• 1 This nomenclature comes from Alain Robbe-Grillet’s ciné-roman, in which X corresponds to the charac (...)
• 2 In Robbe-Grillet’s scenario for Marienbad, published in 1961 as an eponymous ciné-roman, X shows A (...)

1In Alain Resnais’s film L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961), a male character, known conventionally as X, confronts a female character, A, claiming that the two met one year before and agreed to depart together.1 According to X, A asked for a delay of one year, and he has now returned to take her away. A dismisses X’s claims, but the tenor of her subsequent reactions varies significantly—from cool confidence, to confusion, to terror—making interpretation uncertain. Is she trying to get out of an arrangement of which she is fully aware, or is she being destabilized by X’s relentless pursuit? As proof of their encounter, X eventually presents A with a photograph—one he says he took himself—in which she appears sitting on a bench in a garden, leaning back slightly, seemingly laughing (fig. 1).2 He asks if she recognizes it, and she replies:

• 4 X says that he does not know and that it does not matter.

2A later admits that the photo represents her—when discussing it with M (a man who seems to be her guardian or companion), she remarks, “it’s an old photo of me”—but she discounts X’s claims for it. Even so, X persists, and A ultimately acquiesces to his demand. At the end of the film, they depart together—to where is not specified—4 and it remains unclear whether A is fulfilling her end of the bargain or being misled.

• 5 A seemingly life-size, photographic profile of film director Alfred Hitchcock appears in one brief (...)
• 6 See, for example, the account in T. Jefferson Kline, “Rebecca’s Bad Dream: Speculations on/in Resna (...)

3At a superficial level, the viewer of Marienbad is challenged to discern what “really” happened “last year”—that is, to find its secret narrative or key, as in a mystery—5 although the writer, Alain Robbe-Grillet, claimed to have composed the scenario without such an underpinning, abandoning the conventional, story-based approach (Robbe-Grillet 9). Through content and editing, the script, sound score, and images cultivate a sense of the film as a stream of consciousness, or a confluence of several such streams, in which observations, memories, and fantasies co-mingle.6 The “mental origin” of the film could be attributed to any one of its characters (however unreliable), a combination of characters, or an unseen figure or figures, or it could be discounted altogether. Of course, the viewer’s own observations, memories, and fantasies help constitute the film and its meanings. In the meanwhile, elements and situations within the film invite interpretation but offer no clear solutions. For example, X and M are clearly pitted against each other. At moments, the antagonism between them seems a matter of life and death—but which of them represents life, and which represents death? After yet again losing to M in a mathematical Nim game, X places four game pieces back on the table, not from where he took them but in a new pattern, linking with two already in place to form a Christian cross facing M (fig. 2). Is it a sign that X has died, or is it an apotropaic device, implying that M is a vampire—or, the Devil? As an interloper whose desire is to take A away, X could be death, but he could also be an Orphic figure seeking to redeem A from an underworld ruled by M. In Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm (1886)—alluded to within Marienbad by a theatrical play called Rosmer—a sequence of revelations causes understanding of past and present to be revised repeatedly, and a man and woman who have abandoned Christianity, tradition, and ethics leave their country seat around midnight to commit suicide together in a millstream. But is that departure—like the one at the end of Marienbad, for which it seems a clear precedent—tragedy or salvation?

• 7 André Bazin’s “Ontologie de l’image photographique” [Ontology of the Photographic Image] was publis (...)
• 8 For a brief discussion of that tradition in relation to cinema, see Jonathan Law, “Stasis and Statu (...)
• 9 See Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore: The Johns Hopkin (...)

