-
The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press.All rights
reserved. For permissions, please email:
[email protected] 137
Adaptation Vol. 0 , No. 0 , pp. 1 15 doi:
10.1093/adaptation/apr019
The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press.All rights
reserved. For permissions, please email:
[email protected] 1
Total Cinema , Literature, and Testimonial in the Early Films of
Alain Resnais
M. MARTIN GUINEY
Abstract The complex and sometimes antagonistic relationship
between fi lm and literature
reached an important milestone during the era of the French
Nouvelle Vague. Both levels in which
literature and fi lm compete with and contaminate one another,
the concrete (words) and the
abstract (narrative), are at play in Alain Resnais s early
collaborations with contemporary authors,
especially Last Year at Marienbad (1961). The competition
between printed word and moving
image appears as a crucial difference between the opening credit
sequence as it appears in
Resnais s fi lm, and as described in Alain Robbe-Grillet s
screenplay; this example of Resnais s
refusal to follow Robbe-Grillet s text suggests a more profound
disagreement concerning fi lm s
status as a document of the past. The fact that fi lm is the
record of an event, however artifi cial the
event may be, allows Resnais to resist Robbe-Grillet s
totalizing modernist aesthetic by in effect
denying fi lm s claim to producing a virtual reality independent
from human experience. A similar
tension occurs in the seldom-discussed intertextual relationship
between the Marienbad screen-
play and the 1940 novella The Invention of Morel by Argentine
writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, which
centres on total cinema , the dream of a technology that can
produce a perfect recording indis-
tinguishable from the original. By insisting on the testimonial
function of both fi lm and text, Resnais
advanced the literature-fi lm dualism beyond the stalemate of
admiration and denigration that
characterized many fi lms of the French Nouvelle Vague.
Keywords Alain Resnais , Alain Robbe-Grillet , Andr Bazin ,
total cinema , Nouvelle Vague , Last
Year at Marienbad .
In the 1950s, the articles published in Les Cahiers du cinma by
the cinephiles who became famous as the Nouvelle Vague often
betrayed a tense and ambiguous relationship between literature and
fi lm. Franois Truffaut s use of the specifi cally literary term
auteur to designate a director in his 1955 article Ali Baba et la
politique des auteurs , for example, implied that the conventional,
purely cinematic term ralisateur lacked artistic legitimacy. When
they progressed from fi lm criticism to fi lmmaking, members of the
Nouvelle Vague continued to regard literature and the print medium
with a mixture of defi ance and deference, acutely aware of the
second-class status of cinema. Many of their works promoted fi lm s
autonomy from literature, yet subverted it with repeated homage to
literary authors, books, and literariness in general. The defi ant
aspect of the relationship had deep roots; one of the traditions
against which the critics of Cahiers du cinma rebelled was the
assumption that fi lm was not only a successor to literature
historically but also its inferior artistically, destined to adapt
novels and to translate
* Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Kenyon
College. E-mail: [email protected]
Adaptation Vol. 5, No. 2, pp.
137151doi:10.1093/adaptation/apr019Advance Access publication 7
October 2011
-
2 M. MARTIN GUINEY
literary culture into popular entertainment. This is, of course,
a common theme in accounts of fi lm s path to artistic legitimacy:
David Bordwell wrote that For many years after the invention of
cinema, most well-educated people thought that fi lm could acquire
prestige only by aping great works of drama or literature (44). The
discipline of fi lm studies was founded in part as a reaction
against such prejudice. Nouvelle Vague theorist Andr Bazin s What
Is Cinema? (1958 63) was one of many statements, such as Rudolf
Arnheim s Film (1933), or Maurice Bardche and Robert Brasillach s
Histoire du cinma (1935) that based the artistic legitimacy of fi
lm precisely on characteristics absent from other art forms,
especially from literature. Nouvelle Vague fi lmmakers appealed to
this tradition by attacking the literary-dominated tradition of the
adaptation and promoting emancipation from the predominance of
scriptwriters (Lanzoni 210).
The opposing tendency to want to pay homage to literature, even
to the point of acknowledging its superiority, as if the fi
lmmakers themselves were frustrated novelists, complicates the
traditional narrative of fi lm s self-legitimation considerably.
Michel Marie, in his history of the movement, points to this
paradox by contrasting the fi lm-makers emphasis on the fi lmic
with their obsession with the literary: for example, including the
anti-cinematic , nonadaptable aspects of the literary works that
some-times served as the basis for their fi lms by the use of
voice-over narration taken ver-batim from the original book,
thereby reintroducing the literary text that is absent from the
diegetic soundtrack, a way for the director to offer a homage to
the author he or she adapts, respecting each word of the text (80).
Such inclusion-exclusion of the literary through voice-over taken
verbatim from the original novel is evident, for example, in
Franois Truffaut s Jules and Jim (1962), or The Silence of the Sea
by the Nouvelle Vague precursor Jean-Pierre Melville (1949); both
adaptations strive to preserve large excerpts of the literary
(albeit through the medium of sound rather than print), pre-serving
a nonadapted content that viewers of the fi lm will perceive as
literary rather than cinematic .
