sartre describes as 'prvileged sltuations'.4

Philosophers in particular were instantly enamoured of Resnais'sfilm. In 1963 Genevieve Rodis-Lewis, an expert on Descartes andMalebranehe, published a text ealled 'Mirror of My Thought' whieh endswith a superlative analysis of the long 'bleaehed-out' traeking shot:

An absolutely cinematk language is elaborated here which reachesthe intellect only when it has first passed through the senses, as thephilosophers would sayo This is the paroxysm of desire, the vertigoof amour fOu, an invention particular to Resnais, rather than the

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hs. w()rk.-sbIV v\Tor'k at once constructed and deconstructed, in whchmeticulously foreseen save the essental, namely the breeze thatt away, the grace that suffuses t, the inestmable and time1ess

exudes, this work of whch we mainly retam the frame,wb.atever we might do with ths, one of the hgh ponts of thelmlglinary of our time, large1y lives through the presence of thebeings who populate ir: they cast a shadow n places (those famousyews lopped into pyramids) where no shadow is cast.9

hieratic, coldly dishevelled, starchi1y fluid, playfullyW)rCIUS, casually deliberate, glacially frenetic', adding:

For the novelist Jean-Louis Bory L 'Anne derniere aMarenbadwasobsessve and difficult film. 10 Disturbing because tpsychological realism, and its corollares causality and

hn,earlty, nto queston. Obsessive because it's necessary to see it manyand to allow one's admiration to gradually give way to emotion.

lJiJ:hcultbecallseit requires the spectator to make an effort to engage witht surely is. Difficult depends on the viewer. As for

disturibing, the word seems excessive: if we grant to a film the possibilitya poetic rather than traditionally fictional ambiton, if we do

cinema to be a mechanism meant exclusvely for tellingif we accept that a work might surprise us and propose something

ditter1ent to what we're accustomed to, then thisfilm is no moreciistw:Jbng than ir s obscure, something it has often been reproached for

In derniere el Marenbad a game s made of the rules.are peces on a checker or chessboard, sorne cards, with a

tral::lton;a! Western setting: a chateau and a garden. The film's deviationsas complex as those of the human heart. L'Anne derniere el Marienbad

dernarlds that it be submitted to the 'reasons' of the heart.

Resnais's film. The personwas capable of produeing

whilCh .t p,erhaps stH! pr'od1llce:s) 1~. 1 "JJJ

A lain ResnaisBorn on 3 June 1922 in the Brittany town of Vannes, A1ain Resnais wastheonly child of an average midd1e-class family. His father was apharmacist. He went to a religious schoo1: '1 had a very strict Catholicupbringing in Brittany,' he has said,'and 1 hate thinking back to mychildhood.' Subject to attacks of asthma, he was of delicate health. Hismother encouraged his education and would seem to have given him ataste for classical music. His parents had a property in the Golfe duMorbihan. He was to recall this landscape in Mon Oncle d'Amrique:

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Alain Robbe-Grillet.f.;ikeIResnais, Alain Rohhe-Grillet is Breton in origin; like him he wasB?r~ in 1922,on 18 August, in Brest. He received his secondary andhighrr education in Paris. He hecame an agronomist and worked at the!'{atipnal Statistics Institute, afterwards doing lahoratory research inJ:i81(;Jgy. In 1950-1 he was an engineer at the Institute of Tropical and.(2itrusFruits. He was sent on missions to Morocco, Guinea, MartiniquealldGuade10upe. He puhlished hisfirst novel, Les Gommes, in 1953. Twoyears 1ater he became a literary adviser at ditions de Minuit. That same),eathe published his first articles and his second novel, Le Voyeur, whichwas awarded the Critics' Prize. Dans le labyrinthe (1959) '\Vas his thirdnoveL In 1961 he worked on L'Anne derniere el Marienbad, of which hewas the.script and dialogue writer. Two years later he made his first film,L?mmortelle, and published Pour un nouveau romano Since then he has hadacareer as writer, film-maker and lecturer.

output grew during the 50s. Short fi1ms in the first instance,ome of which, like Nut et brouillard (1955) and Toute la mmore du

iflonde (1956), brought him renown. Hiroshma mon amour (1959) washisfirstfeature. The latter part of the 60s marked a change in his sty1e.La. Guerre est finie in 1966 appeared to deviate from his earlieri'experimental' work. In 1967 he directed a sequence in Lon de Vietnam"andin 1968, at the request of Chris Marker, he fi1med a cine-tracto May'@saw the re1ease of le t'ame, je t'aime; which was a commercialailu.re. Resnais received no more offers and 1eft for New York, whereeremained from 1969 (the year he married Florence Malraux) to 1971,orking on a number of projects which carne to nothing, notably withhe~omics creator Stan Lee (The Monster Maker, 1970; The Inmates,

1971). He also proposed Conan to a producer, without success. His8ate~r took off again in 1974 with Biarrtt-Bonheur (or Stavisky), a;vork that was badly received by the critics, hut which proved asuccessyvith! the publico

painters followed in 1947. Myriam, the film editor, got him a JobLe Roman d'un trcheur. He was assistant editor in 1947 on Nicole

i;Yledres's Pars 1900, and subsequently editor on many films between ..l;I'L~I\. Pierre Braunberger suggested he make a seriesof shorts. This

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~eRenewal01 Cinema4e'!50s were of great rchness where cinema is concerned. They werel~oimarked in France by the development of film criticism, notablyrO}lgh magazines like Cahiers du Cinma, Positif, Cinma, lmage etn,'\and the weekly columns published in Les Lettres ftanfaises, Arts,~tc.ln 1958 Andr Bazin, critic on Cahiers du Cinma, of which he was to~Olll~ degree the main theorist, died. His development of crticism~(;cuptomed a certan kind of viewer to a more intellectualapproachtQwards films; it 'lIso led to greater reflection on cinema and its reciprocalrelation with the other arts.

In 1958-9 many directors created works of vital mportance:Jvlichelangelo Antonioni (ll Grido) , Ingmar Bergman (Wild Strawberries) ,Luchino Visconti (White Nights), Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo), Orson"Welles (Touch 01 EYi!), Anthony Mann (Man 01 the West), HowardHawks,(Rio Brayo). Other major works, such as Kenji Mizoguchi's UgetsuMonogotari (1953), were seen in the West for the first time. Hollywoodclasscism entered its termnal phase. In~uropeand in other countries new

8General de Gaulle exercised the power he'd obtained as President of.)W~Republic. Coming immediately after the war in Indo-China, thef\.lgeran conflict weghed heavily in the po1itical balance of the time.

qonomically, France acceded to mass consumerism. Family incomesent on rising. The new franc was created; the Common Market carne

ltobeng. There was nothing to either confirm or to deny assertonstablishing a mechanistic relation between works of art and the politico-

Q9nomic context of ther elaboration, yet such assertons do not allow uspget very far nunderstanding these works.

Such an approachhas obviously been tred in relation to L'Anne~rniere l Marienbad. At the time of its release - and ths is still true todaythe" film appeared, in effect, as an expression of the critique of

\literariness' to which the nouyeau roman bore witness. The school of the~,theabsence of man, the bias towards things and objects, arei~ons which, it might be thought, be10nged to Resnais as well,ecially since at the end of the 50s and early 60s the film-maker worked

thlwriters associated with the nouyeau roman. L'Anne derniere larienbad has 'lIso been likened to Lus Buuel's Exterminating Angel

\1962), owng to the theme of confinement in a sngle place - theR9nfinement, of course, oCa social class.

DERNIERE A MARIENBAD

'Nouyeau Roman'Claude Lvi-Strauss, and the first volume of hisAnthroplogie structurale,announced the arrival of structuralism; in January 1959 a colloquum wasorganised around the word 'structure'. Roland Barthes proposed a newapproach to 'classical' wrters (Michelet, for examp1e, and then Racne).In the literary field at the beginning of the 60s, and according to theprincipIe of the overlapping of the generations, authors like LouisAragon, RaymondQueneau and Jean-Pau1 Sartre occuped pride ofplace, while the representatives of the 'New Novel' began producngther first works: Michel Butor (La Modification, 1957), A1an Robbe-Grillet (La}alousie, 1957), Nathalie Sarraute (L'Ere du souPfon, 1956),Jean Cayrol (Le Vent de la mmoire, 1951), Marguerite Duras (ModeratoCantahile, 1958), Claude Simon (Le Vent, 1957), Robert Pinget (GraalFilibuste, 1957), and Robbe-Grillet published his programmaticstatement 'A Way Ahead for the Novel of the Future'.

