16:9 in English: Modish Artifice versus Modern Art

Af BERT CARDULLO

Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961) are both presented as milestone works in text books on film history. However, historical revisionism also entails actually re-viewing these films in both senses of the word and subsequently re-evaluating their status as canonic works of film history.

As I left the movie theater years ago after seeing Last Year at Marienbad (1961), I heard a man saying grimly to his wife, “Boy, I sure pity the critics on this one.” He had evidently seen none of the tens of thousands of words already published at the time (and many more since) in Europe about this French film, where critics enjoyed themselves at sorting out its meanings.

Last Year at Marienbad is a relatively short picture—ninety-three minutes—directed by Alain Resnais, who made Hiroshima, mon amour (1959) immediately before it. He commissioned the original script from Alain Robbe-Grillet and worked closely on it with him. Robbe-Grillet was one of the three or four leading figures among the so-called New Novelists of France, and those who knew his two chief works, Le Voyeur (1955) and La Jalousie (1957), had something more than a glimmer of what to expect in this film.

It takes place in a huge baroque palace—actually Nymphenburg in Bavaria—which has been converted into a deluxe hotel (fig. 2). A man (never named—no characters are named) meets a young woman. He tells her that they met last year at Marienbad, or perhaps some place else, and were lovers. She denies it. Through a complex series of flashbacks, we see various versions of this past encounter as it may or may not have happened. The young woman is accompanied by a man who may or may not be her husband. The putative husband plays an implicative match game with the other man all through the film, always beating him. The latter insists that the woman leave the “husband” and go away with him, as he says he asked her to do a year ago. At the end, the man and the woman leave together—or maybe they don’t.

The indefiniteness of this story is part of the very fabric of Last Year at Marienbad. Resnais and Robbe-Grillet disagreed publicly at the time of the film’s release about whether the pair actually did meet the year before, and far from being embarrassed by differing views about their collaboration—as, say, their American contemporaries Billy Wilder and I. A. L. Diamond might have been—this director and screenwriter apparently took their disagreement as a certificate of success. This film, they claim, is like a piece of sculpture that may be approached from many angles—and hence be all things to all men.

To Make Visible the Intangible

But the gauzy story is only one note in the work’s tonality. Resnais said that, before shooting Last Year at Marienbad, he drew up a complete chronology of its events on graph paper; while he was shooting, he told actors that the scene at hand followed a certain other scene in time sequence yet would not appear there in the final editing. The plainest point of the film, in fact, is that it does not intend to tell a chronological story. It tries to isolate and reproduce the emotions of its situations, drawing (as all our minds do constantly) on the past and the possible future, as well as on a temporal zone where we put elements of past and present into combinations that may never have happened and may never happen but which influence us nonetheless. Marienbad is thus an attempt to make visible the intangible—the lightning play of mind and memory and impulse.

To describe Resnais’s method in detail is as impossible as it would be unhelpful. Much more to the purpose is to observe that he uses a free range of cinematic devices: intercutting, sometimes so brief as to be subliminal; swift series of still shots; quickly successive scenes of a character in the same composition but in different clothes and different lighting; and repetitions of whole sequences from the same or different viewpoints. (He even repeats one zooming close-up of the young woman in more and more intense light to the point of almost white overexposure, presumably to simulate the increasing intensity of the image in the narrator’s mind.) The other guests in the hotel sometimes freeze motionless as the protagonists move among them (fig. 3), sometimes behave normally, sometimes are seen to speak but cannot be heard. At one point, we watch a duo of string musicians sawing away while we hear an organ playing. Occasionally the hero—the first man—recalls on the soundtrack an episode that is not quite what is happening before our eyes; later, the episode is repeated more or less as he had previously described it.

As in Robbe-Grillet’s novels, the film’s planes of time dissolve, resolve, and re-dissolve continually, like prisms in a kaleidoscope.  And the most realistic detail—a statue’s face, a broken glass—by its juxtaposition with other shots, takes on an unreal, suggestive quality.  Kafka once said that “the strings of the lyre of modern poets are endless strips of celluloid,” and the film of Last Year at Marienbad, an imagist poem, is proof.  It is neither a narrative nor a drama but an endeavor to render subjectivity corruscatingly whole on the screen.