The tribute to literature by the Nouvelle Vague also takes the
form of nontextual or fi lmic homage of one art form to another,
for example in Truffaut s The 400 Blows (1959), in which the main
character played by Jean-Pierre Laud, Antoine Doisnel, erects a
shrine to Balzac in his bedroom. In Jean-Luc Godard s Breathless
(1960), Jean-Pierre Melville, the noir fi lmmaker whom the Nouvelle
Vague acknowledged as a pre-cursor (see above), plays the role of a
novelist, Parvulesco. Such deference to literature was begun by
Melville himself when he chose his pseudonym because of his
admiration for the American novelist (and also to conceal his
Jewish origins: his family name was Grumbach). In an interview, he
stated : If someone asked me what I would have liked to have been
in life, I would answer without hesitation: Herman Melville ; and
to have lived a hundred years ago and write like he did (Breitbart
180). The fantasy of being a great novelist is one of Jean-Pierre
Melville s many legacies to the Nouvelle Vague gener-ation. Godard
s Contempt (1963) pushes the conceit even further, adapting Alberto
Moravia s novel Il Disprezzo (1954), that itself features a fi
ctional cinematic adaptation of the ultimate Urtext , Homer s
Odyssey , resulting in the most extreme contrast to emerge from
this era between the prestige of canonical literature and the
cultural ambition of fi lm.
If literature and cinema or, more concretely, word and fi lm,
are at times engaged in a form of competition, it is not only
because fi lmmakers like Truffaut and Godard appear
Resnais 3
to be jealous of the prestige of literary authors but also
because the would-be novelists of French cinema exploited the
differences between the literary and fi lmic media in their
theoretical texts, militantly defending the particularity of cinema
as something other than the sum of its photographic, literary, and
theatrical parts. Such is the defence mounted by Andr Bazin when he
appealed to the ontological realism of the very medium of fi lm 1
in other words, its ability, through cinematography and sound
recording, to claim to be the accurate record of a past event to a
degree that realist art and literature failed to achieve. Film, in
other words, serves as a witness: unlike writing, it must be
present at the event that it records, and the requirement of
physical prox-imity and contemporaneity in order for the fi lmic
representation to exist provides it with an authority that words
alone lack. Documentary fi lm, the genre in which Resnais began his
career, exploits this authority as a specifi cally cinematographic
rhetorical device. Like all rhetoric, of course, it can be a
vehicle of deception as well as of truth, and the earliest fi
lmmakers wasted no time in applying the new invention, fi rst to
the creation of fi ction, then to the creation of cinematic
illusion. Even though fi ctionality was present at the very start
(Louis Lumire s L Arroseur arros of 1895 is often granted the
distinction of being the fi rst fi ctional scene in the history of
fi lm), cinema reintro-duced into narrative the concepts of realism
and of reliable point of view precisely at the moment when they
were being challenged most directly in the literary fi eld. The
nave question What happened? that gave birth to the narrative
genre, and that remains a concern for forensic science but from
which the novel had emancipated itself, could not help but reappear
in a medium that records acts of the imagination as events in the
world: L Arroseur arros succeeds because it is fi lmed slapstick;
as a literary anec-dote, it would be banal.
Film s suitability as a mode of witnessing marked Alain Resnais
s career as he moved from the creation of cinematographic
testimonials (especially the pioneering Holocaust documentary Night
and Fog of 1955), to dramatic feature fi lms. Resnais s careers as
a documentary fi lmmaker and director of fi ctional works are
continuous, as each of Resnais s fi rst three feature fi lms also
addresses the power of fi lm in answering the need for reliable
testimony, whether of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan and the
repression of France s collaborationist past ( Hiroshima mon amour
, 1959); a private encounter between a man and a woman ( Last Year
at Marienbad , 1961); or, returning from the per-sonal to the
political, the torture of anti-French militants during the Algerian
War ( Muriel , or the Time of a Return , 1963).
Like many Holocaust documentaries, Night and Fog takes full
advantage of fi lm as archive, its ability to provide a more
holistic record of the past than mere words: photo-graphic and
cinematographic images of emaciated prisoners, bulldozers moving
corpses into mass graves, and military offi cers and doctors
overseeing the torture and humiliation of their victims. Resnais s
fi lm also relies on contrasting fi lmic images that subvert the
claim of fi lm to being the most sensorially rich, and therefore
complete record of a past event, for example: beautiful shots of
the countryside surrounding present-day Auschwitz (a bucolic image
that was quoted thirty years later in the Chelmno sequence of
Claude Lanzmann s Shoah , 1985), all the more subversive in that
they are in colour, while the historical footage is in black and
white. The documen-tarian s dilemma is that fi lm can record an
event (the Holocaust), but cannot adequately
138 M. MARTIN GUINEY
-
2 M. MARTIN GUINEY
literary culture into popular entertainment. This is, of course,
a common theme in accounts of fi lm s path to artistic legitimacy:
David Bordwell wrote that For many years after the invention of
cinema, most well-educated people thought that fi lm could acquire
prestige only by aping great works of drama or literature (44). The
discipline of fi lm studies was founded in part as a reaction
against such prejudice. Nouvelle Vague theorist Andr Bazin s What
Is Cinema? (1958 63) was one of many statements, such as Rudolf
Arnheim s Film (1933), or Maurice Bardche and Robert Brasillach s
Histoire du cinma (1935) that based the artistic legitimacy of fi
lm precisely on characteristics absent from other art forms,
especially from literature. Nouvelle Vague fi lmmakers appealed to
this tradition by attacking the literary-dominated tradition of the
adaptation and promoting emancipation from the predominance of
scriptwriters (Lanzoni 210).
The opposing tendency to want to pay homage to literature, even
to the point of acknowledging its superiority, as if the fi
lmmakers themselves were frustrated novelists, complicates the
traditional narrative of fi lm s self-legitimation considerably.