As it is, the name of Robbe-Grillet s linked to the nouYeau roman, aterm

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On coming out of the cinema 1plonked myself down on the edge ofthe pavement and sat rigid for a good five minutes, then 1found myself

:I(ast,Rouch, Rivette,ones(Bresson, Cocteau). Even if account is taken oflinkingResnais .to some of these film-makers the names will

ii:endure. The Same is true for the foreign dir;ctors, with Antonioni~izoguchi, Bergman, Wajda, Satyajit Ray, Cassavetes, Hawks, Welles;Lmg, Hitchcock. Resnais gave his views on sorne of these film-makers(tpmention only the Italians): of Michelange10 Antonioni, 'At a certainlevel 1 actually believe our preoccupations overlap'; and of Luchino

.Visconti, 'Do 1like him? It's more than that! Have you seen White Nights. in..theoriginal Italian version? ... He extracts arare charm from

l~rguage.I saw the film six times.':1 Resnais's relationship with the cinemabegan very early on. Vannesll~d two cinemas, but he was only allowed into the local one, where heenthused over Robn Hood and Julien Duvivier's Mystere de la tour EifJel

oth 1923). At nine he saw Jean Epstein's Mor Vran (1931) and Or desers (1932). His cousin also showed him films on Path-Baby projector:

adocumentary, an animated cartoon and a Harold Lloyd (HauntedSpooks, 1920), plus Abel Gance's Napoleon (1926). In 1936 Resnais shot a,,~rsion of Fantmas on 8mm, using local kids from Vannes as the actorscOllverting a small room into a cinema. He showed Charlie Chase andL~urel and Hardy films there each week, and every two months a feature.'Istarted practising that technique [accompanying the projection of asilent film with music] when 1was eleven or twelve; 1used to put on film

for my friends at eleven on a Thursday morning, with moviesthe Cinmatheque Kodak, and I'd play gramophone records.'In 1936 Resnais continued his education in Paris, lodging with awho took in boarders. Thursdays and Sundays he went to the

'1 remember that after seeing John Ford's The Inftrmer 1disola'ved such enthusiasm in front of this priest that he gave me themckmlme "Simple Alain".' In 1942 Resnais worked as an extra on Les

du soir. He frequented the by now legendary cinemas Studio 28Les Ursulines (with presentations by Langlois, who 'never managedtojt1m~h a sentence'). At the Cinmatheque he discovered Feuillade in

and again in 1944, plus the writings of Jean Epstein, such as BonjourLa Regle dujeu (1939) was a revelation:

forms were appearing. A transformation was at work which attempted toaddress the fact that the situation, the viewpoint one could have of theworld, had changed. The cinema was obliged to communicate this idea ofcomplexity while taking care, as far as Resnais was concerned at least, toaddress itself to the viewer 'in a critical way. To achieve this [he] tries tomake films which aren't natural. Realistic cinema, the reconstitution ofeveryday life, the reproduction of gestures, is something [he] doesn't findinteresting.' 11

Although in France the cinema represented by Ren Clair, MarcelCarn, Julien Duvivier, Claude Autant-Lara and Christian-Jaque hadentered into decline, sorne of the works that would commend themselvesto the so-called New Wave directors were just then appearing: Une Vie(Alexandre Astruc), Mon Oncle (Jacques Tati), Deux Hommes dansManhattan (Jean-Pierre Melville), Pickpocket (Robert Bresson). Gettingtheir chance to direct were Louis Malle (Les Amants and Ascenseurpourl'chafaud), Georges Franju (La Tte contre les murs), Jean Rouch (Moi,un Noir) and Fran

B F I FILMANNE DERNIERE A MARIENBAD

walking the streets of Paris for a coup1e of hours. Everything wastopsy-turvy, aH my ideas about dnema had been turned upside-down.My impressions were so strong during the projecton that if certainsequences had been 10nger by as much as a shot they'd have reducedme to tears or to hysterics.

Other favourites included Cocteau's Le Sang d'un poete (1930) and thefilms of Sacha Gutry.

The desire to go into directing was to grow out of this fertileenvironment:

l'd been present as a youngster at a performance of Ceux de chez nousat the Thihre de la Made1eme, and Sacha Guitry had shown us clipsfrom the fi1ms he'd made on painters like Renoir, Monet and Degasand on other famous people like Sarah Bernhardt. 1said to myse1f thatmaybe it would be amusing to show painters when they're young andnot in their dotage.

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3THE GENESIS Of THE FILM

The Resnais/Robbe- Grille! collaborationBy 1961 Resnais was accustomed to working with wrters. He'd beenstruck, in 1943, by the beauty of the 1anguage n RobertBresson's LesAnges du pch: 'Someone had finally asked Giraudoux to write ascript.' Two years later the 'intense musicality' of Cocteau's dialoguefor Les Damesdu Bois de Boulogne ?elighted him. After collaboratingwth Raymond Queneau and Paul Eluard, Resnas joined forces withJean Cayrol, Marguerite Duras and finally Alain Robbe-Grillet. In 1965Claude Simon crossed swords with Erc Rohmer during a lively debate;he used Resnas's work to argue that 'modern cinema could not existwere it not for the subjectve image, that is, unless the image was a

as t is n Resnais.' Ths echoed a remark made by.ttolnne~lTrlllf't in 1963 about the attraction cinematic creation had for

New Novelists:

It isn't the objectvity of the camera that enthuses them, but ltspossibilities in the domain of the subjectlve, of the imaginary. Theydon't conceive of dnema as a means of expression, but of research,and what most c1aims their attention is, naturaHy, what was mostlacking in the means of literature: name1y,not so much the image butthe soundtrack - the sound of voices, different noises, atmospheres,kinds of musc ~ and aboye aH the possibility of acting on two sensesat once, the eye and the ear. 12

In June 1959 Hiroshima mon amour was presented to the public;during winter 1959-60 two producers, Pierre Courau and RaymondFroment, arranged a meeting between Alain Resnais and AlanRobbe-Grillet. The director hadn't read any of the nove1ist's books,

he made up for lost time. As for Robbe-Grillet, he was preparingto shoot a film, a project he would set aside to 'Xork with Resnais.The two men spoke at length and were to 'come to an understanding?n the notion ofexploring non-narratve "cinematic forms" based

certan indecipherable quality'.13 In an ntervew Robbe-Grillet

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We began by speaking of things like glances that are directed off-screen, what linkages are needed when relations of causality arealtogether uncertain, ambiguity, the obscure nature of the slightestamorous adventure. And we found that we were agreed on aH that.The question of defining an anecdote was something for later: theimportant thing was in the telling. As long as the kinds of form wereagreed on, we'd be able to think up the subject.14

Robbe-Grillet proposed four subjects, L'Immortelle (a project he'dalready completed), a story taking place in a cinema studio, another onein the countryside, and a project entitled L'Anne derniere (the'Marienbad' would come later). A series of discussions followed aimedat making a choice. 'We chose the one l found the most sentimental andaustere,' thedirector has said. Next, Robbe-Grillet handed in a week1yinstalment, until the task was complete. The whole thing was presentedas an image-by-image description, with dialogue and indications aboutcamera movements and sound. This work over, the two men discussedit at length (eight days of talks) and reached total agreement, as theystated to the press. They then went their separate ways, Robbe-Grilletleaving for Brest, then Turkey, with Resnais preparing and directing thefilm.

With Robbe-Grillet in lstanbul, Resnais said they had 'a friendlycorrespondence which l bare1y recal!. l asked him to modify four or fivereplies out of the craftsman-like wish of being more fully understood bythe publico He took pleasure in copying them out for me in hismagnificent handwriting.'15 lt's interesting to note here that Resnaisc1aimed to remember only the handwriting of Robbe-Grillet. We willreturn to this at the end of the chapter.

When Robbe-Grillet, now back from Turkey, saw the film hediscovered that Resnais had added 'a bit of psychology'. Resnaisrecalled:

He didn't take me to task because he found it 'very beautiful, in aword', but he merrily and good-humouredly added that on that scoreI'dbetrayed him. What he also questioned, while recognising itseffectiveness for the public, was the music. He found it too sugary, toolimp, too sentimental. He'd have liked something aggressive, morestrident. On top of that, I think he'd imagined other actors. 16

of at the time of the film's release, the agreement betweenU1t;L\\'U men was to all intents and purposes a mere fa

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describe the mental state of a par-ticular individual, or even of agroup of people. TheBibliotheque Nationale s, firstand foremost, a mental space: itdoesn't facilitate a return to thepast it is, rather, the image of acollective future alreadynscribed n the presento Thecomparisons which go to formthe description of theBibliotheque (prison, hospital)are a11 prescient variations onwhat Foucault has called 'theGreat Confinement'. Confine-ment does not refer to the turningback on itself of consciousness,but to an endeavour n which thewhole human race is trapped

nside an immense, labyrinthine laboratory. This theme of the labyrinth isalso found in Robbe-Grillet, who published Dans le labyrnthe n 1959.

It is quite possible, what's more, todiscover further para11elsbetween Robbe-Grillet's world and that of L'Anne derniere ti Marenbad- t would be astonishing were this not so. In LaJalousie a young woman(A) is the central character around whom hover Franck, her potentiallover, and an invsible narrator,a fanatical observer, probably herhusband. The situaton is not without echoes of the film, in the 'scenario'of whch the young woman is designated by the same letter; added towhich the arrival, or the presence 'last year', of someone called Franck isrepeatedly announced by the occupants of the hotel. Nevertheless, thefact should not be ignored that Resnas has literary tastes which have ledhm in a direction other than that of the nouveau romano At the age offourteen he discovered Cocteau's Le Potomac, then the Surrealists,Philippe Soupault's Le Bon Aptre, and afterwards Le Paysan de Pars,Nadja and the Manifestoes of Surrealism.As a child his sensibility alsodeveloped in aclimate conducive to the supernatural. One of hischildhood readings was La Lgende de la mort che{ les Bretons armorcains[TIte Legendof DeathAmong theArmorican Bretons] by Anatole Le Braz.Archite,cture as p~;ycrlic ~;tate: Vertigo

His grandmother's sister was famous for having seen from her windowthe funeral procession of a woman neighbour who was considered to bein perfect health and whose death had been unannounced; the latter wasto occur eght days later, wth the processon passing exactly as theprophetess had seen 1t, thanks to a leap-forward in time. The strangeadventure that had befallen his grandfather's uncle was often recountedto the youngAlan. The man had come across a ghostly figure inscribinga particular latltude and longitude in the log of the ship he captained.This gave the position of a vessel that was snking. At the prow of the firstlifeboat returnngwth the survvors stood the ghost.

lt could be argued that the film s closest to a literary tradition towhcha writer faithful to Andr Breton and Surrealism, to Julien Gracq(who has wrtten some extremely harsh things about Robbe-Grillet'swork), or, going further back n time, to a 'Romantc' like Grard deNerval belongs. We read, in Gracq's Le Rivage des Syrtes: '1 proceededto slowly move from room to room, while castng a bored glance at thefrozen saraband of theceilings and frescoes, like some museum vistor.'We recognse the slow tracking shot at the begnning of the film; wemay also recall the young woman in L'Anne derniere a Mamnbadthanks the man who has just been describing the ornamental detail onthe hotel wa11s to her with the words: 'I'd never had such a good gudebefore.' In one of Nerval's narratives, Sylvle, we never know whattime-frame we're in: the beloved s now a peasant girl, now an actress,now a young noblewoman who has withdrawn to a convent, etc. Eachevening the suitor is present, like a spectator in the theatre, at a magicalritual of regeneration. We may ask ourselves if the spectacle to Wh1Chwe're invited by the opening of L'Anne derniere aMarienbad does notplay just such a regenerative role.