Order & Disorder

Anyone familiar with fantastic, surrealist, or “experimental” movies will recognize all the cinematic effects described above. Technically, there is little new in the film, as Resnais himself was the first to declare. He and Robbe-Grillet have used their method, not as inventors, but as devotees. They felt, as others have felt before them, that the conventions of art lay a false logic on the mercurial inner life of man, that plot contrivances are the real obscurantism, that the only lucidity is to present inner life as it is. I assume that it is to emphasize this belief that the filmmakers have placed their unconventional work in a highly conventional setting: a place and gardens that are the result of imposing strict order on nature.

In an apparent act of ekphrasis, Resnais very much patterns his film syntax after Robbe-Grillet’s prose. The latter writes in orderly grammatical sentences, not in expressionistic fragments or rhapsodies; his fracture of tradition comes from the content and sequence of sentences. Just so, Resnais almost never uses distortion, or freak shots, or double exposures; virtually every frame in Last Year at Marienbad is a clear and lovely photograph. To use an analogy from painting, Resnais has combined the loneliness of a surrealist vista by de Chirico with the exploded time of Picasso’s cubism, but with this simple yet important difference: he has not distorted any of his elements (fig. 4). It is as if he were willing to accept orderly surfaces because it is the disorder beneath those surfaces that interests him; he seeks the disorderly true reality under the orderly false reality of the surface. Furthermore, to use an analogy from music, Resnais has deployed the compositional order of classical music, only to undercut it with jazz-like experiments in small-scale variation—even improvisation—and a de-hierarchization of elements à la Schoenberg that leaves the viewer without a thematic anchor or center.

Mind Games

That said, the continuing critical search for meaning in this film is, to me, meaningless. Let us define “meaning,” for our purpose, as the belief about an aspect of life that strikes us as basic or residual in a work of art after the initial emotions and sensations it arouses have passed. In this sense, Last Year at Marienbad has no fundamental meaning. Archibald MacLeish’s familiar line tells us that a poem should not mean but be; a film, Resnais obviously thinks, should not mean but—through its maker’s eyes—see.

A somber search for meaning is always the curse of an unusual work like this one. The analysts and aesthetes approach it with pigeonholes and cross-references at the ready, seemingly more interested in explaining it than in experiencing it. But the authors in this case want us simply to let the film happen to us, not to ferret out symbolized theses, not to compare it with plotted movies as we watch, any more than in a love affair of our own we would constantly compare it with a movie love affair. In this ostensibly arty film, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet are trying to remove what they feel are the barriers that art erects between maker and viewer. This film, they imply, is what it does to you: a congress of sensations; no more, perhaps, but no less and no other. Nevertheless, one analytical question must be raised: does Last Year at Marienbad, in the process, open up artistic immediacies to truth or is it simply a case of art anarchy?

Let me qualify my answer at the start by saying that I’m glad the film exists and is still seen, but I believe that this kind of film is self-limiting and eventually futile. My belief does not derive from accepted definitions of art: the fallacy in Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s method is that if it is followed absolutely rigorously, it leads not to art but to madness. This is because no one moment of time can be completely stopped; no one encounter or thought can be traced in all its permutations and ramifications. James Joyce’s novel about one ordinary day in the life of one ordinary man is a titan’s masterpiece; still, any reader can find gaps in the inclusiveness of Ulysses (1922).  Art that tries to set down everything, and to set it down as it occurs, must end like a man trying to pick up too much and dropping what he has. Every honest artist who ever lived has known that he told partial lies, that he had to settle for less than he could see or know in order to reveal something, and that he therefore ended up compromising reality with some kind of abstraction or arrangement.

