Fantastic Metropolis

Alain Resnais is a cult director whose capacity to irritate and enthral seems to spring from the same source. Critics and reviewers have spent many sleepless nights struggling to unravel the enigma of some of his more experimental films. What seems more and more likely as time goes by is that the attempt will always be doomed to failure. Probably there is no great meaning to such creations as Last Year in Marienbad beyond their appeal to the geometrical eye. Resnais, it has been claimed, is a cynical director, a tailor who specialises in stitching Emperors’ New Clothes. It is as if the arty crowd, the demi-monde and weekend bohemians, are always willing to praise that which they do not understand for fear of being ostracised by their fashionable fellows. But it can also be argued that Resnais is genuine enough; that he is merely a lunatic who, if he succeeds in fooling his public, also fools himself.

Born in 1922, Resnais was fascinated by the medium of film from an early age. He began shooting 8mm home-movies while still at school, and at the age of 14 produced an ambitious, though creaking, short entitled L’Aventure de Guy. Shorts were to form his staple diet right from the mid 1930’s up to the late 1950’s. At the end of the war, he released Le Sommeil d’Albertine and then Ouvert pour cause d’inventaire, rather drab affairs which scarcely hinted at the delights, and miseries, to come. It was in the field of documentaries that he found his true vocation, starting with a series of personal portraits in 1947. This year was to see no less than six brief features of famous, and not so famous, personages including Henri Goetz, Hans Hartnung and Oscar Dominguez. His first real success, however, came the following year with his treatment of Van Gogh. This was a thoughtful study of an over-exposed artist, which showed that at least some talent lay behind Resnais’ enthusiasm. Even better was his feature on Gauguin in 1950. It was at this point that he decided to branch out into an examination of contemporary horrors and picked the troubled Basque city of Guernica, that favourite subject of Surrealists, as a more pithy subject for his battered lens.

In 1955, his best documentary of all, Nuit et brouillard, was released to favourable reviews and general acclaim. It is still, in many ways, his most moving film. Released in the U.K. and U.S. as Night and Fog, it is a grim length of celluloid that charts the rise and function of the Nazi concentration camps. Although this was hardly a novel theme, and western audiences were already too numbed by the sight of dead bodies to feel much repulsion or shock at the prospect, Resnais still managed to provoke a reaction by his oblique approach to the subject matter. Thus piles of dead bodies were not shown. Instead, he directed his attention to the minor details, the overlooked aspects of the Holocaust. He showed Himmler’s greenhouse and Hitler’s zoo and Hoess’ symphony orchestra, which was expected to accompany the march of prisoners into the gas chambers with strains of Mozart. Resnais managed to sum up a disturbing atmosphere that was more informative than the presentation of simple facts. Nuit et brouillard established his reputation as a film-maker of tact and humanity; a reputation he seemed eager to demolish in the following decades with a vision altogether cooler and more cerebral.

Two more quasi-memorable documentaries followed, Tout la memoire du monde in 1956, and Le chant du styrone in 1958. These dealt with subjects that were so dry as to be completely desiccated, but they were inventive enough to engage the attention for at least a while. It was obvious that Resnais needed to branch out into new areas and in 1959, with the aid of Marguerite Duras, this is precisely what he proceeded to do, with a film that mixed documentary and fiction, and which won awards from both the Cannes Film Festival and the New York Film Critics.

Hiroshima mon amour was Resnais’ first feature-film, a complex tour de force with Proustian allusions and an intricate mosaic of images. As well as directing, Resnais also produced the film, with co-producer Samy Halfon. Halfon wanted to commission a script from gentile erotic novelist Francoise Sagan, but she rejected the project. Resnais persuaded Halfon to approach Marguerite Duras with the offer, and Duras accepted. Duras was also a writer of erotic stories, but her writing had a much harder edge to it than Sagan’s and a disturbing affinity with surrealism that made her work reminiscent of Bataille. Moreover, she was a much more visual sort of writer, and eminently suited to the task.

The simple plot, in which a French actress travels to Hiroshima to make an anti-war film, meets a Japanese architect and jumps into bed with him, conceals a deeper vein of riches. The cold photography, the elaborate use of flashback and memory (where the Proustian allusions come in) were all truly original at the time, and Resnais’ rigidity at following the script led to the taking of many risks. Indeed, Resnais’ rigid style has become something of a legend in film circles: he steadfastly refuses to deviate from a script and claims that the most important aspect of the production is the editing. Thus Hiroshima mon amour comes over as stiff and mechanical and somewhat lacking in emotion, defects that lend it a geometric beauty and stark symmetry. The sight of the huge mushroom cloud rising over the Japanese port and the ensuing devastation are like blueprints not for the end of civilisation but for the creation of a new form of terrible consciousness.