Resnais manifests a love of theatre unknown in Robbe-Grillet.During his childhood the theatre n Vannes offered him only the mostmediocre of entertainments:

[it] was so much in ruins that people used to sit on garden chairs, andthey took the precautlOn of bringing blankets and umbre11as because,in the event of a downpour, the rain came right through theauditorium roof. The entrance was very strange. In the tmy streetthere were two absolutely identical porches with nothmg to tell themaparto One led to the theatre and the other to the Gents.

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On the otherhand, when he used to visit Paris at Christmas and Easterwthhis grandfatherhe saw anumber of plays that captvated him: La Guerre deTroie n 'aurapas lieu, wth Louis Jouvet; Le Falseur, with Charles Dullin;La Fin du monde, wth Sacha Gutry; Henri Bernstein's Espoir, withClaude Dauphin; and especially Pitoeff in La M ouette at the Mathurins in1937, which triggered an undying passion in him for the theatre.

Other differences exist between Resnais and Robbe-Grillet.Resnais is interested in comic strips and popular novels (he has nevermade any secret of his passion for Jean Ray's Les Ayentures de HarryDickson), while Robbe-Grillet is more attracted to the photo-novel andmagazine images. The obsessive return, n both hisfilms and hs novels,to the stereotyped eroticism transmtted by these magazines is absolutelyalien to Resnais. However, t mustn't be forgotten that the nouyeau romanhas two 'currerits': one that may be called descrptive or scientific,resulting in the impersonal vision of a universe reduced to a sum of'objects'; and the other 'subjectivist', leading to a more oneiric orsymbolic literature. Convergences and divergences are the arder ofthings,then; they constitute one aspect of thefilm which deservesparticular atterition, because n it a majar moment within Europeanctlltureis subtly in play.

TheFilmingResnais's different collaboratorshave been unusually forthcomng. Wecan, then, retrace the various stages of the film and even try and imaginewhat it mght have become if Resnais had had greater means at hisdisposal: Tve never made such a difficult film. Resnais is the first to findthe film a bit slap-dash. And 1agree with him.'18

The anecdotes can be set alongside each other. For instance, theconnection between one of the characters mentoning the water in theornamental ponds which had frozen over 'last year' and the cold weatherthat occurred during shooting: 'Imagine what t means to film in anevening dress in those freezing rooms.' 19 The set designer JacquesSaulnier also tells us that 'the Marienbad set was in colours... , The wallswere pink and the mouldings silver. This pink tone was extremely odd,but it photographed beautifully, a beautiful grey.'2

Saulnier was takenon four months befare shooting. He had aconversation at that time with Robbe-Grillet 'who didn't give muchaway'. The location where the film was to be shot was the subject of sorne

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Resnals directing Giorgio rAlbertazzi and Seyng

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hesitation: Ax-Ies-Bains, perhaps? The novelist hadthe Cercle interallin mind. Why not? The India of Duras's India Song (1975) would besuggested by such anachronisms. 'To begin with everything was to bearranged in Pars, and 1 remember vlsiting the Hotel d'Orsay, at the farend of the Gare d'Orsay, because Kast, who often stayed there, had toldus it had a corridor 150 metres long, and that we absolutely had to see it.It was a bit of a le, there was practcally nothng left of t.'21 Finally thelocations would be on the outskirts of Munich: Nymphenburg,Amalienburg, Schleissheim, the Munich Antiquarium.

Sorne of the anecdotes are, of course, about technical problems.According to the lighting cameraman Sacha Vierny the first few dayswere extremely hard. The film was in 'Scope. According to Jean Lon theuse made of this was 'astonishing'}2 Philippe Brun, the camera operator,has described how 'We shot, then, in 50mm 'Scope, which is the lensnormally used when there 's movement.'23 And Sacha Vierny:

While the 'Scope format usually implies a certain immobility,somethng extremely statc, Resnas had a field day with cameramovements, low angle tracking shots. There was nothing off-handabout this; on the contrary, it's a question of a hghly lucd andintelligent use of methods that could give cause for alarmo TheDyaliscope company helped us a lot technically. In particular theymade me, 1still have them, the bifocallenses 1used in Marienbad to getcertan depth-of-field effects.24

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didn't add much, except that in the event it found great favour. l, onthe other hand, had described a music to set one's teeth on edge.lnstead of this beautiful, captivating continuity, I was after a structureof absences and shocks; with percussive elements in the widest sense,not just drums and cymbals. I'd imagined a composition based on theessentialIy real noises one hears in a hotel, in particular in an old-fashioned hotel like that one. Lift doors, for instance, those metaldoors on hinged rods that make a very beautiful sound if properlyrecorded; or then again the ringing of different belIs: the porter's, thechambermaid's, etc.', more or less strident or distant; and the wholething composed with footsteps, isolated notes, shouts.

TheMusteThe music was one of the things that deeply divided Resnais and Robbe-Grillet. The latter considered that the music Resnais wanted

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Contrary to what many people think, Marienbad isn't a prefabricatedfilm in whch everything was arranged in advance. Certain gestureswhich seem highly studied are simply the result of my awkwardness.Many scenes were improvised on the spot. I'm thinking, for instance,of the one where l roll against the bedroom mirrors. We didn't know,on the actual morning of the filming, what we were going to do. Iwandered about the room, trying out gestures, poses, until Alain said:'That one, that's goOd.'27

It's obvious that the writer and director didn't understand the word'music', as used in cinema, in exactly the same way. Resnais is not someonewithout his own ideas about music, and hence on the way to utilise it in a

Francis Seyrig, the composer, was brought into things 'a goodmonth too late'. He wrote the music between 20 February and 28 March,beginning with 'the stronger passages, the fifth and seventhreels'. He hadphotos of each shot at his disposal, 'which enabled me to make a diagramwith coloured pencils, to control the musical themes, revert back to themagain, etc.'.28 After first thinking of Versailles, the recording of the organwas finally made at the Louvre Oratory, with Marie-Louise Girod as thesoloist. During certain passages a delicate sound mix of organ andorchestra music had to be undertaken.29

Seyrig Improvlslng

lt's in this film that l did one of the most difficult shots of my !ife. Webegan with Albertazzi in very big close-up beside a mirror in whichtwo actors were reflected. We had a lens attachment called a bonnette, abifocal lens whch enables you to have a sharp face in the foregroundand sharp backgrounds. This is what you do: you !ine up a vertical atthe centre of the image with the bonnette, you focus ir at 12 and the lensgives you Albertazzi's face in the focal plane; behind him the wall isout-of-focus, but in the mirror the two actors are sharp. All that's atthe beginning of the shot. After that the camera dispenses with thebonnette. The actors were coming and going as one slowly pulIed backin this Amalienberg salon, whch had to be an octagonal salon withcant-walIs. We were shooting wth a BNC, a Mitchell camera with aclear viewfinder, that's to say with parallax. We had thirty camerapositions, and the viewfinder's lack of precsion made things verydifficult.25

Philippe Brun recalled that

Actording to Henri Colpi, the chiefeditor, the final shooting scriptwas so welI-organised that the editing went without a hitch and therewere only a few 'dodgy' moments, one of which was the sequenceshifting back and forth between bar and bedroom.26 In actual fact,although the shooting script was extremely precise, in terms of detailthere was a significant amount of improvisation during th~ shooting.Delphine Seyrig is eloquent on this:

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film. He has, indeed, a reputation for this. The 50s were in fact musicallyvery interesting and there's no doubt that Resnais c10sely followed whatwas being written at the time in this area. The decade began with liverMessiaen's Quatre itudes de rythmepourpano. The second of these studieshad an enormous infiuence on the younger generation of musicians. Afriend of Messiaen's, Andr Jolivet, created a Concerto pour pano etorc'hestre (1951) and a Concerto pour harpe et orchestre (1952), while HenriDutilleux composed two Symphonies (1951 and 1959). Jean Barraqu'sSanate (1952) was one of the major serial scores of the post-war periodoAmong the orchestral works of the time by Messiaen, one should noteRveil des oiseaux (1953) and Oiseaux exotiquespourpiano etpet orchestre(1956), a work commissioned by Pierre Boulez for the Domaine musicalconcerts he set up in 1954. The first two seasons took place at the Petit-Marigny theatre. The public was able to hear works by Webern,Schoenberg, Varese, Messiaen, selections from Stravinsky and Debussy.Boulez decided to apply the serial concept to all kinds of sound; in 1957 hecorriposed his Troisieme sonate pourpiano, in which he ventured onto theterrain of the aleatory. In 1959 he settled in Germany. Concurrently, PierreScaeffer and his Concrete Music Ensemble took off in another direction.

creation of important works by Hans Werner Henze andbyK.arlh.enlzStockhausen, who followed Messiaen's teaching in 1952-3 at

moment as Iannis Xenakis, who developed his theory ofrando1ll music in 1956. During the same period a number of BenjaminBritten operas were mounted.