4Among the many elements within Marienbad, the photograph is of special interest because of how its credibility relates to trauma, a major theme in the film. In 1958, a year before Resnais and Robbe-Grillet began to collaborate on Marienbad (Robbe-Grillet 7), influential film theorist and critic André Bazin published an essay on the “ontology of the photographic image”.7 According to Bazin, photography “derives an advantage” (Bazin 7)—a credibility—from its mechanical aspect: the process through which each object gives form to its own representation. Indexicality guarantees objectivity: “In spite of any objections our critical spirit may offer, we are forced to accept as real the existence of the object reproduced, actually re-presented, set before us, that is to say, in time and space” (8). According to that logic, photography bridges past and present, disrupting the perpetual immediacy of the here and now. Photographs and other indexical media, including films, therefore have uncanny power. In the Christian tradition, for example, religious icons transmit sacredness through tangible form.8 Similarly, images of horror—such as the footage of wartime atrocities incorporated into Resnais’s film Nuit et brouillard (1955)—put viewers literally in touch with dark realities.9

• 10 See Roger Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, London/New York: Routledge, 2008, 4, citing Cathy Caruth, (...)

7In Caruth’s understanding, trauma is a condition of aporia—meaning, of “unresolvable paradox”.10 In Marienbad, the photograph structures an encounter between A (in the present) and A (in the past), and that experience both unifies and divides her. According to Bazin, the photographic image is at once a representation and the thing represented:

• 11 For example, shortly after showing A the photograph, X tells her, “You’ve always been afraid. But I (...)
• 12 Henri Bergson, “Chapter 1: Of the Selection of Images for Conscious Presentation. What Our Body Mea (...)

10What happened “last year”—if anything happened at all—and how that connects to a pact to depart together are never clarified. Several sequences in Marienbad suggest a violent encounter—specifically, that X raped A.11 But the trauma is not what happened in the past but rather the way the past recurs and disrupts, like a haunting. Building on Freud’s account in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Caruth has described trauma as “the response [my emphasis] to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, and other repetitive phenomena” (91). In that understanding, trauma is “a wound inflicted not upon the body but upon the mind” (3), a “breach in the mind’s experience of time, self, and the world”, following “an event that […] is experienced too soon, too unexpectedly, to be fully known and is therefore not available to consciousness until it imposes itself again, repeatedly, in the nightmares and repetitive actions of the survivor” (4). Without knowing what, if anything, happened “last year”, the only element verifiably “of the past” within the conceptual framework of Marienbad is the photograph. Consequently, A’s repeated encounters with the photograph—as revealed to her by X (see fig. 1), as laid over a page in an open book (see fig. 2), as a subject of interrogation by M (fig. 4), as a cache of many copies discovered inside a desk drawer (fig. 5), and as sixteen prints laid out in the form of a Nim game (fig. 6)—constitute the trauma. Embodied by the photograph, A’s condition of knowing and not knowing allows the past to become active, blurring the distinction between memory and perception and foreclosing her ability to “pass beyond [her]self”.12

• 13 Rivette was responding to the just released Hiroshima mon amour through reflections about Resnais’s (...)
• 14 See, for example, Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 26: “Confronting us with these two alternating shot (...)

12Although rarified in its superficial aspects, A’s predicament in Marienbad evoked a general sense of cultural crisis in the wake of World War II. To Resnais, modernity seemed to have atomized culture, and he used film to explore situations in which that crisis was playing itself out: from cultural institutions, such as museums and libraries, to sites of mass atrocity, such as concentration camps and places of nuclear attack. In 1959, film director and critic Jacques Rivette described Resnais’s work as a search for “the lost secret of humanity”, linked to a need “to try to reassemble the scattered fragments of the universal culture that is being lost”,13 but his work is also pervaded by a sense that matter itself has been transmuted and that new forms of representation must therefore be developed. In keeping with that idea, Resnais’s films up to and including Marienbad—from short works such as Les Statues meurent aussi (1953), Nuit et brouillard (1955), and Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) to his first feature-length film, Hiroshima mon amour (1959)—explore and test, over and over, the relationship among representation, history (interpretation of the past), and the human body.14

• 15 For a sustained account of this sequence and two other flashbacks in Hiroshima mon amour, see Maure (...)
• 16 See Luckhurst, “A genealogy of the traumatic flashback”, The Trauma Question, 179-185.
• 17 “Il y a deux images, l’une qui lui est extérieure, l’autre intérieure. Mais du moment qu’elle les v (...)
• 18 See Luckhurst, The Trauma Question, 182: “Split-second flashbacks, brought on by graphic matches, s (...)