Michel Marie, in his history of the movement, points to this
paradox by contrasting the fi lm-makers emphasis on the fi lmic
with their obsession with the literary: for example, including the
anti-cinematic , nonadaptable aspects of the literary works that
some-times served as the basis for their fi lms by the use of
voice-over narration taken ver-batim from the original book,
thereby reintroducing the literary text that is absent from the
diegetic soundtrack, a way for the director to offer a homage to
the author he or she adapts, respecting each word of the text (80).
Such inclusion-exclusion of the literary through voice-over taken
verbatim from the original novel is evident, for example, in
Franois Truffaut s Jules and Jim (1962), or The Silence of the Sea
by the Nouvelle Vague precursor Jean-Pierre Melville (1949); both
adaptations strive to preserve large excerpts of the literary
(albeit through the medium of sound rather than print), pre-serving
a nonadapted content that viewers of the fi lm will perceive as
literary rather than cinematic .
The tribute to literature by the Nouvelle Vague also takes the
form of nontextual or fi lmic homage of one art form to another,
for example in Truffaut s The 400 Blows (1959), in which the main
character played by Jean-Pierre Laud, Antoine Doisnel, erects a
shrine to Balzac in his bedroom. In Jean-Luc Godard s Breathless
(1960), Jean-Pierre Melville, the noir fi lmmaker whom the Nouvelle
Vague acknowledged as a pre-cursor (see above), plays the role of a
novelist, Parvulesco. Such deference to literature was begun by
Melville himself when he chose his pseudonym because of his
admiration for the American novelist (and also to conceal his
Jewish origins: his family name was Grumbach). In an interview, he
stated : If someone asked me what I would have liked to have been
in life, I would answer without hesitation: Herman Melville ; and
to have lived a hundred years ago and write like he did (Breitbart
180). The fantasy of being a great novelist is one of Jean-Pierre
Melville s many legacies to the Nouvelle Vague gener-ation. Godard
s Contempt (1963) pushes the conceit even further, adapting Alberto
Moravia s novel Il Disprezzo (1954), that itself features a fi
ctional cinematic adaptation of the ultimate Urtext , Homer s
Odyssey , resulting in the most extreme contrast to emerge from
this era between the prestige of canonical literature and the
cultural ambition of fi lm.
If literature and cinema or, more concretely, word and fi lm,
are at times engaged in a form of competition, it is not only
because fi lmmakers like Truffaut and Godard appear
Resnais 3
to be jealous of the prestige of literary authors but also
because the would-be novelists of French cinema exploited the
differences between the literary and fi lmic media in their
theoretical texts, militantly defending the particularity of cinema
as something other than the sum of its photographic, literary, and
theatrical parts. Such is the defence mounted by Andr Bazin when he
appealed to the ontological realism of the very medium of fi lm 1
in other words, its ability, through cinematography and sound
recording, to claim to be the accurate record of a past event to a
degree that realist art and literature failed to achieve. Film, in
other words, serves as a witness: unlike writing, it must be
present at the event that it records, and the requirement of
physical prox-imity and contemporaneity in order for the fi lmic
representation to exist provides it with an authority that words
alone lack. Documentary fi lm, the genre in which Resnais began his
career, exploits this authority as a specifi cally cinematographic
rhetorical device. Like all rhetoric, of course, it can be a
vehicle of deception as well as of truth, and the earliest fi
lmmakers wasted no time in applying the new invention, fi rst to
the creation of fi ction, then to the creation of cinematic
illusion. Even though fi ctionality was present at the very start
(Louis Lumire s L Arroseur arros of 1895 is often granted the
distinction of being the fi rst fi ctional scene in the history of
fi lm), cinema reintro-duced into narrative the concepts of realism
and of reliable point of view precisely at the moment when they
were being challenged most directly in the literary fi eld. The
nave question What happened? that gave birth to the narrative
genre, and that remains a concern for forensic science but from
which the novel had emancipated itself, could not help but reappear
in a medium that records acts of the imagination as events in the
world: L Arroseur arros succeeds because it is fi lmed slapstick;
as a literary anec-dote, it would be banal.
Film s suitability as a mode of witnessing marked Alain Resnais
s career as he moved from the creation of cinematographic
testimonials (especially the pioneering Holocaust documentary Night
and Fog of 1955), to dramatic feature fi lms. Resnais s careers as
a documentary fi lmmaker and director of fi ctional works are
continuous, as each of Resnais s fi rst three feature fi lms also
addresses the power of fi lm in answering the need for reliable
testimony, whether of the atomic bomb attacks on Japan and the
repression of France s collaborationist past ( Hiroshima mon amour
, 1959); a private encounter between a man and a woman ( Last Year
at Marienbad , 1961); or, returning from the per-sonal to the
political, the torture of anti-French militants during the Algerian
War ( Muriel , or the Time of a Return , 1963).
