Memory and Loss in “Last Year at Marienbad”

Much like a shattered plate, the 1961 film “Last Year at Marienbad” (Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet) is fractured and incomplete, a chipped and ciphered segment of it’s original whole. In following the trend within modern art of breaking apart, systematizing, and distorting (see Picasso, James Joyce, et al.), “Marienbad” splits apart both its own narrative and the viewers consciousness, using it’s own splintered structure as a crow-bar to pry open the viewers brain and stir it up.

For this reason, watching “Marienbad” is unsettling – it’s the sort of film that leaves the viewer indefinably on edge all day, as if expecting those around him to suddenly start speaking in the soft, morbid French of the party-goers, repeating their every thought, linking their thoughts together over time, choosing a word and repeating it forever and ever, like some sort of baleful purgatory inhabited by inchoate writers and mumbling philosophers. Most films like this, however, do deliver at least some sort of pay-off, give some sort of prize to the viewer for experience this splitting of consciousness. Marienbad, however, makes no such offer. Instead, the film leaves you with virtually nothing to cling to, nothing to hold on to. You do not even know if the characters are telling the truth, are sympathetic, are hateful, or even real.

But perhaps, as modernism is wont to say, this is the reality of daily life. Perhaps memory and consciousness is a dream-like state, like the one “Marienbad” displays. We do not remember our lives linearly or completely, after all, but rather in shattered segments, in broken pieces, in glimpses of hallways and snatches of conversation. Our memories are inherently faulty, yet we rely on them to create our lives and our selves. Without this imperfect device, we would be nothing more than empty vessels, floating along aimless down the shallow stream of existence, adrift without oars and floating inexorably, meaninglessly, slowly towards the waterfall.

The nature of memory describe here is Marienbad’s chief concern, as the characters attempt to determine if they have met the pervious year, but cannot, and the viewer attempts to piece together the true narrative. However, there is no true narrative in Marienbad, no final twist, no completing gesture. There is only uncertainty. There is only existence.