The Resnais-and-Robbe-Grillet alternative is to reject the contrivances and selectivity of art; but, far from being a move of liberation, this is, in fact, the most slavish realism. It tries to reproduce actual inner life instead of distilling it, as even the most Zola-esque naturalism does.  The logical end of this director-screenwriter’s method, its ultimate purity, is to see that there is falsity in any attempt to reproduce the truth, no matter how faithful; that for full, uncontaminated emotional truth, each audience member must go himself to Nymphenburg and hover in time between present and past, among varying shades of reality. Pressed to perfection, such a quest for fidelity to life cannot be satisfied by anything but life itself, of which art must always be only a delegate. This true-map-of-the-mind approach, arising from a hatred of tired formula and fakery, inevitably founders, then, on the faintly sophomoric failure to distinguish between life and art.

Further, the possibilities of extension of self or self-knowledge, provided by other artistic approaches, are negligible here. A work like Last Year at Marienbad is, in its way, only a “recognition” film, like a television domestic comedy in which you watch kids who behave just like yours at home. When all is over, you are not deeply moved or mentally stimulated; you may only have spent most of your time checking whether or not Resnais and Robbe-Grillet’s representation of the functions of the mind and imagination corresponds with your own experience.

About the acting itself in this film there can be small comment. The actors here are usually not asked to be much more than elements in pictorial compositions, required to stand thus and look thus, rarely with emotional development or transition in any one shot, scene, or sequence (fig. 5). Giorgio Abruzzi, who plays the man, has a genuinely romantic face; Sacha Pitoëff, the other man, has a mysterious death-head’s face. There is really not much more to be said about them. Delphine Seyrig, the young woman (whom Resnais also featured in Muriel [1963]), is handsome, but we are sometimes distracted from the emotion her face is supposed to evoke because her attitudes keep reminding us of those displayed by fashion models. Thus do chic photographers pose their girls in rich settings, even to the averted head and the ineffable secret sorrow that seems inseparable from haute couture. (Indeed, Seyrig’s gowns are by Chanel.)

As I wrote at the start, Last Year at Marienbad is immediately preceded in Resnais’s oeuvre by Hirsoshima, mon amour, which itself is frequently dismissed as an experiment in modernist structure at the expense of traditional substance.  The remainder of this essay will investigate whether such a dismissal is justified.

Hiroshima, mon amour (1959)

Charles Thomas Samuels is representative of those who attack Hiroshima, mon amour as an experiment in modernist structure at the expense of traditional substance:

Daring as an innovator, and . . . unsatisfactory as an artist, is Alain Resnais, whose major achievement is an editing style that represents the flux of memory—with its confusion of tenses and yearning for the subjunctive. Unfortunately, Resnais neither invents nor writes the scenarios on which this technique is lavished, and he has deplorable taste in collaborators. Marguerite Duras’s script for Hiroshima, mon amour is portentous and melodramatic. (9)

But Hiroshima, mon amour is also often discussed as a successful experiment in modernist structure. Roy Armes is representative of those who take this approach to the film and praise it for its achievement:

It was not until nine years after Orphée and Rashomon that the European cinema took further decisive steps forward in its self-imposed task of freeing itself from the bonds of an aesthetic based on the nineteenth-century novel and the ‘well-made play’: Alain Resnais’s Hiroshima Mon Amour is a good example of the total novelty that now became possible. (27-28)
. . . [Hiroshima Mon Amour partakes of] certain stylistic methods which may be taken as characteristic of modern film-making—a refusal of psychological explanation, a stylization of acting, and an interest in novel combinations of image and music. (83-84)

In the following, I want to consider Hiroshima, mon amour on the level at which, unlike Last Year at Marienbad, it seems to me most interesting, and most successful: the level of its modernist structure as wedded to substantial meaning, particularly symbolic meaning.

Resnais was approached after the appearance of Night and Fog (1955) to make a documentary about the atomic bomb. Night and Fog was a documentary about Auschwitz; Hiroshima, mon amour would turn out to be a fiction film, with the script by the novelist Duras.  Hiroshima, mon amour does, of course, include footage of the city and its people after the dropping of the bomb (fig. 6), and half of the film is shot in modern-day Hiroshima. But the aesthetic impulse behind it was not to document or to re-create fictionally the horror of the atomic bomb; that impulse was foremost, I believe, to create through the character of the Frenchwoman a metaphor for the tragedy of the bomb.

