Lost in Marienbad's Surrealistic Labyrinth

“There were always walls—everywhere, around me—smooth, even, glazed, without the slightest relief, there were always walls…Always walls, always corridors, always doors—and on the other side, still more walls.”

That is how I felt while watching this movie...walking around an endless maze…seeing more doors, walls…
Everyone would have to agree that, at first, this movie was confusing and ambiguous. The plot is complex and twists every time you are starting to understand what was going on. Why is everyone frozen like statues? Why don’t we know their names? What is up with the relationships between the three main characters? We just keep questioning every moment of this film.

After all the questioning and confusion, I concluded that this film is more an artistic (avant-garde) film. In the interpretation of Last Year at Marienbad, the author describes the film as “a formalistic experiment in the medium of the film—in the sense in which cubist paintings have been described as formalistic studies”. He or she continues the connection by describing this film as a “landmark of artistic cinematography”. Most importantly, Marienbad as “an artistic presentation of the inner dialectic of the Cartesian mind”. A Cartesian paradise.

I focused on the cinematography and mis-en-scene more than the narrative/plot itself. Those aspects of the film were beautiful. The jump cuts between various conversations/scenes, the long and lingering takes, contrast of light and dark, use of reflections and shadows (oh I love using mirrors in filming!), the geometric garden, juxtapositions of shots/narration, etc. Everything I mentioned speaks volumes! They set off a surrealistic aura. All our questions of the narrative are unanswerable: “The film never provides the viewer with the means to tell what is real and what is fictitious”.

From reading Wikipedia’s article of this film and the one from class, seems like there are various interpretations of this surrealist film…a story of: persuasion, dream-like state, Cartesian mind, and relationship between patient and psychoanalyst. We’re not sure. All I know is that this film boils down to one thing: a continuity of thought. Like the characters, the audience is trapped in their thoughts…we can’t distinguish what is real or not, we can’t escape the geometric labyrinth full of walls, doors, and corridors. We’re stuck in our “French Gardens”—artificial, geometric, human controlled. No matter what: “there is no possible way of getting ‘outside’ of our minds to determine in what state we actually are; inescapable we remain imprisoned in our minds”.