The characters are usually still as the camera tracks. The present-present is generally made absent so that a constantly repetitious elliptical relationship between the past-present and the present-future create an additional layer of resonance to the already rhythmic tracking shots. The split is between time and space, action and space, intention and free will, mind and body, movement and stasis and in the case of Marienbad, between his affected characters the woman A and the man X and their constantly varying relationship with the past, present and the future.Īccording to this reading the present is split into three dimensions the present of the present, the past-present and the present-future. He is also Deleuzean in the sense that he emphasizes schizoanalysis, or the degree to which the Marxist symptoms of reified capital are split ( Capitalisme et Schizophrenie, Deleuze and Guattari, 1972-79) instead of finding a causal Freudian reason to schizophrenia. Resnais along with Orson Welles and Robert Bresson can be called a truly Deleuzean filmmaker in his privileging of the temporal notions of film practice that obviously violate the sanctity of the denotational and metaphorical visual plane. The utterance in this way both triggers and limits the relevance of the visual plane. In the final sequence, where Kane passes through the alley with reflecting mirrors, the memory image is formed as the present moves into the future. In the case of Citizen Kane, the quality of the utterance at the beginning of the film, namely ‘Rosebud’ forms a pure memory-image and therefore in the past (memory), which is then supplemented with investigations in the present leading into the future. In my reading of the film, the unveiling of the mise-en-scene through the baroque corridors and elaborate tracking shots, is a sophisticated reworking of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane particularly in its dealing of the developing temporality of the film across its three dimensions, the past present and the future. In this essay I will try to emphasize the importance of mystical forms mainly of text, like poetry and the haiku, that Alain Robbe-Grillet has carefully adapted into his conception of the Nouveau Roman allocating equally the breakthroughs in modern literature in the early twentieth century mainly addressed in the writings of Joyce and Beckett while at the same time equally allocating masterworks in Hollywood film practice as represented by the works of Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock. The film has become a standard for formalism in cinema that is only matched by the even more obscure films of writers of the Nouveau Romanne movement, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras (who collaborated with Resnais on his first masterwork Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)). ‘Last Year at Marienbad’ has acquired the reputation of being the quintessential cerebral Art House film that is a far more somber version of the experimentation generally termed the Nouvelle Vague represented by the fragmented Balzacian narrative as represented in the films of Francois Truffaut or the playful genre beating of Godard’s A Bout De Souffle (1959).
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