Resnais decided to make a fiction film instead of a documentary or a fictionalized documentary because he wanted, I think, to make his film more accessible to the Western audience for whom the dropping of the bomb meant the end of war with Japan. (The Frenchwoman in the film is herself an actress who has come to Hiroshima to make a fictionalized documentary about the bomb, in which she plays a nurse.) (fig. 7) In fact, he began to make a documentary but did not complete it, stopping work after only a few months. To make a documentary about the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis at Auschwitz is one thing, Resnais must have thought. But to have made a documentary about the horrors perpetrated by the Allies, specifically the Americans, at Hiroshima would have been quite another, he seemed to sense, because unlike the Jews in the concentration camps, the Japanese were aggressors in World War II. The atomic bomb was designed to stop them once and for all.

A Resnais film documenting the devastation and suffering caused by the bomb would therefore have been incomplete and unacceptable to a Western audience. Even a film fictionalizing both the devastation and suffering caused by the bomb and the pressing reasons for its dropping would seem inevitably to be creating more sympathy for the victims than for the victors. However, a film that created the two sides to the dropping of the bomb—the tragedy of its dropping, that is—through metaphor would reach, and affect, its audience. In this regard, Camus was right to say that “it is better to suffer certain injustices than to commit them even to win wars” (114). On the other hand, the Americans could argue that they were equally right to inflict great suffering on the Japanese rather than continue to suffer themselves.

The Frenchwoman comes to Hiroshima thinking that she knows all there is to know (through newsreel footage, books, interviews, and the like) about the atomic bomb and the effect it had on the city. The Japanese architect with whom she has a torrid affair asks her how she can know what she has not experienced, either directly or indirectly.  (He is a native of Hiroshima but was not there when the bomb was dropped; the rest of his family was there, and all of them perished.)  Naturally, there is something to what he says—we get footage of the leveled Hiroshima to underline his meaning, not to give us the experience of the havoc wrought by the bomb. But the real point here is that the Frenchwoman, in her private life during the war, underwent an experience similar to the experience of those who dropped the bomb, not those who received it. And she has undergone an experience since the war openly comparable to the experience of the conscience-stricken airmen who dropped the bomb, if not to the one undergone by the leaders and citizens of the triumphant nation that decided to use it.

Symbolic Constellations

The Frenchwoman (neither she nor the Japanese is ever named), living in occupied Nevers, fell in love and had a long affair with a German soldier. Shortly before the liberation of the town, the soldier, waiting to meet his lover at an appointed place in the countryside, was killed by Resistance fighters. The Frenchwoman, subsequently identified as the lover of a German, had her head shaved by the citizens of Nevers and was paraded through the town to verbal and physical abuse, as well as to the disgrace of her family. In order to avoid further censure by the townspeople, her family virtually kept her prisoner in the cellar of their home (fig. 8). Finally, she was allowed to move to Paris and did not see Nevers or her family again. Although she eventually married, it is clear from her statements that the Japanese is the first man she has been able to love since the German.  (She says to the Japanese at one point, “Oh! How good it is to be with someone, sometime”; and she tells him about her affair with the German, although she has never told her husband.)

The very title of the film expresses the tragedy of the Frenchwoman’s love, as well as the tragedy of the the bomb. The juxtaposition of “mon amour” against “Hiroshima” is startling. The love the Americans should have had for the Japanese is thus juxtaposed against the horror (immediately called forth by the word “Hiroshima”) they should have inflicted, and did inflict, upon them. The love the Frenchwoman had for the German is similarly juxtaposed against the death he should have suffered, and did suffer, at the hands of Resistance fighters. “Hiroshima” in the film becomes a metonym, not only for the Japanese architect, but also for the German soldier, since the Frenchwoman talks to the Japanese as if he were the German a number of times. When she does so, he does not act surprised (fig. 9).  Through this device, as well as through the device of having the Frenchwoman and the Japanese speak throughout in incantatory tones, Resnais encourages us to view his film on the symbolic rather than the realistic level. To this end, also, he does not name the characters, does not permit them to engage in small talk, and has the Frenchwoman utter the following line to the Japanese, in which she describes the meaning of the film’s title from her point of view: “You destroy me, you are good for me.”

