Word: marienbad
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...there are even more obvious sources for this facet of Resnais's direction. A film such as Marienbad calls to mind the subjective chronology of twentieth century experimental fiction. As in the novels of Robbe-Grillet, there is no progress; the past exists only as a conjecture, and the present only as a dream. The same event, with minor variations, is constantly recurring, ending in a number of ambiguously false denouements...
ACOLLABORATION of Alain Resnais and Stan Lee, if it is ever realized, may well be a combination as significant and as perfect as that, eleven years ago, of Resnais and the French author Alain Robbe-Grillet, in the creation of Last Year at Marienbad. Filmmaking, of course, has always made strange bedfellows: as different as the American father of Spiderman is from the French creator of the "nouveau roman", and as different as both of these are from the novelist Marguerite Duras, who wrote the script for Hiroshima Mon Amour. Resnais has affinities with all three...
Last Year at Marienbad was the paramount example of this ideal director-writer relationship. Oddly enough, Resnais did not know Robbe-Grillet, and had read none of his books, before the producer suggested they try working together. Within a week after their first meeting, where they "agreed about everything," Resnais had read all of Robbe-Grillet's novels, and Robbe-Grillet had submitted four possible script projects. The writer and the director discovered themselves in each other's work: "I felt," explains Resnais, "that we had already made a film together." In the work on Marienbad which followed, visual...
...equally interesting match, though of a decidedly different tone. The comics have been an avowed influence on Resnais's earlier works; he mentions specifically how, in Muriel, they inspired the overlapping of dialogue belonging to one scene with action of another, and how the action on Marienbad had some resemblance to Phil Davis's Mandrake the Magician...
THROUGH FILM, however, Resnais can create experiences unattainable by his literary forbears. As in Marienbad, he can stop human time, by freezing motion, while, through the exploring action of the camera, he can make inanimate objects come alive. In both Marienbad and Hiroshima Mon Amour, there is a peculiar juxtaposition of an ongoing text with the filmed image. The text is the dialogue of a man and woman. Simultaneously with this text, instead of the objective reality of their faces, we see the images in their minds--a cellar in Nevers, maimed victims of Hiroshima, or the gardens of Marienbad...