Like many Holocaust documentaries, Night and Fog takes full
advantage of fi lm as archive, its ability to provide a more
holistic record of the past than mere words: photo-graphic and
cinematographic images of emaciated prisoners, bulldozers moving
corpses into mass graves, and military offi cers and doctors
overseeing the torture and humiliation of their victims. Resnais s
fi lm also relies on contrasting fi lmic images that subvert the
claim of fi lm to being the most sensorially rich, and therefore
complete record of a past event, for example: beautiful shots of
the countryside surrounding present-day Auschwitz (a bucolic image
that was quoted thirty years later in the Chelmno sequence of
Claude Lanzmann s Shoah , 1985), all the more subversive in that
they are in colour, while the historical footage is in black and
white. The documen-tarian s dilemma is that fi lm can record an
event (the Holocaust), but cannot adequately
Resnais 139
-
4 M. MARTIN GUINEY
reproduce it: the dead and dying bodies remain abstract, no
matter how incontrovert-ible the cinematic evidence. But fi lm is
also capable of something that at fi rst seems to contradict its
documentary value: to record the diffi culty of imagining that the
event ever could have happened. The images of the beautiful spring
or summer landscape surrounding present-day Auschwitz are thus an
ironic admission of the defeat of representation, as the voice-over
narration emphasizes. Yet paradoxically the admission of defeat the
colour footage is as effective in its way as the more direct
representa-tion, the black and white images of the functioning
death camps. The contrasting styles of fi lm, the ironic (colour)
and literal (black and white), briefl y merge at various points,
such as the contemporary shot of the gas chambers (in colour,
therefore), in which they really do look just like showers until
the voice-over narration (actor Michel Bousquet reading the text of
poet and Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol) explains that the rough
tex-ture of the room s concrete ceiling was caused by the scraping
of the victims fi ngernails mais il faut le savoir [but one has to
know] ; if you didn t already know this fact (a fact that can only
be conveyed by words, since no fi lm was made inside the gas
chambers while the victims died), you would not even notice, much
less interpret correctly, such an apparently insignifi cant detail.
It is a case of the narrative superiority of words over images, in
spite of their relative lack of ontological realism . It is worth
adding, how-ever, that the superiority of words in this scene would
be harder to justify if it were not the case that the author of the
words, Jean Cayrol, was himself an eyewitness to the event, as well
as a poet, and therefore doubly qualifi ed to supplement the
archival defi ciencies of the moving images alone.
In a Holocaust documentary, there is no prior text of which the
fi lm is an adaptation, but rather a historical event of which it
strives to be the adequation. In the adaptation of a fi ctional
narrative, the issue of fi delity is, arguably, irrelevant; in a
documentary, it is paramount. Yet in both, absolute fi delity is
impossible, since adaptation and adequa-tion imply a
commensurability of word and image, or history and image, that
remains stubbornly elusive. After the release of Night and Fog , in
a decision that would prove very consequential for the history of
fi lm, Resnais began his long career as a maker of fea-ture fi lms,
without however renouncing his efforts at reconciling verbal and
cinematic testimonial with its historical referent. In the
documentary mode, we saw that he did so in part by juxtaposing
different types of fi lmic testimonial, such as archival images,
contemporary documentary footage, and voice over. A similar
dialectic of disparate types of fi lmic image, and of their
diegetic and extradiegetic verbal accompaniment, occurs in the
opening scenes of Hiroshima mon amour . As the male character s
voice repeats over and over You saw nothing in Hiroshima and the
female insists I saw everything (Duras 15), the fi lm shows what
remains of the bomb and its aftermath, including not only
documen-tary footage of mutilated victims and the barren cityscape
but also fi lmed artifi cial reconstitutions of the event in which
the victims are played by actors ( Figures 1 and 2 ).
Juxtaposing real and fake images create a confusion between fi
ction and nonfi ction that is absent from Night and Fog , with its
exclusive reliance on genuine archival or con-temporary documentary
footage. 2 Resnais thus demonstrated that the mimetic power of fi
lm does not free it from the inherently symbolist character of its
precursors such as painting and writing, and Hiroshima , by
dramatizing the problem of adequation of history and image, serves
as a farewell to the documentary genre.
Resnais 5
In the move from documentary to fi ction, Resnais complicates
the status of fi lm as a reliable witness of an event in the past,
just as the earliest fi lmmakers (and photogra-phers) realized that
their invention functioned just as well for creative as for
archival purposes. Nevertheless, whether fi ctional or documentary,
fi lm preserves the character-istic that founds it as a separate
medium: the images on the screen are recordings of actual (albeit
often highly manipulated) events, a fact that makes it such a
persuasive medium, whether the purpose is testimony, entertainment,
propaganda, or fraud. Andr Bazin s concept of total cinema is the
tantalizing dream of a perfect record of an event, a sensory
experience that would be indistinguishable from life itself. A
medium
Figure 1 Fake (reconstruction ) image from the Hiroshima Museum
included in Hiroshima mon amour .
Figure 2 Real (archival) image from the Hiroshima Museum
included in Hiroshima mon amour .
140 M. MARTIN GUINEY
-
4 M. MARTIN GUINEY
reproduce it: the dead and dying bodies remain abstract, no
matter how incontrovert-ible the cinematic evidence. But fi lm is
also capable of something that at fi rst seems to contradict its
documentary value: to record the diffi culty of imagining that the
event ever could have happened. The images of the beautiful spring
or summer landscape surrounding present-day Auschwitz are thus an
ironic admission of the defeat of representation, as the voice-over
narration emphasizes. Yet paradoxically the admission of defeat the
colour footage is as effective in its way as the more direct
representa-tion, the black and white images of the functioning
death camps. The contrasting styles of fi lm, the ironic (colour)
and literal (black and white), briefl y merge at various points,
such as the contemporary shot of the gas chambers (in colour,
therefore), in which they really do look just like showers until
the voice-over narration (actor Michel Bousquet reading the text of
poet and Holocaust survivor Jean Cayrol) explains that the rough
tex-ture of the room s concrete ceiling was caused by the scraping
of the victims fi ngernails mais il faut le savoir [but one has to
know] ; if you didn t already know this fact (a fact that can only
be conveyed by words, since no fi lm was made inside the gas
chambers while the victims died), you would not even notice, much
less interpret correctly, such an apparently insignifi cant detail.
It is a case of the narrative superiority of words over images, in
spite of their relative lack of ontological realism . It is worth
adding, how-ever, that the superiority of words in this scene would
be harder to justify if it were not the case that the author of the
words, Jean Cayrol, was himself an eyewitness to the event, as well
as a poet, and therefore doubly qualifi ed to supplement the
archival defi ciencies of the moving images alone.