The use of the organ on the soundtrack was Resnais's idea. He'dthought of asking liver Messiaen to compose the music for his film. Thelatter politely dec1ined the offer. The director then consulted his friendPierreBarbaud, the musician on Le Mystere de l'atelier quin{e (1957) andLeChant du Styrene (1958),30 'to whom, for months on end, he playsanutnber of very different works: for example an opera by the Swedishcornpc)ser Blomdah1. Barbaud thinks he 's understood: he proposesAe:naJils.The idea doesn't work out.'31 Resnais finally got in touch withFrancis Seyrig, a Messiaen student. Seyrig would say:

At the beginning1didn't really understand what he was after. He wentall around the houses and didn't seem to know exactly what t was hewanted. He'd told me, right off, to do something extremely modernoFor three weeks we tred things out on the organ, using the low notes,

then the hgh. He listened, we discussed it. Inthe end 1realised thathewanted Wagnerian touches for the love-story sde of the film, but alsoa 1925 fee1, plus modern bits, all mixed together.32

Resnas wanted 'functonal' but also lyrical music, the sound curveof W~chwould reproduce that of the film. Ths image of the curve, of itsplottmg so to speak, is essential: it is somethng which seemed to obsessResnais, and which functions as a connecting thread in the 'scenario' ofL'Anne derniere aMarz'enbad. Music was needed that would blend withthe dcor. It's certan that Jacques Saulnier he1ped crystallise the visualconception of the dcor for Resnais:

One day 1showed him a photo of the private apartments of the CrownPrnce n Schonbrunn, wlth German-style wanscoting, the sInusodalforms of whch interested him a lot. We constructed a somewhat widercornice with oeils-de-boeufat the top, but the overall shape complete1yrespected ths snusoidal formo So 1 took off from this dea. Wedevised some panels and reworkedcertan sculptures which werecarved n these panels,the motif of which made him thnk he said of, ,the repetiton of a musical phrase.33

The film had encountered its form, then, its space and its rhythm. It wasth.e assumption of this decorative aspect which helped the connectonwlth the writing to function, the 'magnificent handwrting' of the letters{rom Turkey and of the scenario that Resnas must sometmes havevisually hallucinated, just as he auditively hallucinated Robbe-Grillet's

langu~ge: '1 neededa sound. Robbe-Grillet's language soundsmagmficent, it hypnotises YOU. It's true music. r reckon there must beforty minutes of speech in Marienbad. It could almost be sung. It's like anopera libretto with very beautiful and very simple words, which areendlessly repeated.'34The strength of L'Anne derniere aMarienbadliesi~ its havng been imagined by Resnais, between statuary and opera,sInusOIdal form and abstraction: '1 think one can arrive at a cinemawith~ut psychologically defined characters, in which the play ofemotlons would be m moton, as n a contemporary paintng where theplay of forms contrves to be stronger than the anecdote.'

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A DESCRIPTION OF THE FILM

All Stories TogetherLet's not forget that L'Anne derniere could have been a detective film.Somethng would remain of that initial project - beginning with a silhou-ette of Hitchcock glimpsed during one shot. Trails and false trails, royalroads and culs-de-sac all go to make up the scenario of the film. A journal-ist was to remark in Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's presence that there wasoften a character looking attentively off-screen in the film. Resnas com-mented: 'That's Robbe-Grillet's Piero della Francesca side. There'salways afigure in Piero dellaFrancescawho'slookingbeyond the frame.'35Robbe-Grillethimself declared that itwas indaily life that they'd detectedthese kind of looks and discussed them. To which we might add that suchlooks are very frequent n the films of Antonioni, and that Piero dellaFrancesca would be one of Godard's references in Le M pris (1963).

There are three main characters in thehotel setting: a woman (A)and two men (X and M). M is perhaps her husband and X her lover. Xwants to persuade the woman that they've already met the year beforeand that at that time she'd promised to leave with him ayear later, that is,'now'. The woman resists this extremely unusual attempt at sducton.All the questions are posed in relaton to this schema: s one of thecharacters telling the truth? Did they really meet? If so, was seductoninvolved? Or rape? Did she promse? Is she pretending to haveforgotten? Has she really forgotten? Is M her husband? Her brother? Isthere incest here? And so on. Robbe-Grillet was to insist:

The questions you were mostlike1yto ask yourse1f were: did ths manand ths woman really meet and fall in love last year n Marienhad?Does the young woman remember and merely pretend not torecognise the handsome stranger? Or has she indeed forgotteneverything that has passed between them? Etcetera. Let's get onething straght: these questionshave no meanng.

We can,furtherrnore, recount the story of the film in anotherway. Ina place which is not unlikeakind oflimbo, rnidway between life and death,a number of human beings, isolated from the world and to all intents and

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purpos,es dead, pass their time in idle and repetitve pursuts. A man (X)comes III search of awoman he knew ayearbefore, while she was alive and

~ell; he tries to convince her that she is still alive and that she must go wthh1m III order to escape ths baleful world. Still ensnared in that world sheresis,ts, and he lets himself be gradually caught in the trap. As an adju;ct toth1S lllterpr;tatlon, the stO? echoes that ancient Breton legend in which,after a year s stay of executlon, Death comes looking for ts victim. Morethan ?ne detail s~ggests this: the mmobile servants, 'doubtless long sncedead ; the comphment addressed to the woman, 'You seem lively'; or thestatement she makes, 'You're like a shadow'; or there again, this fragmentof a couple's conversaton, 'We live like two coffins side by sde n the

froze~ ground of a garden'; andin one of the very last images as, framed inthe d1stance X and A go off together, the curtains around the door under

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ARIENBAD

The waltz: an intlmation ofmortality

which they pass are like the drapes of a catafalque. And not to overlook thevery slow waltz (which recurs three times), since it's known that Resnais,who likes this movement a lot, finds it sinister and disturbing, an intimationof mortality.

The name of the play to be performed in the luxury hotel is Rosmer,'an a11usion to Ibsen's Rosmersholm, a play aboutfather--daughter rela-tioris that Freud and Rank judged to be incestuous', according to RobertBenayoun,36 who sees here the ha11mark of Robbe-GrilIetwho'd ima?inedthefigure of M with grey hair. Given that the title doesn't appear m thescreenplay, and that Mhas jet-blackhair in the film,it mustbe assumed thatResnais had something to do with it, thus retaining (perhaps) a trace of thewriter's original intention, and dropping in amore secret, secondary refer-ence to Ibsen: When We DeadAwaken, or Ghosts are fitting titles for thefilm. 37 As in Ghosts, the source of the action in Rosmersholm is the humanworldhaunted by the emphatic presence of the absentlpresent dead. Thepresence of the dead Felicebecomes stronger and stronger as the play goeson. The fo11owing phrase uttered by one of the characters ~ '1 fear we '11soon be hearing ghosts spoken of' - is perfectly consonant with L'Annederniete aMarienbad. On top ofthat, Ibsen's play enables us to establish alinkbetween this and another of Resnais's films: the fascination exerted inthe play by the milI-race and the river announce a similar fascination forthe fast~flowingwaters of L 'Amouramort.38

We can be sure of Resnais and Robbe-GrilIet's consensus that 'thismanand this woman only begin existing when they appear on screen forthe first time; prior to that they're nothing; and, after the projection is

over~ th~y're nothing once again.' Each person can and must interpret thefilm m hls/her own way. To begn wth, it can be argued there have beenas many films as there were co11aborators. Beginning with Robbe-Grillet:what mages did he have in mind while he was putting his text together?And Resnais, what was he seeing in his mind's eye while Robbe-GrilIetwas workingon the script?

. Certain o~ these 'mental' films grew out of the needs of the Job: thedIa?ram the scnpt supervisor Sylvette Baudrot drew up, for example,WhlCh in both its 'short' and 'long' versions has since become famous (it's~ee? ~eproduced in Cahiers du Cinma). A lack of chronologicalmdIcatlOns led her to elaborate the diagram, organising data according toan X and y axis:

On the X-axs, from left to right, the sma11 black rectangles representthe sequences in the arder they appear on the screen, each of whichcan have several shots (there are 430 shots, spread over 120sequences). Each rectangle corresponds to a change of set: the 'gallerycorridors' (shots 1 to 18), the theatre (19 to 39), the 'twn corridors'(shot 40), the Schlessheim hallway (41), and so on. Also indicated arethe three main roles (A, X and M) and the number of their costumeplus the presence, or otherwise, of extras. On the Y-axs, the thre~man areas represent time: at the bottom the present, at the top the past(last year), and in between an intermediary area which has helped megraphical1y separate the present from the past more c1early, and whichrepresents what one mght call 'time in general' (in his shootng sCriptResnals spoke of 'eternty' shots). Lined up in the middle, theseemphatic black touches were to represent shots that had no precisedate, everythng that was future time or timeless.39

This 'time in general' series would, according to Bernard Pingaut, grouptoge~er a 'successon of static views, or travelling shots along thecorndors, shots of promenades in the garden - dead time, a sort of puredescription escaping the rgorous order of the narrative'. 40 Thecontingency which, of itself, was to lead to finding a classification for the

~hots and to situating them in time leads, fina11y, to one of the possiblemterpretations of the film.