13For example, in Hiroshima mon amour, the film Resnais completed just before making Marienbad, that relationship is probed in the flashback sequence, which occurs early in the film.15 Presented from the point of view of the heroine, a French actress working in Hiroshima, the flashback relates images of two hands: one “in the present” belonging to her sleeping, Japanese lover—an architect living in Hiroshima—and the other “of the past” belonging to her dying, German lover—a soldier killed in France about fifteen years before (fig. 7 and 8). The hands are matched graphically across cuts; each is laid flat, palm up, with fingers curled. Both images appear still, like photographs, except that the fingers twitch slightly, and the shot of the German soldier’s hand—which appears closer up—suddenly pans right to reveal the heroine embracing him, her face marked with his blood. Like A viewing the photograph in Marienbad, the heroine of Hiroshima here confronts an unanticipated image of herself in the past. Predicated on formal resemblance, the relating of hands manifests a trauma, in which a “past” image interrupts “present” vision.16 Robbe-Grillet spoke of this sequence as a representation of “réalisme mental”, by which he meant the unmarked presence of internal and external images in the mental process (i.e., stream of consciousness) (Labarthe and Rivette 10).17 Resnais agreed that the sequence represents a “victoire du réalisme” (10), its form breaking sharply with the cinematic conventions for flashbacks.18

• 19 See Turim, Flashbacks in Film: Memory & History, 216-217; Deleuze, Cinema 2, 122: “in Last Year at (...)
• 20 In fact, this was a conflation of studio sets in Paris and the Nymphenburg and Schleissheim palaces (...)
• 21 In fact, this was an eighteenth-century view of Schloß Schleißheim onto which an image of the sculp (...)

14In Hiroshima, graphic matching of bodily images structured a device through which to relate distant times and places, but flashbacks were out of the question in Marienbad, given the ambiguous treatment of time there,19 and bodily images were used instead to subvert the credibility of filmic space. For example, the setting of Marienbad is a baroque palace (repurposed as a luxurious hotel) and French-style garden—20 historic, spatial types known for combining elaborate decorative schemes with highly rationalized plans. Within that context, a large, presumably immovable sculpture of a man and woman in classical dress, with a dog at their feet, appears several times in the film but in differing garden situations, contradicting spatial logic. The first two instances are in an engraved view of a palace and garden, displayed on a wall inside the palace-hotel (fig. 9).21 The sculpture appears in the right foreground of the print, its back to the viewer and facing the palace across the large parterre garden.

• 22 In an interview with film critic James Monaco in 1975, Resnais cited Epstein’s writings as an impor (...)

17Resnais’s way of subverting filmic space in Marienbad drew on his background as a film editor and was influenced by the “anti-Cartesian” writings of filmmaker and theorist Jean Epstein (1897-1953).22 Epstein’s essay “Le cinéma et les au-delà de Descartes” (1946) asserted that the invention and development of the movie camera was connected to a recent, historic shift away from Cartesian traditions in mathematics, science, and philosophy (22). From the time of its formulation in the seventeenth century, Cartesian method had vast shaping influence on Western culture, building on core concepts such as the dualist nature of the universe—its division into “thinking substance” (mind) and “extended substance” (matter)—and the certainty of analytic geometry, with its methodical use of coordinate systems. However, given the revolutions in mathematical and scientific thought during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and in the wake of two World Wars, those positions no longer made sense. Epstein argued that, through its own “propagande discrète”, the movie camera could cast doubt over outmoded accounts of space and time, thereby liberating viewers from the tenacious legacy of Cartesian thought and extending to modern society changes equivalent in magnitude to those already achieved in science. Epstein regarded camera movement and editing as “la meilleure expérience préparatoire à la critique de toutes les notions traditionnelles qui se prétendaient absolues, à la formation de cette mentalité relativiste qui, aujourd’hui, pénètre généralement les connaissances” (22).

