Samuel Beckett's own English translation of his originally French-written play Fin de partie (or Endgame) (1957) – interestingly published just four years before the release of Marienbad – contains the lines:
'Hamm: We're not beginning to...to...mean something?
Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!'
We could make a number of comparisons between the play and the film – the fact that Beckett's play refers to a game, is apparently absurd in nature, etc – but to my mind meaning is the key concept. To Hamm and Clov, meaning is almost a joke, or almost something to be feared, and the brunette A (Delphine Seyrig) seems to be frightened of having a meaning which the Italian-accented X (Giorgio Albertazzi) is attempting to give her by taking her away from the ever-repeating present, fixing her in a past somewhere (perhaps in Marienbad), and moving with her into a future which is by definition indefinable.
This is of course absurd, but then the film Marienbad, with its eternal present peopled by speechless, unmoving ghost-like beings some of the time or at other times dancing, small-talking, mindless game-playing zombies trapped in a surreal, oneiric or potentially nightmarish situation of which they appear to have no cognizance, is surely absurd?. Over them, Death (personified perhaps by M (Sacha Pitoëff) for Mort, possibly) stalks, or gloats: they are evidently lost in a living death and only X holds the key to at least free A from. I'm also reminded of Philippe (Lino Ventura) in Jean-Pierre Melville's film L'Armée des ombres calling the three domino-playing men 'imbéciles' in the Vichy concentration camp which can only lead to death.
Also coming to mind is Pierre Assouline's book of interviews with Antoine Blondin, Le Flâneur de la rive gauche: Entretiens (1988): famously, Blondin wrote in his novel L'Humeur vagabonde: 'Un jour nous prendrons des trains qui partent'. Although Assouline can't pin Blondin down to a specific meaning of that expression, it suddenly occurs to me that meaning itself is exactly what the sentence is about: one day our lives will have meaning. Perhaps X gives A meaning in the end, which she has all the time been avoiding for so long: but why? Even odder, this reminds me of what my cousin Charles Pembleton wrote on the title-page of his poetry book Living in a Timewarp (1974), which he published shortly after a traumatic experience: 'Anything above zero is painful because it has meaning.' Yes, that must be it.
Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'Année dernière à Marienbad – in spite (or perhaps because) of its lack of hardfast meaning – is one of the greatest films ever made, and just in the English langauge alone its influences extend from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to David Mould's video of Blur's song 'To The End'.
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