Last year in Marienbad

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Movie
German title Last year in Marienbad
Original title L'Année dernière à Marienbad
Country of production France
Italy
original language French
Publishing year 1961
length 94 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Alain Resnais
script Alain Robbe-Grillet
production Pierre Courau
Raymond Froment
music Francis Seyrig
camera Sacha Vierny
cut Jasmine Chasney
Henri Colpi
occupation

Last Year at Marienbad ( French L'Année dernière à Marienbad ) is a in black and white twisted French - Italian film directed by Alain Resnais from the year 1961 . The script was written by Alain Robbe-Grillet . The film, which combines the stylistic devices of the avant-garde film with the content of the film drama , represents, after Hiroshima, mon amour Resnais' second attempt to transfer the structure of the Nouveau Roman to the medium of film.

action

The film begins with tracking shots through rooms with baroque decor, while the voice of a man explains that he has often walked through these rooms. In the next scene, two heavily made-up actors perform a play in front of a distinguished audience. A man tries to persuade a hesitant woman to leave with him. The piece ends with the strike of a clock. The audience applauds and stands up.

In a luxurious grand hotel , a man tries to convince a woman that they had already met in the same place the year before and agreed to meet again. The man insists that the woman had promised him at the time that she would leave her companion and start a new life with him. The woman cannot remember her promise or pretends not to be able to remember. Your partner repeatedly challenges his rival to a variant of the Nim game that the man loses. The present, the past and the fantasy mix while the man tries to remind the woman of various encounters from the previous year, some of which she has completely different in mind, including a possible rape in her apartment . Nevertheless, the woman finally agrees to leave the hotel with the man. Again you can hear the chiming of the clock from the theater performance.

background

The film was not shot in Marienbad in Czechoslovakia , but mostly in Germany. The setting was formed by the palaces in Schleissheim and Nymphenburg in Munich with the Amalienburg , as well as a hotel in Courbevoie near Paris. Sacha Vierny , who had already photographed Resnais' Hiroshima, mon amour , acted as cameraman . Delphine Seyrig's costumes were designed by Coco Chanel , the film music was composed by Delphine Seyrig's brother Francis. The young Volker Schlöndorff was one of the assistant directors .

Resnais named G. W. Pabsts Pandora's Box , Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo - From the Realm of the Dead and the paintings by Piero della Francesca as influences on his film .

The Misère variant of the Nim game, shown several times in the film, is now also known as Marienbad .

The French premiere took place on June 25, 1961. The film opened in Germany on October 19, 1961.

The scene of the action - if there is such a scene at all - remains open. The spa town of Marienbad, together with other places (Karlstadt, Friedrichsbad, Baden-Salsa), all of which are fictional, is named by the person named in the script as a possible location of the events of the last year. The addition that it could also have been “here”, “in this salon”, suggests that the current action is not taking place in Marienbad.

analysis

The ambiguity of the film - "at no point in the film can the viewer be sure whether what he is currently seeing on the screen is the present or memory, dream or waking dream" - was already reflected in the contrasting views of director and author about whether the starting point of the film is real or fictional. Alain Resnais: “For me, the two actually met a year earlier in Marienbad. The woman tries to suppress this past, while the man acts towards her like a psychologist who forces her to re-establish contact with something that has really happened. "Alain Robbe-Grillet contradicted this view:" I think rather that the two of them are in Have not met Marienbad. The man suggests this shared moment in the past to the woman. "

Resnais deviated significantly from Robbe-Grillet's script at one point. While Robbe-Grillet explicitly describes a rape of the woman by the man in one scene - but this is denied by the man's narrative voice - Resnais is content with hints: The man takes energetic steps towards the woman sitting on the bed, this one backs away from him, then the camera leaves the room. In the next picture, a tracking shot through the corridors of the hotel, the audience hears the man's voice from the off : “That is wrong! [...] It wasn't by force. "

In Cahiers du cinéma, François Weyergans interpreted the events as a woman's dream and the protagonists as "instances" of psychoanalysis that have become shaped : the woman (A) as I , the man (X) as id and the husband (M) as super-ego . Peter Cowie saw last year in Marienbad as a variant of the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, in which X the role of Orpheus, A the role of Eurydice and M the role of death, and based this view on "Resnais' declared love for Cocteau and Orphée ”.

References in the film

The play that can be seen at the beginning of the film is announced on a poster as "Rosmer". Resnais explained the title as an allusion to the French writer Jean Rosmer . Reviewers saw it as a reference to Henrik Ibsen's drama Rosmersholm .

