New Yorker Review of Last Year at Marienbad
The Screen: 'Concluding Year at Marienbad':Carnegie Hall Picture palace Shows Resnais Motion picture
See the article in its original context from
March 8, 1962
,
Page
0Purchase Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive do good for home commitment and digital subscribers.
Virtually the Annal
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times'due south print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; nosotros are continuing to piece of work to improve these archived versions.
BE prepared for an experience such as you've never had from watching a picture when you sit down down to look at Alain Resnais' "Last Yr at Marienbad," a truly extraordinary French film, which opened at the Carnegie Hall Picture palace last night.It may grip you with a strange enchantment, it may twist your wits into a snarl, information technology may go out your listen and senses toddling vaguely in the regions in between. Merely this we tin can reasonably promise: when y'all stagger away from information technology, you volition feel you lot accept delighted in (or suffered) a unique and intense experience.And that, it appears, is precisely what Yard. Resnais means you to feel—the extreme and abnormal stimulation of a complete cinematic feel. For this is no usual motion picture drama that he is dishing up from a script of radical construction by Alain Robbe-Grillet. This is no lucid exposition of human being behavior in terms of conventional dramatic state of affairs, motivation and plot.This is an middle-opening example of the use of the cinema device—the machinery of visual prototype-making, conjoined with musical sounds and the contrapuntal assistance of vocalized images and ideas—to excite the imagination as it might be excited past a lyrical poem or, meliorate, past the tonal colorations and rhythms of a fine symphony.To this observer's mode of thinking (which nosotros might as well recognize right now is going to be countered or challenged by others that may be but as skillful), it is not to exist taken even as what it may seem to exist—that is, a surrealistic flick of a romantic encounter betwixt a man and a married woman, who meet at a European spa and drift into an thing that he cons her into believing began the previous year.To our way of thinking and responding to the flow of sensuous stimuli, it is a spider web of complete imagination, a visualization of the thoughts, the mental associations, the wishes and fantasies that swirl through the mind of this fellow—the fellow conveying his dream to us—beneath the spell of an elegant palace that suggests all sorts of romantic things.It suggests, every bit he walks u.s.a. through it, looking at the busy walls, the ballroom full of formal people, a stiff performance of Ibsen'south "Rosmersholm," something of the cold, embalmed emotions that lived and died here in long-gone years. And as he picks upwards his wife, his dream of honey, and begins his pursuit, information technology suggests that fourth dimension and emotions have no terminal points, that they whirl in fields of gravity surrounding textile things and magnetize the sensitive people that come within these fields.As a consequence of this concept, in that location is not time continuity in this film. The images change, spring, contrary, go fantastic, as the homo continues his pursuit, pleading, reminiscing, always as in a desperate quest to escape the tension of loneliness, longing and desire. When he finally completes his persuasion and gets the woman to agree to go away with him, information technology is equally though a stream of consciousness has ended its flow through a ocean of memories.The artfulness of this picture is in its brilliant photography, in black and white and (what is wondrous) on a radically wide screen; in its sumptuous setting and staging (most of it was shot in a palace and park near Munich); in its hypnotic rhythmical flow and in the radical apply of actors well-nigh equally models within the architectural frame.Delphine Seyrig as the woman, Giorgio Albertazzi as the human being (who also performs as narrator through the better part of the moving picture) and Sacha Pitoëff as the husband walk through their roles eloquently, speak occasionally in slumberous intonations and utilise their eyes tellingly. Dozens of other handsome people, stylishly and impeccably dressed, surround them with a dazzling aura of the haut monde and haute couture.Francis Seyrig'southward music, mostly for the organ, has a sad, lyrical quality, and the French narration is poetic. It is likewise bad that it cannot exist spoken in English by a beautiful voice, then to free the eye from the English subtitles, which go along one glued to the bottom of the screen.To be sure, this is not a picture in which a vital "message" is conveyed. It is a romantic circuit—or possibly a serious sort of travesty on same. It is, in short, an experience, total of dazzler and mood.Take it thus and y'all should find it fascinating; try to make some sense of it—to discover some thread of proof or logic—and it is likely to drive you mad, like that clearly illogical match game that is played like a running gag through it.
The CastLAST Twelvemonth AT MARIENBAD, screen play by Alain Robbe-Grillet; directed by Alain Resnais; a French-Italian co-product of Terra Films, Societe Nouvelle des Films Cormoran, Preceitel, Como-Films, Argos-Films Les Films Tamara, Cinetel, Silver-Films and Cineriz of Rome. Released past Astor Films. At the Carnegie Hall Cinema, Seventh Avenue and Fifty-7th Street. Running time: ninety-three minutes.The Woman . . . . . Delphine SeyrigThe Stranger . . . . . Giorgio AlbertazziThe Husband . . . . . Sacha PitoeffandFrancoise Bertin . . . . . Wilhelm von DeekLuce Garcia-Ville . . . . . Jean LanierHelena Kornel . . . . . Gerard LorinFrancoise Spira . . . . . Davide MontemuriKarin Toeche-Mittler . . . . . Gilles QueantPierre Barbaud . . . . . Gabriel Werner
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/1962/03/08/archives/the-screen-last-year-at-marienbadcarnegie-hall-cinema-shows-resnais.html