A furtherfilm is the one elaborated in the minds of the actors accord-ing to how they envisaged their characters. Delphine Seyrig tho~ght that

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In Marzenbad, for example, there was a very long scene in whchDelphine Seyrig and Albertazzi walk side by side down a corridor. Weshot i~ in three different corridors, and to make things even morecomphcated, 1t was llltended to be a contnuity scene for the dialogueas well as for the rhythm. We shot one secton in a castle atNymphenburg, another section in a castle at Schleissheim and thethird section, whch in fact carne first in the order of the f.ilm ~e filmedin th~ studio at the end of shootng. We'd put potted plants'so that the

contlllu~ty between the potted plants might disguise the passage fromone sectlon of corridor to another, but Resnais didn't want to hide thefact that three different corridors were lllvolved.44

derniere el Marienbad is based on the kind of play whch opposes, to theCartes1alllsm of conscious Jife, the baroque nature of our memory andour affectlve life.

This oppostion exsts but it s precise up to a point. In effect nterior andexteror contaminate one another. For example, two knds of mouldeddoors exst, those that hark to the Baroque and those that reproduce theground plan of the formal garden as seen onthe engraving: two paths intheof?rm of a cross, with a rotunda at the centre. The painter Giorgio deChmco has spoken of the effect produced on him by the Parc. dVersailles, where every tree has been formed and deformed by man an~where, at the turn of a path, an immobile, gesticulating baroque statue isen~ountered. We w111 recognse, furthermore, an echo in the film of thspamter n the perspectives which pose insoluble problems for the frozen~gures pre.ced,ed by long shadows. The hotel s, na sense, peopled bymetaphys1cal mannequins.

o The garden ~ith its painted shadows'was [Resnais's] idea, a preciselmag~ he h~d m mmd from the start; it merely needed executing'.42 Itwasn t poss1ble for the film to be shot entirely on location. The studio setsmc~uded, according to Jacques Saulnier, 'a sxty-metre-long corridor,Wh1Ch we ~ere able to construct by joining two stages together, othershorter comdors, mtersectng, and the bedroom - to begn wth therewere two of these - in different states of decoration. It was in the 'studio~atwe als?shot certain "inserts", such as the scene of the pistol shotwith1tS false cetlmg in trompe-l'oeil.'43 Sylvie Baudrot the script supervisor

a telling anecdote: ' ,

Mouldings, dadoes, frezes, cornices, astragals and festoons ...baroque sensuality of the interior architecture and decoration of thegrandhotel-palaceeontrasts with the exterior Cartesianism of theformal rather, there is a play between them. L'Anne

the role of the young woman wasn't natural for her: 'lfelt completely alienin the middle of the vast hotel descrihed in the film. . .. It was necessary,then, that 1 completely invent the character.'41 The amusing part of thewhole affair is thatone of the extras, Karin de Towarnick, a Dior model,exactly represents the character as the actress imagined her. Accompaniedby the director, Seyrig trawled around the fashion houses. Finally, theylighted on a Chanel evening dress which they then had shortened, playngon the contrastbetween the 'evening dress' concept and the 'cocktail dress'length. This detail, which draws attention to a hesitation (an 'as well'), ischaracteristc of amore general hestancy affectng all the elements makingup the film, be they narrative, decorative, descriptive, etc.

SettngSettingplays ahuge partin Robbe-Grillet's mostimportantworks. True tohis own ideas, the writer thus began with the settingof a grand internation-al hotel, a closed world made up of visual illuson and corrdors leadingnowhere. This settng was to give rise to the story. In Germany Resnais, asis his habit, took photos, those famous 'locaton shots' whch for JorgeSemprun evoked the works of the photographer Eugene Atget, pctureswith a 'scene of the crime' feel to them, it has been said. Resnais askedJacques Saulnier to note down the shots of the different places they passedthrough n order to reflect at greater leisure and, perhaps, to 'detect thecrime and pick out the guiltyparty' . Ghosts were to emerge from the preci-sion of these shots and hypnotic contemplaton of the resultingphotographs. Ghosts like the hotel's female 'prsoner' ,aclothed version ofan 'o' (Marienbad, O's town) Robbe-Grillet imagned to be nvolved mincest or rape. (Resnais associated her with the long-sufferng belles thecinema has brought to life, such as Elizabeth Russell in films produced byVal Lewton.) The setting itself would beget the characters, ther postures.Thus it is that the curve ofN sneck and shoulder echoes the twisting of thebanster againstwhich she stands.

This setting was judiciously chosen, as Jean-Louis Bory hasremarked, because it was in fact twofold:

ANNE DERNIRE A MARIENBAD

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The baroque ceiling In the opemng shot

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Inside and outside merge

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c~ntemplatedand :vorked on ~rom 1951-66, and Dlivrez-nous du bien, aRlchard Seaver scrtpt on the hfe of the Marquis de Sade. In this film one~as tOinsistently hear, in 'a sort of totalising recitative', Sade's voice,,sometlm~s alm?st inaudible ... rare1y synchronous with the image'.The scemc devlce conceived for the film as a whole, which was to haveoccupie~ an entir: ~ound stage, is made up of a sort of labyrinth ofs~affoldmg, ~ermlttmg the characters to cross, at a preordained point,dlfferent spatla1 zones which form a series of successive and simultaneouslocations underpinning the action.' A dcor and a 'recitative' whichin;line,the ci~:m~ tow~rds both theatre and music: this is the project ofL'Annee dermere a Marzenbad as Resnais conceived it.

At the very beginning of the film, after sorne brisk and over-emphatic music, a ho11ow voice, at times perceptible, at times not isheard, interspersed with chords struck on the organ. The voice,pe~etratmg the ty~panum of our ear, bids us to enter the labyrinth ofWhlCh lt speaks, whlle we see a dcor for losing onese1f in. It asks us tolisten and obliges us to fo11ow its fragile spira11ing, like an Ariadne'sthread in a maze. This voice, which we will discover belongs to theStranger, at first belongs to no one. !t's like the woman's voice at thebeginning of The Secret Beyond the Door (1947) - an interior voice amurmur, a rising of the curtain, a setting sail. '

The voicespeaks of a 1uxurious, labyrinthine and carceral culturalspace; an exceedingly beautiful, funereal and deserted prison. To whatuse is this.set~ing~ut? In a sense this prologue sets out the 'atmosphere ofthe questlOn . ThlS atmosphere is not an origin, but rather a point ofdeparture and, ~bov: a11, a cons~ant point of reference. The atmosphereof a work conslsts m the work sopen nature and its rapport with thereader. The film then proceeds to meander beneath the ceilings, along thewa11s, across rooms, etc., while the voice drones on. We 're ledsomewhere, something is said (murmured). A fourfold question: whereare we being led? What is being said (the words aren't always audible,phrases seem to be r~peated)? Who is speaking? And who is leading us?

Aman (the vOlceismale) speaks in the firstpersonof a journeythathas already been undertaken, apparently, many times: The text seems toconform to the idea of a frieze, or a garland: it 'unwinds' like a frieze withr~curringmotifs. Such a repetition is produced in various aspects of the~ecor: a s~ccession of doors, one corridor after the other. Thematica11y,1t emphaslses the funereal (lugubrious, black, dark, silent, deserted,

has its unresolved, and long-serving as 'fuel' for other films.H arry Dickson, which Resnais