In a Holocaust documentary, there is no prior text of which the
fi lm is an adaptation, but rather a historical event of which it
strives to be the adequation. In the adaptation of a fi ctional
narrative, the issue of fi delity is, arguably, irrelevant; in a
documentary, it is paramount. Yet in both, absolute fi delity is
impossible, since adaptation and adequa-tion imply a
commensurability of word and image, or history and image, that
remains stubbornly elusive. After the release of Night and Fog , in
a decision that would prove very consequential for the history of
fi lm, Resnais began his long career as a maker of fea-ture fi lms,
without however renouncing his efforts at reconciling verbal and
cinematic testimonial with its historical referent. In the
documentary mode, we saw that he did so in part by juxtaposing
different types of fi lmic testimonial, such as archival images,
contemporary documentary footage, and voice over. A similar
dialectic of disparate types of fi lmic image, and of their
diegetic and extradiegetic verbal accompaniment, occurs in the
opening scenes of Hiroshima mon amour . As the male character s
voice repeats over and over You saw nothing in Hiroshima and the
female insists I saw everything (Duras 15), the fi lm shows what
remains of the bomb and its aftermath, including not only
documen-tary footage of mutilated victims and the barren cityscape
but also fi lmed artifi cial reconstitutions of the event in which
the victims are played by actors ( Figures 1 and 2 ).
Juxtaposing real and fake images create a confusion between fi
ction and nonfi ction that is absent from Night and Fog , with its
exclusive reliance on genuine archival or con-temporary documentary
footage. 2 Resnais thus demonstrated that the mimetic power of fi
lm does not free it from the inherently symbolist character of its
precursors such as painting and writing, and Hiroshima , by
dramatizing the problem of adequation of history and image, serves
as a farewell to the documentary genre.
Resnais 5
In the move from documentary to fi ction, Resnais complicates
the status of fi lm as a reliable witness of an event in the past,
just as the earliest fi lmmakers (and photogra-phers) realized that
their invention functioned just as well for creative as for
archival purposes. Nevertheless, whether fi ctional or documentary,
fi lm preserves the character-istic that founds it as a separate
medium: the images on the screen are recordings of actual (albeit
often highly manipulated) events, a fact that makes it such a
persuasive medium, whether the purpose is testimony, entertainment,
propaganda, or fraud. Andr Bazin s concept of total cinema is the
tantalizing dream of a perfect record of an event, a sensory
experience that would be indistinguishable from life itself. A
medium
Figure 1 Fake (reconstruction ) image from the Hiroshima Museum
included in Hiroshima mon amour .
Figure 2 Real (archival) image from the Hiroshima Museum
included in Hiroshima mon amour .
Resnais 141
-
6 M. MARTIN GUINEY
that can reproduce events in their entirety is the fulfi lment
of the ancient mimetic impulse. Every technological milestone in fi
lm history sound, colour, three dimen-sional , and so on brings us
closer to the complete imitation of nature (Bazin 1, 173), or its
complete recreation, that he claims is cinema s founding myth.
What is Resnais s relationship to this founding myth , and the
effect of such a myth on his collaborations with literary authors?
Although his fi lms do not display the ambivalence toward
literature described above as a hallmark of the Nouvelle Vague , he
is unwilling to resign himself to a conception of fi lm as pure
artifi ce, as simply another means of manipulating signs. Nowhere
is this attachment to fi lm s testimonial power more evident than,
paradoxically, in the most abstract and fi ctional of his early
works, Last Year at Marienbad.
Resnais sidestepped the literature-fi lm competition most
obviously by collaborating with literary authors rather than
adapting preexisting material. Such collaboration worked well with
Marguerite Duras on Hiroshima , Resnais s fi rst nondocumentary
feature; there is considerable evidence that it broke down,
however, with Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Marienbad .
My purpose is to try to explain this particular failure of the fi
lmic-literary synthesis by revisiting some well-known points of
disagree-ment between the two Alains and also exploring ones that
have not previously been studied.
FILMIC MIMESIS AND LITERARY INTERTEXTUALITY Despite
Robbe-Grillet s claim that their collaboration was like the
unspoken harmony between two halves of the same creative mind (
Resnais had kept as close as possible to the shots, the set - ups,
the camera movements I suggested, not on principle, but because he
felt them the same way I did 10), there are important differences
between his screen-play and the fi lm. He both acknowledges and
dismisses these differences: slight changes dictated by material
considerations, such as the architectural arrangement of the
set-tings used, even sometimes by a simple concern for economy, or
else imposed on the director by his own sensibility (15). As T.
Jefferson Kline (see below) and others have shown, however, not all
the changes were slight : while Robbe-Grillet was revising his text
so as to make it conform to the fi nished fi lm, he refused to
follow scrupulously the model on which he was working, just as
Resnais had refused to follow every detail of the screenplay.
The very fi rst discrepancy occurs, not surprisingly, in the
credits where, because they consist of printed words, the symbolic
tension between text and image, between litera-ture and fi lm, is
most explicit. In Robbe-Grillet s screenplay, the opening credits
begin as pure text: letters on a neutral background. [T]he credits
are initially of a classical type: the names in fairly simple
letters, black against a grey background, or white against a grey
background (17) . Indeed, the actual fi lm s stylistically
minimalist credits are in grey-white letters over grey ( Figure 3
). Then, in the text (but only in the text) , they slowly merge
into the baroque architectural details of the eighteenth -century
palace in which the action of the fi lm takes place: Then the
frames are gradually transformed, grow broader [ s paississent ,
which could also be translated as grow thicker/more substantial ],
are embellished with various curlicues which fi nally constitute a
kind of picture frame, at fi rst fl at, then painted in trompe-l
oeil so as to appear to be three dimensional.