• 23 Resnais studied film editing in the first class to graduate from the new Institut des hautes études (...)
• 24 “I took a lot of things from his book. I am not ashamed to say that”. In naming Epstein and Reisz a (...)
• 25 “Although the mechanical rules of cutting must be kept in mind, the decisive consideration at the j (...)

18Epstein’s ideas resonated strongly with Resnais, who had begun his career in cinema as a film editor.23 As Resnais transitioned into directing, editing remained a priority in his approach, and he drew inspiration from Karel Reisz’s widely disseminated textbook, The Technique of Film Editing (1^st published 1953, with many later editions)—so much so, in fact, that he called Reisz his “real teacher” (Monaco 40).24 In his book, Reisz explained in a systematic way how film editing could be used to cultivate viewer interest while constructing “a lucid continuity” (Reisz 216-227). While he insisted that the primary role of editing was to support dramatic action (227),25 his main chapter on praxis concluded in a highly evocative way by invoking a “pure cinema” constituted through editing alone:

• 27 See Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, 2: “This is a cinema of the seer and no longer of the agent (...)

20For example, in several scenes in Marienbad, the position and dress of a figure are maintained across a cut while the setting changes radically. The first example of that effect occurs early in the film, in the sequence in which audience members socialize in the theater following the stage performance. Among them is a blond woman in a lace-trimmed cocktail dress, who appears standing to the left of a man with a moustache (fig. 21). Several shots later, the two appear again in the same clothing and relative positions, but in a different space, the hotel lobby, and they seem to chat with someone off-screen (fig. 22). Two shots follow in which women are seen staring off-screen, as if lost in thought or mesmerized by someone or something not visible within the frame.27 In the next shot, the first blonde appears again, now standing alone in the back of the theater and staring off-screen like the women in the preceding shots (fig. 23). After a marked pause, she begins to turn around (fig. 24). Part way through her turn, the setting around her changes completely, from the theater to the hotel lobby (fig. 25), seen from a new angle. The cut was carefully edited so that the movement of the woman appears continuous. She looks about the lobby, as if suddenly awakened to her environment, then completes her turn (fig. 26).

• 28 See note 12.
• 29 See note 12.

24Over and over in Marienbad, the human body is presented as stable and continuous within the volatile visual field of the screen. Graphic matches across cuts train viewers to see the body as a site of coherence and orientation, qualities traditionally associated with the classical “unity of place”, on which the credibility of dramatic action was long thought to depend, but here cultivated at the expense of that priority. In other words, images of the transcendent body are at once grounding and destabilizing in Marienbad, invoking the multiple, symbolically central scenes in which A confronts a photograph of herself. The photograph traumatizes A by embodying her condition of knowing and not knowing. Rooted in indexicality, yet easily reproduced (as demonstrated when A finds many copies in a desk drawer), it allows the past to become active and blurs the distinction between memory and perception—thereby foreclosing A’s ability to “pass beyond [her]self”.28 In a similar way, graphic matching across cuts haunts Marienbad by embodying its condition of moving and not moving—a paradox not lost on Resnais, given his basis in editing. Rooted in still images, yet virtually continuous, such matching allows the past to become active and blurs the distinction between memory and perception—thereby foreclosing the ability of the film to “pass beyond [it]self”.29

• 30 In theatre, that technique—in which the action halts and, by implication, time freezes—is called th (...)

25In Marienbad, the terms of that paradox are made explicit in various stagings of the time freeze effect. For example, in the five-shot sequence of audience members socializing following the theatrical performance, figures transition from moving to not moving in the first shot, then from not moving to moving in the second, and so on through the sequence, as if repeatedly crossing a margin—at once historical and technical—between photography and film. In fact, the “stills” in Marienbad are not freeze frames, in which a photographic image is extended through repetition; rather, they are time freeze effects, in which performers hold their positions, like statues or as if frozen.30 Signs of life can be glimpsed in subtle movements—a blink, a sway, the sparkle of a gem, a chest moving with breath—just as, in Hiroshima, the lovers’ fingers twitch. Yet, those movements remain rooted in stillness—an endless collapsing of the virtual into the actual.