A M A R lE N B A D

Ke:snals's ambitionhere reveals a sought-after effect: a setting thatundergoes a transformation, plus a continuity within movement, andmodulation. This is the reason the bedroom mantelpiece changes fromone moment to ihe next: a mirror here, a snowy landscape there (anallusion to Ludwig II of Bavaria which doesn't appear in the screenplay).This is why a camera movement can begin with a character and re-encounterhim/her at the end of the shot dressed differently, or doingsomething else,. since transformation and modu1ation af~ect bothcharacters and objects: the Marienbad game is played wlth cards,matchsticksdominoes or photographic images.Robb~-Grillet specified that on the wa11s there would be 'old-fashioned engravings. representing .a formal garden with geometriclawns bushes trimmed into cones, pyramids, etc., gravel paths, stonebalus;rades statues in mildly emphatic poses on massive cubic plinths'. Inaccordance'with these instructions, Resnaishad strewn the hotel dcorwith representations of this garden, which served to decorate the wa11s.They encourage the idea that there's no longer an inside or an outslde,only spaces imbricated in each other. We may swmg between one and,theother because the exterior is incIuded in the interior, and the perspectlvalview from the paths of the chateau leads either towards infinity ortowards the chateau's fas;ade. At the moment 'the man who is perhaps thehusband' explains the subject of the sculpture in the p.ark represented i~the engraving, the characters are framed from the pomt of Vlew of thlSengraving (that is, from the wa11 it's on) with, in the background, atrompe-l'oeil image taking in the balustrade skirting the statue, and behmdthatonthe floor a chessboard pattern (black-and-white squares) which

~~~i:~~~i~a~:dct:s::o~~~~~:~:e::~~o~r~:n~i~~~~;:::o~:~:~U;~;characters are caught like prisoners between the engraving and thedovetailing perspectives which face it. Inside the hotel we re-en~ounterthen the alternative present at the very end of the garden paths: elther an

we get lost in, or the hotel fas;ade 'from which there is no means

empty, sombre, cold, oppressive). All these termssuggest thetomb. Theidea of the funerary is linked to that of antiquity - 'edifices andornamental styles from another century', 'ancient leaf-work' - and hereths means an ornamentation whch a sngle adjective describes (andhstorically specifies, at least from the viewpont of the history of style):baroque. 'Nature' is absent, or stone-like. We are, indeed, in theworld ofculture. After Austrian and Bavarian baroque comes ltalian (which theforeign accent of the male voice conveys), the land of culture parexcellence, and before long Norwegian. A camera leads us towards a roomwhere a theatrical representation is drawing to a close.

Is the journey described being undertaken by the owner of thisvoice? The spectator is led to form that hypothesis, but there's nothing toback it up with any degree of certainty. The gaze meandering throughthis dcor lacks a recognsable human origino The voice also meanders,now very close to the camera, now moving away (or it's the camerawhich moves away or comes back to the source of the sound); the voicedoesn't be10ng to a body. The gaze and the voice are adrift of each other.Added to which there is the distance. The voice says, 'As if the ear itselfwere very far, far from the ground, the carpets, very far from this emptyand oppressive dcor, very far from this complicated frieze runningaround the ceiling.' Very far, but where then? And shouldn't the questionof the ear be referred to the voice to the gaze? The voice at once audible,then inaudible; at times it is obscured by the music, systematically so,even.

We pass from the dead man's gaze (the framng of Dreyer'sVCtmpyr [1932], in the famous scene from this film) to that of someonewho might be floating slightly aboye the ground. In the foreground 'athuman height', as in a mirror, we see the film's first human figure in thedistance: she advances front-on towards thecamera. The decorations inthe form of sculptures themselves invite the human figure intoshot. Afurther important new element is obviously theengravingrepresentingthe garden: as if the human figure and a setting (weknow thisis a hotel)were beinggradually set in place at one and the same time. A thirdelement is introduced: the announcement of a play. A voice searches foritsphysical form; this is why it seeks a place and a dramatic situation to bein.

The camera movements continue. The quest is not overo Now wepenetrate the blackness, pass through a mirror. Faces 100m out of the

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L;ANNE DERNIERE A MARIENBAD

darkness, attentve and rigid. They are listening: they prolong, then, theidea of an all-powerful voice (in the beginnng was the Word) whichgives rise, in effect, to the spectator-listeners (or potential 'actors-out'?).The screenplay says 'The faces are elicited from the shadows by the veryplay they are observing,'45 posng the problem of orgins once more: wasthe screenplay a product of the cinema beam, before providing the matterto fill ths beam? Or is it the other way round? What beam of light do thetwo L'Anne derniere aMarienhad issue from? The question posed at thestart of the film bears a double orign: that of gaze (camera movement asgaze) and that of voce (a voice embodied in a body), and not that of'plot' in the c1asscal sense. On one side, a machne; on the other, a humanbody. The body, like the machne, s nvisible.

The Word (the author, n fine) 'descends' in a gaze and a vocewhch once embodied will be dissociated: even though attributed to a, ,fictitious being, the gaze is always that of a machine. The fictitous beingendowed with a voice, even reduced to the idea of a character, alwayspossesses the body of a recognisable, and at times identifiable, humanbeing.

We advance towards these characters, then move away from them.A change in camera direction announces a further change: the charactersare shown turned to the left, sitting down and cut off at the chest, apartfrom the man who is perhaps the husband and the woman on the stage:both are standing, turned to the right, which of necessity suggests arelationship between them. The 'husband' appears at the moment thevoice says, 'Among whom 1 too was already waitng for you,' as if thisvoice were comng from this body. The formal 'you' would be the womanon the stage. The situaton itself 'is embodied': a pause. The scene endson a question posed by the male voice: 'Are you coming?' There exists,then, an interlocutor, or an interlocutrice. In the screenplay we hear theactress before we see her. Resnais proceeds nversely: he shows her, thenwe hear her (wthout seeing her). It isn'tcertain that the voice belongs tothe body. It is necessary to wait a little longer before having proof of it.The actress is immobile, fixed in a pose, rendered as a statue or frozen ina single gesture as in a snapshot.

The Theatre: A Film in Search of its CharactersThat the first image of a woman is that of an actress (that s, from thetheatre, an art of 'rehearsal' [rptition] par excellence) is interesting on

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more than one account: n addition to her skill with make-llp anddisguse, her faculty for slipping nto different roles, the actress presentsthe peculiarty of being fascinating, idealised, transformed by thefootlights, and thus endowed with the sort of magical power the theatreconfers on her. Utmately she is two people. In the theatre the actors arenot the only ones wearing costumes, the play also extends to theauditorum: the theatre is the setting for a ritual attended in ceremonaldress, a veritable disguise which, given ts artificial aspect, transfiguresthe spectator.

In this narrative the real is never present, it never wil1 be present: itis always a simple'echo' of the pasto The past itself will never be present,either, snce it was itself already circumscribed by one phantasm oranother, already transformed into some ghostly figure. In theatricalterms the 'rehearsal' is different to the 'revival' [reprise]: rehearsals,where the same text is recited in order to demonstrate the mechanism ofmemory, differ from the revival, where it's a question of an authenticrecreaton of the play. The same could be said of the reprise n themusical sense of the word. The word rehearsal evokes a smilitude in thereproduction of word or gesture; revival is a second begnning, a new life.

As for the setting, certan of its features are c1ear enough: thegarden path with its rows of shrubbery, a balustrade, a statue. Somefeatures recur which have already appeared in the engraving in thecorrdor. We realise that a serial order is being set up which obliges us toshift from one type of representation to another: from the engraving tothe theatre set (which resembles the backdrops nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century photographers placed behind the people whose imagethey were taking), pending the shift to a third type of representation,intended to refer to the 'real' - a real whch wil1 be necessarilyco'utamlnated by these earlier representations.

Intercut with the shots of the spectators is one which takes n theactor, the actress's interlocutor. This plan is unique n the way it begins(the descending movement which first takes in the top of hs skull); also

is this head seen face-on, with its searching and almost alarminglike a predator fixing on its victim (a vampire, o,ne would say). It's

apIlarJltlOn. While the actress is placed within a dcor, he sn't: theba

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residents (assembled in small groups). The presenee in the dcor of threewindows in. an arc a.nd the faet that the characters are when not in pairs, ,presented in a triangular composition, suggest that the story willcrystallise around a threesome, as the text spoken on stage has alreadysuggested.

. Among these speetators we can see A, played by Delphine Seyrig,lost in thought at the extreme right of the frame (in fact she is seen threetimes, far off and indistinct). The script allows for 'shooting' around her,having her emerge slowly. Her folded arm posture is repeated by a blondewoman. A difference is notceable here between the screenplay and thefilm: one names, the other shows. During her first appearance in thescreenplay A is repeated1y seen among the spectators, as in the film: thefact of naming her is very different from showingher over and again,always at the edge of the frame, unidentifiable as long as we don't knowwho she is, the more so when a forward travelling shot on a young womanin front of her seems to set this character apart (as if the choice of femalelead hadn't already been made, that it could just as easily be this otherwoman).

We hear voces, we see mouths opening - or noto What these voicesinsist on, however briefly, is the idea of temporal con{usion ('in '28 or in'29'), the former meeting (we've already met) and the suspendednarrative (the outcome wasn't known). The mismatching of image andsound (as far as the spoken word is concerned) is systematc. It issystematic throughout the film: the sound of footsteps on gravel as a

AR I EN B DI ER EDEN

(towards whom a forward tracking shot is made, similar to the onetowards the actress). Immediate1y following this fema1e spectator we re-encounter the 'husband' (presented in the inverse manner to his firstappearance; that is, with a forward movementof the camera). In mis waythe woman is now actress, now spectator; her ma1e opposite a1so occupiesthese two positions. And behind the two actors on the stage their shadowreduplicates them.