Other scenes proved less palatable to French sensibilities. While the French actress (played to great effect by Emmanuelle Riva) makes love to the Japanese architect, she recalls an earlier affair she had with a German soldier during the second-world war; an affair for which she was locked in the cellar by her parents and punished after the war by having her head shaved. The issue of collaborators has always been a thorny one in France; Resnais decided to tackle it head-on, as it were.

Hiroshima mon amour has also been cited as the very first example of a new genre: the film-text. According to one improbably named film critic, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, this means that “the film becomes text, not because it includes a text… but rather because it incorporates a textual apparatus which deprives the written text of its autonomy, its specificity even, and at the same time lays the film open to the invasion of an off-screen space, by definition hidden.”(!) What it does actually mean is still unclear, but it is certain that it reached its apotheosis with Resnais’ next film, the notorious Last Year in Marienbad, completed in 1961, which is an enigma inside a puzzle inside a conundrum and which is hated and loved, despised and admired, and has polarised opinion like almost no other film in cinema history.

Scripted by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year in Marienbad is in many ways the ultimate Resnais film. Robbe-Grillet prepared not only the plot (dubious) and the supposed rationale of the various characters but a detailed shooting script which outlined exactly how Resnais was supposed to film scenes and precisely what he should do with them afterwards. Robbe-Grillet was the real lunatic-genius behind this monster; Resnais was more like a catalyst or an algorithmic adding machine by which the calculations of the enigmas could be solved or, more often, twisted into even greater paradoxes.

Robbe-Grillet, doyen of the nouvea romanciers, was the darling of the French literary set. His novels, which include Jealousy and Djinn (either works of hard brilliance or else the most boring books ever written, depending on the prevailing point of view) were supposed to be completely unique, but really were merely carrying on the tradition established twenty-five years earlier by Louis Aragon. One of the leading Surrealists, Aragon was responsible for Paris Peasant (1936), a novel in which the main characters were not people but objects. Robbe-Grillet adapted the form to suit his own purposes with the result that novels such as Jealousy (1957) require detective work from the reader to be intelligible. A love-scene, for example, will not be described in terms of the characters and their actions but by the relative position and appearances of the objects around them. The reader is expected to absorb the hints and fill in the gaps.

Last Year in Marienbad possibly pushes the form too far. Some empathy at least is required if the reader, or cinema-goer, is to rack their brains trying to solve a puzzle that is almost certainly unsolvable. There is no empathy at all in Resnais’ film or Robbe-Grillet’s script. What it lacks in humanity, however, it more than makes up for in visual beauty and coldly clever images and scenes. The story is ostensibly set in an anonymous hotel peopled by wealthy anonymous guests. These are a man, X; a woman, A; and another man, M, who is possibly A’s husband. X tries to persuade A that they met together last year in Marienbad and that they had an affair. A cannot remember any of this, but eventually she is persuaded. When X also convinces her that they agreed to elope together, she leaves with him. It is an odd story, one that is somehow beyond the call of reason and therefore unarguable.

Briefly fashionable in high society, Last Year in Marienbad now seems more like an elaborate game than ever. But at the time, intellectuals took the film seriously: they discussed the possible symbolism of actress Delphine Seyrig’s hairstyle and her outrageous feather dress; they wondered at the meanings supposedly encoded in the sculpted gardens of Frederiksbad; they gnawed their nails at the mysteries contained in the sinister game of dominoes played between X and M. They simply assumed that there was more to the film than there was, like students who spend long hours almost analysing Finnegans Wake instead of just reading it.

Quick to capitalise on his success, Resnais took the opportunity to make his first colour-feature, Muriel, in 1963. It is an impressive film to watch for its visuals, but once again the characters exist in limbo, and the superb pastels and darker tones are wasted on the trite events that happen, or rather do not happen. Nonetheless it was a brave attempt to make a radical women’s film with political overtones (it makes references to the Algerian War) and ultimately emerges as less depressing than the two films which followed it, La guerre est finie in 1966 and Loin du Vietnam in 1967. Championed by the likes of J.G. Ballard, whose own Atrocity Exhibition reads like a literary Last Year in Marienbad, it was inevitable that Resnais would eventually try his hand at science fiction. In 1968, he made Je t’aime, je t’aime, an experimental piece of speculation which tried to merge Surrealism with the new concepts of the future and which ended up being neither a satisfactory avant-garde film nor an obvious example of science-fiction. It is true that it is a mite more accessible than its predecessors and succeeds in some small way at presenting a gloomy, metaphysical ambience. But both Truffaut and Tarkovsky were doing similar things to greater effect at the time.