In a setting in the 12th minute of the film in the penumbra is to see a life-size portrait of Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock's works like Vertigo or The Invisible Third are considered possible models for the film.

synchronization

The German version for Last Year in Marienbad was created in 1961 under the dubbing direction by Manfred R. Köhler , who also wrote the dialogue book.

role actor German Dubbing voice
Woman (A) Delphine Seyrig Renate Grosser
Man (X) Giorgio Albertazzi Ernst Kuhr
Player (M) Sacha Pitoëff Alf Marholm

criticism

Although after the screening at the Venice Film Festival “two hostile camps immediately formed among the critics”, the German press reacted extremely positively, according to the news magazine Der Spiegel : The film editor of the Süddeutsche Zeitung , Hans-Dieter Roos, celebrated “Last year in Marienbad "As" one of the boldest creations of contemporary film ". The reviewer of the Frankfurter Allgemeine , Martin Ruppert, saw in “this cinematographic etude” the “beginning of a new era of film art”. And the Hamburg critic Klaus Hebecker was impressed: “This film calls for a dark suit.” The Spiegel reviewer himself described the film as opaque and confusing and summed up: “The viewer is forced to wonder whether the hotel is not a sanatorium after all or even a madhouse. "

In later years, film encyclopedias followed the largely positive opinion. Thomas Koebner described last year in Marienbad as "virtuoso and sovereign" and a "philosophical parable [...] of a fragmented, ritual frozen and seemingly dead world of the 'others'". The Lexicon of International Films rated the film as a "demanding cinematic reflection on the difficulty of objectifying impressions of reality."

Awards

literature

  • Alain Robbe-Grillet: Last year in Marienbad. Screenplay (translated from French by Helmut Scheffel, translation of the dialogues by Leonore Germann). Carl Hanser, Munich 1961.
  • David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson: Film Art. An Introduction , 4th edition, McGraw-Hill, New York 1992, ISBN 0-07-006446-6 . (Pp. 391-396) PDF download from Davidbordwell.net
  • Jean-Louis Leutrat: L'Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad) (BFI Film Classics). BFI Publishing, London 2000, ISBN 0-85170-821-8 .
  • T. Jefferson Kline: Last Year at Marienbad: High Modern and Postmodern . In: Ted Perry (Ed.): Masterpieces of Modern Cinema . Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis 2006, ISBN 978-0-253-21858-2 . (Pp. 208–235)
  • Michaela Krützen : classic, modern, post-modern. A film story. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2015, ISBN 978-3-10-040504-3 . (Pp. 233–462)
  • Christoph Grunenberg, Eva Fischer-Hausdorf (ed.): Last year in Marienbad: A film as a work of art. Wienand, Cologne 2015, ISBN 978-3-86832-284-2 . (Catalog for the exhibition Last year in Marienbad. A film as a work of art , Kunsthalle Bremen, November 14, 2015 to March 13, 2016)
  • Manfred Engelbert : Breaking identity: "Last year in Marienbad", in Fischer film history. 3, 1945 - 1960 , eds. Werner Faulstich , Helmut Korte. Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1990, pp. 386 - 406 (with detailed content, sequences of scenes)

symposium

  • International, interdisciplinary symposium on film last year in Marienbad , Kunsthalle Bremen , April 23, 2015.

exhibition

  • Last year in Marienbad. A film as a work of art , Kunsthalle Bremen , November 14, 2015 to March 13, 2016.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The people in the film have no names, the letter abbreviations were only used in Alain Robbe-Grillet's script.
  2. ↑ Interview with Alain Resnais on the US DVD of Last Year in Marienbad ( Last Year at Marienbad, Criterion Collection, 2009).
  3. ↑ Last year in Marienbad in the Internet Movie Database .
  4. ↑ a b Last year in Marienbad. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed January 20, 2018 .  .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used
  5. ↑ a b Article in Der Spiegel 46/1961, accessed on June 26, 2012.
  6. ^ Wording according to: Alain Robbe-Grillet: Last year in Marienbad. Carl Hanser, Munich 1961. See, among others, Emma Wilson: Alain Resnais. Manchester University Press, 2006, pp. 79-80 and Anthony G. Fragola, Roch C. Smith: The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films. Southern Illinois University Press, 1995, p. 143.
  7. ^ François Weyergans: Dans le dédale, in Cahiers du Cinéma No. 123/1961, quoted in Der Spiegel 46/1961.
  8. ^ Peter Cowie: Antonioni, Bergman, Resnais. Three Monographs, Tantivy & Barnes, London 1963.
  9. ↑ Interview with Jacques Saulnier in Positif No. 329–30, July / August 1988, p. 22.
  10. ↑ Ginette Vincendeau: The Companion to French Cinema, London 1996; T. Jefferson Kline: Screening the Text: Intertextuality in New Wave French Cinema, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992.
  11. ↑ DVD documentation of the film, from minute 29
  12. ↑ Gereon Stein: Last year in Marienbad on synchrondatenbank.de. Retrieved May 27, 2019 .
  13. ↑ Thomas Koebner (Ed.): Classic films. Descriptions and Comments, Volume 2, Reclam, Stuttgart 1995, ISBN 3-15-009416-X , p. 450.