Although it may at first seem strange that Resnais has chosen the tragedy of the Frenchwoman’s love to be a metaphor for the tragedy of the bomb, his choice is actually entirely appropriate. For loving the enemy is the only thing that approaches, in its seeming incomprehensibility, grotesqueness, or even monstrosity, utterly annihilating (as opposed to simply defeating) the enemy by means of the atomic bomb. Although it may seem equally strange that Resnais has included someone French in a metaphor for the tragedy of the bomb, this too is entirely appropriate. America is never referred to by name in Hiroshima, mon amour. For purposes of distancing, it is left to a foreigner, from a country that was almost a non-combatant in the war, to incarnate America’s presence—one implied by the very word “Hiroshima.”

The French are thus the apparent opposites of the Americans who dropped the bomb, just as the Frenchwoman’s love is the apparent opposite of the bomb’s destruction. But the rapid French capitulation to (and collaboration with) the enemy is the only thing that approaches, in its seeming incomprehensibility, grotesqueness, or even monstrosity, the American annihilation of the enemy by means of the bomb. Like the woman’s love for the German, the French capitulation was tragic—one knows that they could not have won if they had fought an all-out war against the Germans; yet one senses that they should have fought anyway, lost, and maintained their honor. And even as the French have suffered since the war from the tragedy of their capitulation-cum-collaboration, so too has the Frenchwoman been suffering from the tragedy of her love affair with the German soldier. Not only has she not been able to love another man until she meets the Japanese; she has also not been able to love herself—love for another, of course, presupposes love for oneself—out of guilt for having had an affair with one of the enemy. 

John Ward, for his part, believes that the Frenchwoman has been “psychologically deformed” by her experience at Nevers and that her psychosis flaws Hiroshima, mon amour:

The experiences of the girl were not of a kind that would give rise to normal personal memories, or even to the kind of memories which, just because of their extremeness, could serve as a paradigm of a class of ‘standard’ personal memories.  Hers were in fact traumatic.  It is not just her relationship with her Japanese lover that is affected: her whole life has been crippled. . . . The simple fact is that, in various ways, she is not free to choose what she wants to do; and to that extent the film, as an analysis of how even lovers are kept apart by their pasts, is weakened.  It is weakened because instead of developing the conflict between them, it assumes this conflict by making her the kind of woman any man would fail to get on with. (34-35)

To the extent that Hiroshima, mon amour is a realistic film, Ward is correct.  The Japanese is “normal” and the Frenchwoman is “psychotic.”  That is what keeps them apart.  But if we look at the film symbolically, as being less about the lovers themselves than about the two sides in World War II they represent, then I think that the flaw Ward speaks of disappears.

This particular Japanese (as played by Eiji Okada) is the perfect one to place in service as a symbol for his people, since he did not suffer any physical harm himself from the bomb and since his looks are more Western than those of the average Japanese (fig. 10). Thus we are distanced sufficiently through him from the actual suffering caused by the bomb, just as we are distanced through the Frenchwoman (Emmanuèle Riva) from those who actually dropped it. This frees us to contemplate and lament the very tragedy of the atomic bomb’s creation and use. The Japanese and his Frenchwoman are in this way stand-ins for the genuine articles, symbols by detraction. Unlike traditional filmic or literary symbols, which are intended to enrich our perceptions of what in real life we take for granted, these two are meant to make us contemplate in art what we otherwise could or would not. All film characters are literally “figures of light”; the Japanese and the Frenchwoman are figuratively so in the sense that, as symbols, they are shadows of the substance on which Resnais means to shine his light.

