Matthew Bettencourt
Professor Sarah E. S. Sinwell
Film 6350
September 29th, 2020

Last Year at Marienbad and Art Cinema

Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961) is one of many seminal European films of
the 1960s that rewrote the rules of traditional cinema. The way it dismantled the classical mode
of storytelling was incredibly ambitious for its time. While the film’s plot sounds simple – a man
named X trying to convince a woman named A they had fallen in love the previous summer –
Last Year at Marienbad ’s use of non-linear storytelling and spatial incoherence make it
fascinatingly enigmatic and a quintessential example of art cinema.

To fully appreciate the attributes in Last Year at Marienbad that contribute to its
classification as art cinema, it is helpful to acknowledge the traditional mode it is diverting from.
In his essay “ The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice”, David Bordwell recognizes art
cinema as a departure from a dominant narrative tradition, often using the Hollywood studio
system as one end of the continuum. In these classical films, the primary goal is to tell a logical
story. The narrative structure is tightly bound together by a chain of causality: events and
character decisions are linked in such a way as to advance the story. (Bordwell 717) The
cinematic representation (editing, mise-en-scene, and cinematography) work to achieve this.
Devices such as continuity editing and the 180 degree rule ensure the legibility of the temporal
and spatial dimensions of the film world.

Art cinema is less driven by narrative demands. Character psychology becomes an arena
suitable for cinematic examination. The chains of causality become looser and the depictions of
time and space more abstract. (Bordwell 717) In Last Year at Marienbad, the film world is
spatially disorienting. The opening scene consists of various tracking shots that present to us a
stunningly baroque setting, yet no explicit information is conveyed to the audience. In a classical Hollywood film, we are typically introduced to a location by the inclusion of an exterior
establishing shot. No such establishment is offered in Last Year at Marienbad.

An ever present sense of aimless drifting permeates the film, contributing to the spatial
inconsistencies. This is primarily accomplished through the film’s use of editing. For example,
characters will be in the middle of a sentence and the film will cut to the character finishing the
sentence in a completely different location. Further, various iterations of the same event are
repeated, but details within each iteration change. In a series of shots where X and A are in the
garden, A’s dress changes with each iteration. The art film takes these standard devices, such as continuity editing and the match-on-action cut and turns them on their head. The audience is left to wonder if the space these characters inhabit is real or imagined.

Through the editing a certain rhythm is generated that illustrates our character’s
subjective perceptions. The way they experience this world and the strange movement of time
are expressed to us cinematically. Bordwell states, “what is essential to any such organization
scheme is that it be sufficiently loose in its causation as to permit characters to express and
explain their psychological states.” (Bordwell 718) This contrasts to classical Hollywood cinema
where characters have clear-cut goals and traits, leaving little room for psychological
complexity. The breakdown of temporal parameters enable a representation of the character’s
interior states and the mechanics of memory. X’s mission is to convince A they met one year
ago, but she seems to have no memory of such an encounter. The film’s syuzhet – it’s
organization of story events – reflect A’s amnesic confusion. The film creates an alchemy of
various timelines, fusing together the past, present, and future. In one scene, X describes through voice-over the time when A broke her high heels and he helped her. Throughout this verbal
account, X is seen playing cards and we don’t cut to the memory. This suggests inconsistencies
in the film’s organization of story order – up to this point, the events he describes are almost
always shown on screen. Later in the film, we see this scenario take place. Was X describing a
future event? The temporal landscape in the film is manipulated in such a way as to evoke a
dreamlike world where time does not move linearly.

The communication between our two protagonists is another feature Bordwell discusses
in his essay. Autobiographical events, dreams, and fantasies become topics of conversation in art cinema. (Bordwell 719) In the film, there is talk about living in a purgatory “from which there is
no escape,” as well as discussions on the nature of time: “A year isn’t long. For me, it’s nothing.”
In classical cinema, the dialogue is taken at face-value with no allusion to deeper meanings. In
Last Year at Marienbad, the dialogue is layered, ambiguous, and thwarts our efforts to rationally
interpret the story. Could it be these people are in an endless cycle forever experiencing the same events? Towards the end of the film, the camera dollies rapidly towards an over-exposed A
multiple times in a row. This could support the existence of a cyclical loop of time where events
are eternally repeated.

The writer-director team behind Last Year at Marienbad have created an experiential
work of art open to many interpretations and not concerned with connecting to the mainstream masses. It’s a film that stimulates the viewer’s intellect, forcing them to participate in the
construction of meaning. This is vastly different from the lowest common denominator type of
classical cinema with its preference for casual viewing requiring little to no intellectual exertion.
Last Year at Marienbad is one of the prime examples of art cinema. Almost 60 years after its
release, it remains a thoughtful, slow moving masterpiece of cinematic lyricism – the ultimate
exploration of human memory and our subjective experience of time.

Works Cited
David Bordwell, “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” in Film Theory and Criticism ,
eds., Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (NY and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999),
716-724.
Last Year at Marienbad . Directed by Alain Resnais , performances by Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio
Albertazzi, and Sacha Pitoëff, Cocinor , 2008.
Bernstein, Mark. “10 Tips on Writing the Living Web.” A List Apart: For People Who Make
Websites , 16 Aug. 2002, alistapart.com/article/writeliving. Accessed 4 May 2009.