This passage is without music. The chiming of the dock introducestime (or at least a sign of time): 'Now, 1 am yours.' At that moment theactress on stage lowers her hand as if coming out of trance. This shot ofher is static at first, then there's a pan to the left as she makes a turningmovement; the pan reveals the man on the left. In the screenplay theactress remains perfectly still. The movement creates an effect that willoften oeeur in the film: the character doesn't 100k in the direction of hisinterlocutor; he looks even in the opposite direction, hence the impressionof a eonfused spaee. Another effect relies on the presence of the actor onthe 1eft of the frame: this presence is all the more surprsing since therewas nobody there before and there has been no entry on-stage. Thefeeling of witnessing an apparition is thereby reinforced.

This moment implies a series of shifts. For instance, thechangeover of the voice heard since the beginning to that of the actor'son stage (who repeats the same text; it's the first time we see lips moving).Time is eonstantly invoked in the actor's lines:. 'a few minutes, a fewseconds ... still, already .. in future, for a1ways.' Loss,expeetancy, fear,hope, encounter, hesitation: all these 'themes' are set out, just as thelocation is confirmed ('this hotel', 'a past represented in marb1e, like thesestatues, this garden hewn in the rock').

The text tells us that we 're at the end of the play: 'the story is done.'An end and a beginning. The light from the stage has brought the roomto life and the nature of this play, its content, can now be extended into theroom. '1 am yours' is spoken dUrng a shot showing the stage from theroom, as if the real interlocutor was there and not here; the formulationtself is ambiguous.

At first the theatre stage is seen from the room, yet it is as if theroom itself is seen by someone 'in the background'; then the room is seenfromthe stage. The room is thus caught between these two points ofview. Henceforth the hotel, which has been shown as being empty, willseem, at least in the places shown, to be occupied by a great many

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lllovement) ;;tnd creates the illusion of a potential match cut: what ishelooking at?Might he not have turnedhis head because the music stopped?This shot is perhaps the first of a series, described thus in the screenplay:'In this series new groups must be interpolated which do not appertain tothe theatre auditorium, but to other rooms in the hotel and at some othermomento Hence, after the images of the theatre there foUows a series ofviews of the hotel and of the characters in it, a bit everywhere, a bit at aUtimes.'46

There are various changes of space: to the hotel lobby, anunidentifiable location. These are linked to the theatre, the first by theleft-to-right movement of a woman in the background, the second by thepresence of an identical characterin the foreground (the blonde woman).In the cinematic tradition an identical character in different clothes may

in the same space (in Duck Soup [1933] or in musical comedies), ora single, identical character traverses different locations (Buster

Keaton in SherlockJr. [1924]). The sequence develops the movement bywhich a character turns round - or has already turned (the match cut iseven made at the end of this movement); the other figure is theAntonionian one of characters looking in opposite directions. A numberof previously seen characters (the bald man, the two blonde women)recur; we crcle around couples or threesomes; changes happen on thesoundtrack. This moment is wordless (even though the lips move); aconfused murmur recurs when the woman turns round - this sound'event' does not exist in the screenplay. These differing events will bereproduced in the film.

'A bit everywhere, a bit at aU times,' is a phrase of Robbe-Grillet's.'a bit everywhere' aspect is illustrated yet, despite everything, we

the images that foUow in a temporal continuity, 'after' the play.is the feeling of a soire drawing to a close: the people return to

their rooms, the hotel empties. We revert to the initial desertedness.We start off with an unknown person, then the 'husband' appears

among the other spectators, looking at two actors on a theatre stage at themoment the voice says 'Among whom 1too was already waiting for you.'When the man in whom the voice is embodied appears, it is at the edge of

largemirror in which there is reflected a far-off couple, exchangingwords that the couple will pronounce along with the 'husband'. He looks\towards the left, off-screen, the hypothetical place where the couple in themirror beside him is. The couple draws near, leaves by the door he was

Antononl and della Francesca: characters look opposite directions ard beyond the frame

character climbs the stairs; organ music while the musicians in the imageare playing string instruments. Added to which the characters~eem tostand still, as if once endowed with bodily form they have dlfficultymoving. . .

AU of a sudden the music stops - such sudden breaks m the mUS1Coften occur in the film - ona shot in which we 've visibly changed space.We 're no longer inthe room where the theatrical presentation took place.Inthe background we see a corridor down which two silhouetted figuresare headed. Aman at the centreof the frame turns to face (when, like theothers,he was looking towards the left) something we don't see. Thismovementmakes the character stand out (i1's the first such brusque

Groups of three, A at the edge of the frame

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standing beside (he has disappeared); a pan towards the left reveals, onthe left of the frame, the young woman stilllost in thought. The double,symmetrical presentation of this man and the 'husband' is noteworthybecause in Robbe-Grillet's text the couple does not appear in the mirror.Resnais, then, has knowingly made a parallel between the couple on thestage and the couple framed in the mirror. In addition Robbe-Grilletdoesn't show A close to the mirror, contrary to what happens in the film;another sign of Resnais's desire to establish a symmetry n thepresentaton of the characters.

The double presentaton beside the mirror s effected n a sequenceshot which ends on aman looking at the engraving representing thegarden. X is alongside him, turns away and goes through a succession ofdoors which are clearly the hotel equivalent of the paths in the garden.The idea of this shot sequence is Resnais's. It allows for transformationand modulation, and shows the mirror (and is itself the mrror) whch'changes things into images, mages into things, myself into the other andthe other into myself', to use aformulation of Merleau-Ponty's.

The voce we hear is that of the man next to the mirror, but could itnot be attributable, in the first instance, to the 'husband' whose eyesobserve the discussion on stage which is (has been, or will be) that of theyoung woman and the other man? And could the two men not be simplytwo versions of male desire acting out, around a female figure, the eternalscenario of possession and seduction, of deviousness and jealousy?(Didn't the two Alains act out a similar scenaro around the film and thescreenplay?) 'X M~ can and must be read as 'X (a man) aime [loves] A(a woman).' As soon as the drive impelling aman towards a woman isevoked, a parthenogenesis follows which renders t impossible todetermine who comes first, X or M, each being the mediator of thepassion and suffering of the other. As for the young wOJ;nan, she herselfis divided into a beautiful woman clad in black and a woman dressed inwhite. And so we swing from one man to the other, from film toscreenplay, and from a woman in black to a woman in white.

In the film, two characters playing draughts are framed before thetrompe-l'reil backdrop with its balustraded setting repeated ad nfinitum,situated opposite the engraving representing the garden and the statue(which isn't described as such by Robbe-Grillet, although t isreproduced in his book as a frame blow-up). It is a question, here, of the'husband' tactically undermining the other man's plans, of cutting short

MARIENBAD

46 The mirrar sequence

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At first 1didn't know what it was or what t was about, nor even if tshould be a couple. lt was Alain Resnais who had the idea of those twofigures in a Poussin painting: two really undecipherable figures in thebackground. So undecipherable in fact that the sculptor (there werethree of them: Grache,.his wife and Babinet) asked if t was two menor two women. Jean Lon replied two women. Jacques Saulnierargued for two meno The quarre1 was resolved by Resnais, whoconcluded that t was unquestonably aman and a woman.48

that he'd been vainly searchng for her, that she was 'in the Httle greensalon near the music room'. The colour green conjons two meanings,hope shading into jealousy, beside a room where the sonorous tones ofwell-tuned instruments are blending in total harmony.

The Statue, 'Mise en abyme'of the FilmThe statue near which a famous scene in the film unfolds is characteristicof the play of nterpretatons fue film e1icits. As to ths statue, the setdesigner Jacques Saulnier has provided the followng information: 'Thestatue had been made n Pars, then transported to Munch, where it still

To begin with Resnais was thinking of Max Ernst. He 'deven writtenhim, 1 beHeve. Then, nspred by a painting by Poussin, he asked for

designs and sketches to be made. Without hurrying, and after discussingeach new design, his ideas progressively changed.'47

Whether the Poussin paintng s La Peste d'Asrod (or 'd'Azoth'), LeMiracle de l'Arche dans le temple de Dagon or Les Philisunsftapps par laThe 'Marienbad game'

PlaYlng draughts in front of the trompe-roeil background

his incursions nto the past by which he tries to capture the young woman.The 'husband' is, furthermore, the one who always wins the 'Marienbadgame' (another reason why Robbe-Grillet designates him by the firstletter of the spa's name): lucky at cards, unlucky in love. A double game,then, for each of the two men, and signified by the twin recedingperspectives: that of the park for the narrator and of the checkerboard forthe husband, reversible as they both are, false exits, labyrinths in whichone is always brought back to the same places. L'Anne derniere aMarenbad is undeniably a black-and-white film; it's impossible to thinkof it in any other form, and the text makes only one reference to colour.This is towards the end; when A announces to M, who has just told her

L'ANNE DERNIERE A MARIENBAD

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the inextricable web of tme. The statue is ageless. Its existence srecento It is a smulacrum, a copy (like the statuary in Le Mprs), andt s clearly an adaptaton of a detail from a vsual work. Its functon nthe film seems to be to encourage nterpretation or dentification, toincite the characters to imagine things. It he1ps make the film aconsistently open work. Like the theatre stage, the statue clearlysuggests the idea of representation, but also that of the manycombnatons of game magery which feature n the film. . ..Begnning with the conflict of interpretatons and of the aleatorinessof memory, the statue sets different conceptions of tme against eachother: 'The eternal instant of Marienbad s divded between a now-imaginary past and an as~yet unimagned future.' For al! these reasons,the statue s real!y the mise en abyme of the film, not least becauseResnais wanted at the tme to make a film which is looked at as if t., ,were a sculpture.49

en:!;ravn.g or to the heroine's and narrator's poses createanumber ofntersectmg systems and a somewhat seral composition.

Suzanne Liandrat-Guigues believes that the film presents, throughintermediary of differmginterpretations of the statuary,

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The left foot had advanced, and the rght, about to follow, touched theground only lightly with the tps of the toes, while the sole and heelwere rased almost vertically. Ths movement produced adoublempresson of exceptional agility and of confident composure, and theflight-like poise, combined with a firm step, lent her peculiar grace.