Resnais 7
Finally, in the last credits, the frames are real, complex and
covered with ornaments (17) . In short, the initially extradiegetic
credits gradually become diegetic; the printed words of the credits
contaminate the fi lmic universe, fi rst turning into trompe-l oeil
images, and fi nally achieving the status of fi lmed
three-dimensional objects, a true synthesis of word and fi lm. But
in Resnais s fi lm, this contamination does not occur: the credits
remain in their place throughout, confi ned to their extradiegetic
and ostenta-tiously unadorned, abstract frames ( Figure 3 ). There
is evidently a disagreement between the writer and the director,
one that happens to refer to the relationship between printed word
and moving image, or the literary and the fi lmic.
This brings us to the plot (or nonplot) that Robbe-Grillet
invented for Marienbad : a man (designated as X) and a woman (A)
meet in what appears to be a baroque palace transformed into a
luxury resort hotel or sanatorium. They may have met a year ago in
the same place, or a similar one (the names Marienbad and
Fredericksbad are men-tioned, or it could have been another spa
entirely): the man tries to convince the woman that they not only
did meet but also that they fell in love, and that she has promised
to leave with him if he would come back in a year. He implies that
their relationship was consummated, though at one point betrays
uncertainty as to whether the sexual encounter was consensual on
the part of the woman. The woman claims to have no memory of the
man or of the earlier encounter. Meanwhile, another man (M), who
may be the woman s husband, lurks in the background and
occasionally challenges X to a game of nim . From the German verb
nehmen ( to take ), nim is a game in which a number of rows of
objects coins, matchsticks are placed on a surface; players take
turns removing as many objects as they want, but only from one
pile, or row, per turn; the player who takes the last object loses.
The third person, M, effortlessly wins every time, saying at one
point: I can lose . . . But I always win (39) . At the end of the
fi lm, X and A appear to be leaving the palace together, though it
is not clear if she has fi nally
Figure 3 The abstract, gray-on-gray, credits of Last Year at
Marienbad .
142 M. MARTIN GUINEY
-
6 M. MARTIN GUINEY
that can reproduce events in their entirety is the fulfi lment
of the ancient mimetic impulse. Every technological milestone in fi
lm history sound, colour, three dimen-sional , and so on brings us
closer to the complete imitation of nature (Bazin 1, 173), or its
complete recreation, that he claims is cinema s founding myth.
What is Resnais s relationship to this founding myth , and the
effect of such a myth on his collaborations with literary authors?
Although his fi lms do not display the ambivalence toward
literature described above as a hallmark of the Nouvelle Vague , he
is unwilling to resign himself to a conception of fi lm as pure
artifi ce, as simply another means of manipulating signs. Nowhere
is this attachment to fi lm s testimonial power more evident than,
paradoxically, in the most abstract and fi ctional of his early
works, Last Year at Marienbad.
Resnais sidestepped the literature-fi lm competition most
obviously by collaborating with literary authors rather than
adapting preexisting material. Such collaboration worked well with
Marguerite Duras on Hiroshima , Resnais s fi rst nondocumentary
feature; there is considerable evidence that it broke down,
however, with Alain Robbe-Grillet, the screenwriter of Marienbad .
My purpose is to try to explain this particular failure of the fi
lmic-literary synthesis by revisiting some well-known points of
disagree-ment between the two Alains and also exploring ones that
have not previously been studied.
FILMIC MIMESIS AND LITERARY INTERTEXTUALITY Despite
Robbe-Grillet s claim that their collaboration was like the
unspoken harmony between two halves of the same creative mind (
Resnais had kept as close as possible to the shots, the set - ups,
the camera movements I suggested, not on principle, but because he
felt them the same way I did 10), there are important differences
between his screen-play and the fi lm. He both acknowledges and
dismisses these differences: slight changes dictated by material
considerations, such as the architectural arrangement of the
set-tings used, even sometimes by a simple concern for economy, or
else imposed on the director by his own sensibility (15). As T.
Jefferson Kline (see below) and others have shown, however, not all
the changes were slight : while Robbe-Grillet was revising his text
so as to make it conform to the fi nished fi lm, he refused to
follow scrupulously the model on which he was working, just as
Resnais had refused to follow every detail of the screenplay.
The very fi rst discrepancy occurs, not surprisingly, in the
credits where, because they consist of printed words, the symbolic
tension between text and image, between litera-ture and fi lm, is
most explicit. In Robbe-Grillet s screenplay, the opening credits
begin as pure text: letters on a neutral background. [T]he credits
are initially of a classical type: the names in fairly simple
letters, black against a grey background, or white against a grey
background (17) . Indeed, the actual fi lm s stylistically
minimalist credits are in grey-white letters over grey ( Figure 3
). Then, in the text (but only in the text) , they slowly merge
into the baroque architectural details of the eighteenth -century
palace in which the action of the fi lm takes place: Then the
frames are gradually transformed, grow broader [ s paississent ,
which could also be translated as grow thicker/more substantial ],
are embellished with various curlicues which fi nally constitute a
kind of picture frame, at fi rst fl at, then painted in trompe-l
oeil so as to appear to be three dimensional.