A break was much needed, and Resnais took a six-year sabbatical before bouncing back in 1974 with Stavisky, easily his most immediate and orthodox film. Although Stavisky is the best introduction to his work, it is an atypical one and leaves a peculiar flavour of disenchantment. The intellectuals felt betrayed; they complained and Resnais answered with a film that backtracked slightly to his more difficult work but which failed to convince in either form or content. The master of gloss and facade, Resnais had compromised his skills for the sake of bigger returns at the box-office. Providence, released in 1976, was mildly controversial, mildly avant-garde, mildly a film.

Despite a thunderous score by Miklos Rosza, Providence never manages to convince or to mirror the emotion of the music. It is a study of old age and the old Proustian chestnuts of memory, taste, sensation, the periphery of motive, the edges of forgetfulness. What critic Dwight MacDonald said of Last Year in Marienbad can be applied equally to Providence, but sadly for different reasons: “It is a charade, a masque, beautiful to the eyes… and interesting to the mind, or at least to a crossword-puzzle-solving part of the mind, but curiously lacking in emotional effect.” Resnais, it seems, was unable to reconcile humanity and his own idiosyncratic versions of reality. He was no Cocteau.

The subject-matter of Providence demands a caring, sympathetic attitude that does not lapse into sentimentality. It could be argued that there is destructive art as well as constructive and that Providence is a monument to senility by the very absence of its compassion, but such sophistry usually rings hollow. Resnais’ real topic should have been autism rather than dementia; he shares the inability to communicate on the same level as his audience. While this might have been a strength in Last Year in Marienbad, it is decidedly a weakness in Providence. There are moments of vulgarity worthy of a Waters or Meyer; hardly appropriate elements in an art-house director fawned over by the cognoscenti.

Following Providence came two utterly dismal films, Mon oncle d’Amerique in 1980 and La vie est un roman in 1983. If all life is really a novel, as this latter film claims, then Resnais was unable to make a good case for the theory. Again he was influenced by Marguerite Duras, whose belief that literature is real and reality a fiction is a convenient one for her chosen career. It is rather a sad admission in that it elevates the product, the artifice, over its creator in Borgesian fashion but then fails to deliver. For paradoxes to be truly effective they have to be on the horizons of understanding; the consumer has to feel that there is a solution just beyond their grasp. A paradox that is meaningless is not a paradox. But like all of Resnais’ films these two are unarguable. It is impossible to disagree with something that has no meaning. Resnais not only makes the Emperor’s New Clothes; he also wears them, and only the viewer prepared to do likewise will be able to share his rather peculiar insights and those of Duras and Robbe-Grillet.

And yet in the rather grotesquely titled L’amour a mort, made in 1984, and the blander Melo, completed in 1986, there are hints of the former brilliance that astounded audiences two decades earlier. Melo, with its theatre simulacrums, is hardly a Last Year in Marienbad, but it is not entirely a failure either. Again there was a convergence with Duras and if there is any value in their collaborations this one certainly shows more of it than any other film since Hiroshima mon amour. Resnais has re-embraced pure style, leaving angst to those better able to deal with it. He is the physicist of the cinema world and only when he accepts his role do his creations show any life. But it is a crystalline species of life, one that glitters and precludes any warmth. It is hardly surprising that he should appeal to the likes of Ballard.

In summation then, Resnais is an important minor figure in cinema, a director who chose a path that no-one else seemed inclined to follow; an imagist who charted unknown territory which was barren and alien but not infrequently beautiful; the chief engineer of the New Dehumanism; a rare talent encased in a startling monochrome jewel, as wondrous and uncaring and transient as the Aurora Borealis. Last Year at Marienbad should be seen by all cinema-lovers just once; the same way that it is also advisable to view Tarkovsky’s Stalker or Greenaway’s A Zed and Two Noughts or even Goddard’s Alphaville: not necessarily with unashamed enjoyment but with a dim contentment and an appreciation of sheer technique.