peste (a happy accident in this instance, since the title s undecided), of thetwo figures in profile who could have inspired the statue, one s bearded,which indeed suggests the degree of mimetism the 'paratext' has attainedin relation to the text and the film. Or there again ... Another sourceis thepainting, Achille parmi les filles de Lycomede (the Richmond Museumversion, rather than the Boston one) in which two figures, seen face-on,are bearded.

The woman compared to a statue is an implicit reference toJensen's story Gradiva. In the deserted ruins of Pompeii, at the spectralhour of mdday, Norbert Hanold meets a young womanwho strangelyresembles the figure of aRoman bas-relief he has at home. What strikeshim is the movement of her feet:

Akind of snapshot, then, between pose and movement. The actirigstyle demanded of Delphine Seyrig was doubtless aimed at recapturingthis 'peculiar grace'.

'1 told you you had an animated air,' the narrator says to the youngwoman; he speaks just after the statue in thefilm. If the humansare'turned into stone' (by their immobility, poses, rigid gestures, etc.), thestatue tself is animated by the shots of it taken from different angles; itchanges location, like the fake balustrade which s found indifferentplaces in the film. The technique of montage also permits rapprochementsand oppositions to be made; finally, many interpretations of the subject ofthe sculpture are put forward, just as many representations of it areoffered: in words, in an engravng ...

One of the hands of the female figure in the statuary group isextended, while her other hand rests on the man's shoulder. A reversal:the man's hand is extended towards the young woman ('Please ... '),while the latter places her hand on his shoulder. The words of the twomen, the displacement of the elements making up the statue (the figureswith their particular hairstyles, clothes and gestures, and the dogaccompanying them which nobody knows what to do with) to the

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The Credit SequenceAt first Resnas seems to illustrate exactly what Robbe-Grillet haswritten: violent and tumultuous 'end-of-film' music, a credit sequence ofthe classic type against a grey background. This, indeed, is what our earsand eyes register. But the Robbe-Grillet description adds: 'Gradually, theedges of the frame are transformed, they become denser, are ornamentedwith various fiourishes which finally form something like picture frames,at first fiat, then painted in trompe-l'oeil in such a way as to sugge~tobjects in relief.'50 Of this there is no trace in the film. The credltsequence we see is visually uniform from start to finish.

Robbe-Grillet had foreseen that 'the music would slowly betransformed into a man's voice'. According to hm, the idea was for adouble transformation of image and sound. Resnais has not retained the

~creenplay, but knowledge of Robbe-Grillet's work does add anotherdimenson to Resnais's opus. Conversely, t's possible to read the

~creenplay without knowing the film, but i1's impossible to do this-thoutencountering sorne allusion to the locatons it was shot in andthout the frame stills that illustrate it (with a reference to the pages~here adescripton of the scene represented can be read). Robbe-Grillet:r.~worked his text after having seen the film, with the result that ths)Vritten version is also a reprise. If Resnais picks up on the echoes thescreenplay awakens in him, Robbe-Grillet tunes his text to the memory ofthe inital idea, filtered through a viewing of the film.

The spectator is asked to look and to listen. With tremendousfathfulness the film puts across what we can also read published underthe name of Robbe-Grillet, and which preceded its making; the filmallows us to see the characters and locations that these words transmuted.Robbe-Grillet's text is instantly anamorphosed through a series ofstrange voices; and as for Resnais's images, they bear the trace of thedescrptons penned by the writer. Robbe-Grillet's words and Resnas:sjmages are preserited together, and play on ther convergences and thelrdivergences. The writing (the screenplay) s distinguishable from speech,nthat writing is defintive while speech is open, uncertain. The writingmust also reckon with another rival, the sing-song tone which possesses aparticular force of conviction, and is an 'autonomous language' on whic.hResnais systematically relies: the voices of the three actors wlth thelrinfiectons and ther accents sustained by Francs Seyrig's music.

The film isn't an adaptaton n the strict sense. Resnais based it onRobbe-Grillet's text, though the two works seem to have more asimultan.eous a chronological re1ationship, strange1y similar yet

reaSOns other than their belonging to differentResnais's film wthout knowing the

I wrote, not a scenario, but a straightforward shootng scrpt. Next,Resnas did the filming and he filmed solo. He scrupulously respectedevery detail, to such a degree (I was in Istanbul at the tme) that he wassending me a te1egram every tme he wanted to change a comma in thetexto Nevertheless, he has transformed everythng; and 1's obvousthat, while a reading of my work (published in book form) might leadone tobelieve in the total agreement of the two works, the film sneverthe1ess by him.

A Pairo! TwinJPr1csTraditionally, a script has. a particular status whch is not that of anentrely separate work. It's a document, a stage to be gone through. In thecase of L'Anne derniere ti Marien6ad, things are complicated by the factthat there are two quas-simultaneous and inseparable works. In effectthere are two L'Anne derniere ti Marien6ad, a film signed 'Alan Resnais'and a screenplay signed 'Alan Robbe-Grillet'. The two L'Anne derniereti Marien6ad are twin works, at once divergent and complementary.Although at the time the film was sometimes presented as the work of thetwo Alains (photographs showed the two men in symmetrical poses), it isin fact Resnas's alone, Robbe-Grillet being the author of a screenplayand not a scenario and dialogue script (as with the books of MargueriteDuras, Jean Cayrol, Jorge Semprun and Jacques Sternberg whichaccompanied the release of Hiroshima mon amour, Murel, Stavis1cy andje t'ame,Je t'aime). We can opt for knowing only one of the two works,or the two together; in which case we will ndiscrmnately explore firstthe one or the other. Whatever the choice, their great proximity (thedialogues are almost identical) and their many infinitesmal or morevsible differences will be noted. Robbe-Grillet has said:

THE TWO 'L'ANNE DERNIERE A. MARIENBAD'5

, ANN E D E R N I ER E A M A R I E N B A D

54 The 'bleached-out' effect

L NNE DERNIRE A MARIENBAD

transformation of the image track; this idea makes way for a differentone, then. The nitial music is heard over the five title cards featuring theactors' names.51 The sixth title bears the name of the film:organmusicand the whisperng voice take over (for fourteen titles, until theend of thecredits). This procedure foregrounds the idea of an end and a(re)beginnihg, underlined by the text itself which inSsts on the 'one moretime' aspect; the text begins in medias res, in the middle of a sentence, andends up being obliterated by themusic,when t is said that the sound offootsteps is absorbed by the carpets. lf weadd that this text appears to goback ov~r itself, reprisingdifferentnotions slightly modified bysubstitutions (the earlthe footfall of the man; anedifice/ornamentationfrom another century) and interlocking elements, then we are madeaware that the film willconsist of the metculous and obsessionalinventory of a limited universe ruled by permutation and repetition - andsince the outcome of this spiralling universe of expression will be ane~cess of contamination - the question comes up agan: which one givesrise to the other? For the moment, this involves sound: the voicelthefootsteps, the organ/the carpets - we can say that this beginningfunctions as a true set of instructions.

The Balustrade SceneThedifferencemost frequently pointedout between the film and thescreenplay s Resnais's substitution in the rape episode of a series of'bleached-out' travelling shots of the young woman. We might also men-tion the snapping of the bracelet and the lost pearls which Resnais didn'tutilise. But rather than to the 'visible' differences it is preferable, in order to

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understand the nature of the work Resnais effected on the Robbe-Grillettext, to look to an episodelike the one nvolving the collapsingbalustrade.

A single detail demonstrates the sort of difference existing betweenthe two works. The broken balustrade provokes the young woman's cryof alarm, which dissolves to her cry of alarm in the bar. This dissolvemight seem arbitrary, governed solely by the logic of the fragment whichwants the passage from nterior to exterior to be consistent. And yetthere's another reason for it: previously in the same bar the 'herone',stepping back, had bumped nto ablonde woman and caused the glass shewas holding to fall to the ground, where it broke. Robbe-Grillet's textspecifically points to this re1ationship: 'a large room in the hotel, theballroom for example, near the bar, on the spot where the scene- of thebroken glass occurred'. He points to another lead with the indicaton: 'along violent cry of terror, or for breaking a spell'. The two works, then,

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its own way, develop a series of associations around the idea of athe writer plays on both the proper and figurative meaning of the

word. Resnais on the other hand appeals to the spectator's reca1l - arecollection of the film which is obliged to associate two scenes separatedin time; plus an intertextual memory, since with the laughter on thesoundtrack we recognise, at that moment, the 'illustration' of aGuillaume Apollinaire verse, 'My glass has shattered like a burst oflaughter' (from 'Nuit rhnane ').

Another detail is the displacement made by Resnais of the 'longfalling sound of an imposing mass of large stones, crashing from a greatheight onto hard ground'. Robbe-Grillet has this sound heard during theshotof Mon the path, while the next shot, in which A looks at the collapsedbalustrade, 'is perfectly sileni:'. Betweenthese two shots Resnais inserts aclClseup of the young woman (a touch of classical intensity) which heaccompanies with the sound of falling stones (very like, in actual fact, thatofa tomb closing or opening in a horror film). Robbe-Grillet situates thisclose-up before M's arriva1. Resnais, then, performs a double displace-ment: that of the two shots whose order is inverted, and that of the soundofone shot made over to another. These transformations are of minorimportance in appearance only. M's lack of reaction to the sound of the.fallingstones does not exist at the point in the film where the arrival of thecharacter seems to provoke the catastrophe. Robbe-Grillet imagines thatNs hlack wrap comes undone at this moment and slips from her shoulder,revealing awhite nglig. Resnais doesn't find itnecessary to over-empha-sise the event; added to which, as he's just shown the young womandressed in white in various over-exposed shots, he doesn't seek to rein-scrihe the opposition within the scene. .

In the screenplay the shot which follows the one in which A, seenfrorn the back, looks at the collapsed halustrade presents A face-on.Resnais keeps to this principIe and accentuates the ahout-face in two ways:after the shot in which 'he who is mayhe the hushand ' moves towards us, heshows the face of the young woman turning round in close-up, and theshot in which she is face-on reveals, behind her, the space, now empty,where three shots hefore the hypothetical hushand stQod; the latter's disap-pearance transforms his arrival into something ghostly. The film-makerretains the turning-round or the reversal and makes it the most essentialpart of the sequence: the forward tracking shots hecome reverse trackingshots, the characters are now inside, now outside, at least in traditional

L;AN N E D E R N I ER E A M A R I E N B A D

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in fact echo, in the man's case, the statuary (as if he were the statue'descended