Resnais 7
Finally, in the last credits, the frames are real, complex and
covered with ornaments (17) . In short, the initially extradiegetic
credits gradually become diegetic; the printed words of the credits
contaminate the fi lmic universe, fi rst turning into trompe-l oeil
images, and fi nally achieving the status of fi lmed
three-dimensional objects, a true synthesis of word and fi lm. But
in Resnais s fi lm, this contamination does not occur: the credits
remain in their place throughout, confi ned to their extradiegetic
and ostenta-tiously unadorned, abstract frames ( Figure 3 ). There
is evidently a disagreement between the writer and the director,
one that happens to refer to the relationship between printed word
and moving image, or the literary and the fi lmic.
This brings us to the plot (or nonplot) that Robbe-Grillet
invented for Marienbad : a man (designated as X) and a woman (A)
meet in what appears to be a baroque palace transformed into a
luxury resort hotel or sanatorium. They may have met a year ago in
the same place, or a similar one (the names Marienbad and
Fredericksbad are men-tioned, or it could have been another spa
entirely): the man tries to convince the woman that they not only
did meet but also that they fell in love, and that she has promised
to leave with him if he would come back in a year. He implies that
their relationship was consummated, though at one point betrays
uncertainty as to whether the sexual encounter was consensual on
the part of the woman. The woman claims to have no memory of the
man or of the earlier encounter. Meanwhile, another man (M), who
may be the woman s husband, lurks in the background and
occasionally challenges X to a game of nim . From the German verb
nehmen ( to take ), nim is a game in which a number of rows of
objects coins, matchsticks are placed on a surface; players take
turns removing as many objects as they want, but only from one
pile, or row, per turn; the player who takes the last object loses.
The third person, M, effortlessly wins every time, saying at one
point: I can lose . . . But I always win (39) . At the end of the
fi lm, X and A appear to be leaving the palace together, though it
is not clear if she has fi nally
Figure 3 The abstract, gray-on-gray, credits of Last Year at
Marienbad .
Resnais 143
-
8 M. MARTIN GUINEY
submitted to his version of events, or if the game of seduction
and resistance will con-tinue (we do not see them leave the
building, but on the contrary, they appear to travel deeper into
its labyrinthine passages until the fi nal fade to black).
In all that has been written about the repeated occurrence of
the nim game in Marienbad , one possibility remains unexplored:
that the game symbolizes what has long been recognized as one of
the themes of the fi lm, virtual reality. Virtual reality bears a
strong resemblance to artifi cial intelligence, a fi eld whose
founding myth, expressed by Alan Turing in his famous article
Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), is the ideal of a
computer that can communicate in a manner that is indistinguishable
from a human. One could summarize both A.I. and virtual reality as
the claim that if one cannot distinguish the natural from the
artifi cial, the original from its reproduction, then no meaningful
difference exists. The Turing Test challenges anyone wanting to
preserve human beings monopoly on humanity : as long as a computer
program sustains the belief that it is intelligent, then for
practical purposes, it is; by implication, to deny that such a
program is intelligent and therefore human is to appeal to a
super-natural, soul-based defi nition of human , and therefore to
leave the scientifi c realm for the religious one.
This claim depends on the fact that, in our materialist
universe, access to the ideal, or noumenon, is forever withheld. In
this (admittedly impoverished) universe that is the material both
of science and of modernism, if we mistake an artifi cial
intelligence for a real person, it is hard to deny that we have
experienced humanity . The nim game suggests artifi cial
intelligence because the strategy for the game involves translating
whole numbers into binary notation, the basis of all electronic
computation; as long as the sum of each pile of objects expressed
in binary notation is even, then it is impossible to win in the
following move (Kraitchik 86 88). The challenge is in converting
the number in each pile quickly into binary notation and adding
them, in order to end one s move in a strategic position (a
position in which one s opponent cannot win in the following move).
The advantage computers have over human intelligence is calculating
speed, crunching the zeroes and ones to which they reduce every
question. During the repeated nim games, M always moves
immediately, without taking time to think, while X takes time
before every move, an experience familiar to anyone who has played
chess against a computer. M therefore calculates almost
instantaneously, using binary num-bers, exactly like a computer;
his artifi cial, machine-like behaviour (displayed most prominently
in his uncannily quick and infallible play) is a kind of reverse
Turing Test , emphasizing technology s indifference to human
concerns.
Therefore, in addition to asking the nave question What
happened? , Marienbad makes explicit the hidden fl aw of the
ontological realism of the supremely techno-logical medium of fi
lm. Unlike painting or the printed word, which advertise their
artifi ce from the outset, fi lm presents itself as a record of an
actual event; the status of the event itself, however, is
impossible to ascertain. The founding myth of cinema, to use Bazin
s term, is divided at the root: both a dream of total
representation (the perfect testimonial of displaying past events
as if they were occurring in the present), and one of total fi
ction (the perfect artwork of displaying an artifi cial construct
virtual reality, artifi cial intelligence as if it were natural,
thereby eliminating the truth-fi ction distinction). The problem of
the plot, the relationship between truth and memory, is
Resnais 9
slightly different from the problem of the fi lm, which is
representation, or the relation-ship between truth and image. The
problem of the fi lm, as opposed to the problem of the plot, is
that fi lm records events mechanically and permanently, unlike our
sensory apparatus that immediately translates perceptions into
memories that are subject to repression, distortion, and other
forms of forgetting. But fi lm, though it is a very differ-ent and
more permanent storehouse of images than memory, has its own
reliability problems, one of the most basic of which Resnais
illustrates in the opening scenes of Hiroshima mentioned above: if
I see a scene of post-apocalyptic Hiroshima, how do I know that it
is a recording of the aftermath of the bombing, rather than a
studio recon-struction (a question posed by the juxtaposition of
exactly those two kinds of fi lm, see Figures 1 and 2 above)? The
dilemma of perception and memory becomes the dilemma of
representation, the impossibility of moving beyond the fact that fi
lmic representation, like words, exists to try (unsuccessfully) to
compensate for the absence of the signifi ed. Marienbad s
reputation as one of Resnais s most literary works depends in part
on the critical tradition according to which the question of
representation is, for all purposes, pushed aside: if the
connection of the sign to its referent is nonexistent, then only
the sign exists, as an end in itself rather than the means to an
end. Under this interpretation, the question of whether A and X
ever met is at best a pretext, at worst irrelevant; it is also an
interpretation that is strongly rejected by T. Jefferson Kline
(mentioned above), who makes much of Resnais s alleged humanistic
resistance to Robbe-Grillet s modernist self-referentiality and in
fact explicates the entire movie as an expression of this confl
ict.