• 31 That sense of transition is supported by the sound score, which shifts from measured tiptoes to dis (...)

27As a “still life” with duration, in which moving and not moving are “distinct, but indiscernible”, the vase scene in Late Spring relates to many moments in Marienbad, but most powerfully to the iconic scene near its midpoint—a single shot lasting twenty-two seconds—during which the camera moves past a balustrade to reveal nine figures standing in the “empty” central axis of a French-style garden (fig. 38). The figures appear motionless, like the statues surrounding them. Reinforcing the film’s lessons about the integrity of the human body and the dubiety of traditional (Cartesian) space, the figures cast long shadows while the forms of the setting cast none. Fifteen seconds into the shot, the camera halts, and the scene seems completely still, as if transformed into a photograph.31 However, as with the other “stills” in Marienbad, this is a time freeze shot, not a freeze frame; while the figures hold their positions, wind gently flutters the skirts of several women.

• 32 See Berthier, 143-144.
• 33 See Yamada, 162.

28As a “still life” with duration, this pivotal scene in Marienbad is a “direct time-image” in the sense defined by Deleuze. But its resonance with Ozu’s Late Spring goes beyond the vase scene to the one immediately following it: a sequence of eight shots set in the meditation garden at Ryoan-ji, an important Zen temple in Kyoto, Japan. During that scene, two men sit and talk on the veranda overlooking the garden. In their moving and not moving—their “unchanging form in which the change is produced”—they are related visually to the distinctive rock clusters there.32 In the garden scene in Marienbad, the nine figures are compared to the same rock clusters, but in a different way: specifically, they stand in the pattern of their layout at Ryoan-ji (fig. 39). Although highly suggestive, that reference is easily overlooked; to my knowledge, it has not been noticed or remarked upon before now, at least in publication. The success of Late Spring had recently made the garden at Ryoan-ji famous,33 and Resnais would have known it because of that film, if not in another way. But Ozu did not show the garden as a whole, whereas Resnais displayed its general configuration—provocatively, with one additional “rock” cluster, embodied by a “gray” figure, at the far left.

• 34 Resnais spent two months in Japan, in August and September 1958, directing episodes of Hiroshima mo (...)
• 35 See note 5.
• 36 See note 13.

29Given its specificity and the complex conceptual, technical, and cultural context of Marienbad, how might the reference to Ryoan-ji be interpreted? Was it simply a nod to Resnais’s recent time in Japan working on Hiroshima,34 a souvenir hidden in plain sight—like the photo of Alfred Hitchcock that also appears briefly in Marienbad?35 Of course, inserting a paragon of Japanese aesthetics into the core of a paradigm of French aesthetics touches on the anti-Cartesian aspect of the film, invoking Epstein. But its unsignaled appearance also alludes to the flashback in Hiroshima, where an image from wartime France intrudes on the heroine’s experience of post-war Japan, with immediate dramatic implications. In the meanwhile, arranging human figures in imitation of Zen garden stones recalls Resnais’s interest in representation, history, and the human body. Is it a clue, if not a key, through which to decipher “the lost secret of humanity”, fulfilling Resnais’s desire “to try to reassemble the scattered fragments of the universal culture that is being lost”?36 Does it map a new covenant between man, form, and the world? Or, is it a symptom of modern longing for a pre-modern past? Whatever its significance, the scene seems to balance on an overlap between the two defining paradoxes in Marienbad—on one hand, knowing and not knowing; on the other hand, moving and not moving—linking to their other manifestations in the film (stagings of the time freeze effect, graphic matching of bodily forms across cuts, A confronting the photograph of herself) while remaining curiously apart.