In order to do justice to each work and avoid ranking all according to a general standard, one needs to evaluate each film within the standards it sets for itself, judging its success according to its own ambitions. Unfortunately cinema runs into some fairly unsurpassable limits which make ambitious films appear haughty and foolish. For this reason Bergman's more ambitious work appears banal, while humbler films that do not attempt to address philosophical questions are successful in not addressing them.
Last Year At Marienbad is the most glaring exception. The film is extremely ambitious and wants to push the spacial and temporal facets of the moving image to their most self-illuminating point. If that were not enough, it tries to establish its place among other arts, especially theater and sculpture. With the stakes raised so high, the film inevitably fails to accomplish its mission and make the screen image self-conscious of its flexibility. Nevertheless, this failure gives birth to a wonderful film bursting with subtle experiments.
The space in which the movements of the film take place is disorienting. The three players move in a maze of stone and mirrors. They roam around a garden whose every turn resembles the previous. The other guests are often motionless, turning into props behind the love triangle. And the triangle itself is composed of a woman, her alleged paramour and a man who claims to be her lover from last year. Through this constellation of characters, Resnais works to visually explore the dimension of memory. As the stranger provokes the woman's recollections, the creative and autonomous character of memory emerges on the spacial and temporally flexible screen. Of course, such a moment destroys the fragile walls of the film beyond recognition. The film perpetually teeters on the edge of chaotic incoherence, or more precisely the incoherence latent in the composure of bourgeois ennui. In allowing the structure of memory to wholly determine the structure of the film, Last Year at Marienbad attempts to bring to light a self-consciousness of which the medium itself is likely incapable.
Despite this pretension and shortcoming, the film lands in a place that is much more provocative than many films that resist expecting this much of themselves. Watching it means making a commitment to its experiment. Without such a commitment, its meditative rhythm will become soporific. Last Year At Marienbad can only exert its transformative, albeit confused, appreciation of the indefinite dimensions of its own walls upon those who pledge to view it generously.
Last Year At Marienbad is the most glaring exception. The film is extremely ambitious and wants to push the spacial and temporal facets of the moving image to their most self-illuminating point. If that were not enough, it tries to establish its place among other arts, especially theater and sculpture. With the stakes raised so high, the film inevitably fails to accomplish its mission and make the screen image self-conscious of its flexibility. Nevertheless, this failure gives birth to a wonderful film bursting with subtle experiments.
The space in which the movements of the film take place is disorienting. The three players move in a maze of stone and mirrors. They roam around a garden whose every turn resembles the previous. The other guests are often motionless, turning into props behind the love triangle. And the triangle itself is composed of a woman, her alleged paramour and a man who claims to be her lover from last year. Through this constellation of characters, Resnais works to visually explore the dimension of memory. As the stranger provokes the woman's recollections, the creative and autonomous character of memory emerges on the spacial and temporally flexible screen. Of course, such a moment destroys the fragile walls of the film beyond recognition. The film perpetually teeters on the edge of chaotic incoherence, or more precisely the incoherence latent in the composure of bourgeois ennui. In allowing the structure of memory to wholly determine the structure of the film, Last Year at Marienbad attempts to bring to light a self-consciousness of which the medium itself is likely incapable.
Despite this pretension and shortcoming, the film lands in a place that is much more provocative than many films that resist expecting this much of themselves. Watching it means making a commitment to its experiment. Without such a commitment, its meditative rhythm will become soporific. Last Year At Marienbad can only exert its transformative, albeit confused, appreciation of the indefinite dimensions of its own walls upon those who pledge to view it generously.
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