Last Year at Marienbad was an extremely intriguing film. Lacking a traditional narrative form, the focus of the movie was more on strangely beautiful images than plot or characters. The way this film was shot disrupts realism as we view surrealistic images, such as the image of the garden when the trees and bushes have no shadow yet the people have elongated black silhouettes.
Through applying the philosophy of Rene Descarte, “I think, therefore I am,” I gathered an interpretation of the film as addressing the separation between mind and body. In this case, body represents the tactile, raw material of the physical world on which, the mind superimposes its designs. A can be seen as representing the landscape. She fits in to the glamorous extreme artificial setting of the film. Her dress is always very flashy, her feathered robe ridiculous in its intense luxury. In a literal sense, she enjoys being in the landscape, sitting in the garden where she feels at ease. This links her again to the physical world. Her opinions and reactions to things aren’t shown in a definite matter. She seems to exists in the landscape and X is trying to force upon her a reality that isn’t true.
X, the stranger in the film sticks out in the landscape. No one seems to know who he is and he attempts to prove his presence and importance in the landscape. He seems only to acknowledge his thoughts as being truth. Trying to convince A that he has known her, X desperately tries to conquer nature, insisting that he knows the truth. It seems clear that A doesn’t want X around. She pulls away from his advances and asks him to leave her alone. X doesn’t want to acknowledge the existence of A but merely construct his own idea of who she is. This can be seen in the allusions to rape. X wants to make A his lover, even though she is not and never was. He doesn’t ever try to acknowledge the real truth in the landscape, connecting with it to formulate his own perception of reality. He is so removed from the physical in the mental world. This film, through the separation of X and A in which we never really know the actuality of their possible shared time together, illustrates the separation between body and mind and how one cannot ignore or void out the other in constructing reality.
I think its interesting that you thought about this movie as more of a mind vs body story because I didn't think of it like that. I also thought it was interesting how A wants basically nothing to do with X and how X doesn't want to acknowledge A. It's also true that X was just thrown into the movie and we really have no idea who he is.
ReplyDeleteIn formulating a response to this film I never saw it as being mind vs. body but I think it is very interesting. It is true that X seems to be imposing some type of fantasy/landscape world in which no one really knows him nor acknowledges him. We as the audience and the characters in the film truly have no idea on who this man is. Only he knows who he is.
ReplyDeleteI hadn't thought about how the characters each fit into the story. Your interpretation makes alot of sense and almost makes the movie more understandable in my opinion. A just fits in with the landscape moving along with the real world while X is that random "X" factor that conflifts with the norm. Ooo, I just figured out his name's purpose.
ReplyDeleteYour interpretation is very interesting and I also hadn't really thought about viewing the film as mind vs. body. The film was very surreal so viewing it that way does help make more sense out of it. I like that you brought the Descarte quote into your thoughts because that's exactly what the film was doing and the thoughts changed so quickly that the images and backgrounds changed before we could make real sense of them.
ReplyDeleteI would like to congratulate you for making this movie more confusing to me =) You pointed out something that I completely missed, and that's A and X's relationship to each other: the individual person doesn't matter to either one of them. A pretty much wants X to go away, and although X is pursuing A, he is fitting her into his own perception of reality so it's not really A that he wants. While I was watching it, I only really saw connections between the main characters, but now those connections are destroyed, and now I feel like the overall film has a greater feeling of purposelessness.
ReplyDeleteMahhhfy's reading and this one are interesting opposites. Mahhhfy watched the movie in a visceral, nerves on edge sort of way, and this blog entry focuses more on the mind game aspect of the thing--both of which are very interesting.
ReplyDeleteThis is a lovely, concise essay, Anne. Really nice use of Descartes. I'm not quite as sold on the A = nature thing though, or at least not in that formulation, given how utterly artificial even the natural things were in this movie. We didn't really have a landscape with growing things in normal shapes, but rather an ultra-rigid topiary garden which, as several people noticed, aren't even casting real shadows. Also, we never see A so much relaxing in the garden as posing--in ways that more or less correspond to positions that X describes her as being in. What do you make of that, given your larger point about how A is trying to fit everything into his perceptions?