The Japanese is more precisely a symbol for his defeated people, who, in rebuilding their country, were at the same time “externalizing” their wartime experience—working off their suffering, if you will. He has adjusted to his (or his family’s) experience of Hiroshima and has been involved, as an architect, in rebuilding the city. His fellow Hiroshimans now live so well with their past that they erect museums to memorialize it and give guided tours to commemorate it.  The Frenchwoman, by contrast, has not adjusted to her experience at Nevers, has never returned to the city, and has been involved as an actress in living her life through others, on stage or on the set, and thereby negating her past. 

In her joy-guilt over loving the German soldier, the Frenchwoman is a symbol for the victorious Americans, who, overjoyed at saving their own country and the countries of the Allies, were at the same time internalizing their guilt for destroying Hiroshima with the atomic bomb. (This guilt was externalized in the well-documented soul-searching, if not suffering, after the war of the crew members of the Enola Gay, the plane that carried the bomb). The Americans—in Indochina in particular, where they followed the French—were later to attempt to negate their past by playing the role of peacemaker or savior in foreign conflicts, all the while continuing to build up arms and set themselves up for the same dilemma they faced in World War II, this time with the added danger that they themselves might be destroyed by nuclear weapons launched by the Soviets or one of their satellite states.

The Frenchwoman faces her World War II dilemma again in Hiroshima—to remain or not to remain with her Japanese lover, a one-time enemy like the German. Far from being merely a relationship between a psychotic woman and a normal man doomed to failure from the start, the relationship between the Frenchwoman and the Japanese is symbolic of the difficult rapprochement between a repressed America and a reconstructed Japan. (Remember that Hiroshima, mon amour was made only thirteen to fourteen years after the war). The Japanese wants to find out all he can about Nevers, so that he can know the Frenchwoman better. The Frenchwoman, thinking she knows all there is to know about Hiroshima before she gets there, learns that she must come to terms herself with what happened at Nevers. Like the American “peacekeepers” abroad, the actress in the film “about peace” (she says) must return home to find herself.

Even as she could not tear herself away from the dead German’s body in Nevers, the Frenchwoman cannot leave the Japanese. But she must, and she will. Even as the German courted death by continuing to see the Frenchwoman as the Americans approached and the Resistance fighters thereby became braver, the Japanese risks psychological damage by continuing to woo the Frenchwoman in the face of her moral-mental dilemma. He must, and he will, give her up in order for himself to survive. The Japanese must return to re-building Hiroshima—significantly, he has stopped work completely while conducting his affair with the Frenchwoman. On the realistic level, their love could not have existed without the bomb—recall that the Frenchwoman comes to Hiroshima in the first place to make a film about the bomb, or about the banning of atomic weaponry. On the symbolic level, their love cannot continue to exist because of the bomb: the Frenchwoman, in returning to Nevers, symbolizes America “coming home” to confront its own romance with nuclear warfare.

The Frenchwoman’s love for the German isolated her in Nevers, has isolated her since the war, and will continue to isolate her: she must return to Nevers alone, a heroine who has, through contact in the present with the searching Japanese, experienced tragic recognition about her past. (He may be seen, in this sense, as a purely dramatic device, in addition to being the German’s “double” and a symbol in his own right for Japan.) Just so, America’s atomic bombing of Japan alienated her from some of her own people, separated her, in power and might, from the rest of the world, and has continued to separate her. Although other countries have had, and continue to have, the bomb, only America has ever used it. Now the United States has a stockpile of nuclear weapons that is matched only by that of Russia, with whom she remains isolated in perpetual conflict despite the so-called end of the Cold War. Like the Frenchwoman, America has had to return home alone, a heroine who, through “involvements” abroad as well as postwar occupation of Japan, has again and again had to comprehend the tragedy of the bomb, of the conflicting, reconstructive as well as destructive demands of absolute power.

As I left the movie theater years ago after seeing Hiroshima, mon amour, I said to myself, “I’d love to read what the critics have to say about this one.” I did read them, and I have read much about the film since, but without satisfaction, because the critics have always spent less time sorting out its meanings than describing (or deprecating) its structure. In this case, as not in the case of Last Year at Marienbad, the two—structure and meaning—go together.  The result is a happy marriage, if not for the Japanese man and the Frenchwoman, then for Hiroshima, mon amour.