To support his claim that Resnais wanted Marienbad to be based
on an event outside of and prior to the images we see on the
screen, Kline explores the consequence of another major difference
between the screenplay and the fi lm: the fact that Robbe-Grillet
specifi ed that the poster announcing the play within the fi lm
that is being performed in the opening scenes not show the play s
name, or else give a meaningless title. Instead, Resnais had the
poster announce the title Rosmer , the name of the primary male
char-acter in Ibsen s Rosmersholm ( The House of Rosmer ). The
heroine of Ibsen s play, Rebecca West, is haunted by the memory of
incest; she at fi rst only suspects that her adoptive father, who
committed what today we call sexual abuse, was in fact her
bio-logical father. Her suspicion is confi rmed by another
character, Kroll, who reveals the truth in an attempt to thwart the
love between Rebecca and Rosmer, who both commit suicide at the
end. For Kline, introducing the title of Ibsen s play signals
Resnais s insist-ence, in contrast to Robbe-Grillet, on addressing
the issue of (sexual) violence by repre-senting it through
cinematic means (69). For Resnais, therefore, there had to be a
prior event, and the present violence of X attempting to impose his
version of the past on a possibly traumatized A is a struggle over
truth, just as the relationship of the Japanese architect and the
French actress in Hiroshima is the correlative of the unspeakable
violence of the atom bomb and of the repression of France s
collaboration with the Germans. Robbe-Grillet s screenplay also
contains a rape scene that Resnais excluded, substituting an
ambiguous scene that is overexposed, setting it apart from the rest
of the footage. It is as if Resnais refused to place the rape the
actual event on which Kline believes the entire plot is based in
the same representational limbo in which every other scene resides,
by excluding it from the mechanically produced images of the fi lm
itself.
144 M. MARTIN GUINEY
-
8 M. MARTIN GUINEY
submitted to his version of events, or if the game of seduction
and resistance will con-tinue (we do not see them leave the
building, but on the contrary, they appear to travel deeper into
its labyrinthine passages until the fi nal fade to black).
In all that has been written about the repeated occurrence of
the nim game in Marienbad , one possibility remains unexplored:
that the game symbolizes what has long been recognized as one of
the themes of the fi lm, virtual reality. Virtual reality bears a
strong resemblance to artifi cial intelligence, a fi eld whose
founding myth, expressed by Alan Turing in his famous article
Computing Machinery and Intelligence (1950), is the ideal of a
computer that can communicate in a manner that is indistinguishable
from a human. One could summarize both A.I. and virtual reality as
the claim that if one cannot distinguish the natural from the
artifi cial, the original from its reproduction, then no meaningful
difference exists. The Turing Test challenges anyone wanting to
preserve human beings monopoly on humanity : as long as a computer
program sustains the belief that it is intelligent, then for
practical purposes, it is; by implication, to deny that such a
program is intelligent and therefore human is to appeal to a
super-natural, soul-based defi nition of human , and therefore to
leave the scientifi c realm for the religious one.
This claim depends on the fact that, in our materialist
universe, access to the ideal, or noumenon, is forever withheld. In
this (admittedly impoverished) universe that is the material both
of science and of modernism, if we mistake an artifi cial
intelligence for a real person, it is hard to deny that we have
experienced humanity . The nim game suggests artifi cial
intelligence because the strategy for the game involves translating
whole numbers into binary notation, the basis of all electronic
computation; as long as the sum of each pile of objects expressed
in binary notation is even, then it is impossible to win in the
following move (Kraitchik 86 88). The challenge is in converting
the number in each pile quickly into binary notation and adding
them, in order to end one s move in a strategic position (a
position in which one s opponent cannot win in the following move).
The advantage computers have over human intelligence is calculating
speed, crunching the zeroes and ones to which they reduce every
question. During the repeated nim games, M always moves
immediately, without taking time to think, while X takes time
before every move, an experience familiar to anyone who has played
chess against a computer. M therefore calculates almost
instantaneously, using binary num-bers, exactly like a computer;
his artifi cial, machine-like behaviour (displayed most prominently
in his uncannily quick and infallible play) is a kind of reverse
Turing Test , emphasizing technology s indifference to human
concerns.
Therefore, in addition to asking the nave question What
happened? , Marienbad makes explicit the hidden fl aw of the
ontological realism of the supremely techno-logical medium of fi
lm. Unlike painting or the printed word, which advertise their
artifi ce from the outset, fi lm presents itself as a record of an
actual event; the status of the event itself, however, is
impossible to ascertain. The founding myth of cinema, to use Bazin
s term, is divided at the root: both a dream of total
representation (the perfect testimonial of displaying past events
as if they were occurring in the present), and one of total fi
ction (the perfect artwork of displaying an artifi cial construct
virtual reality, artifi cial intelligence as if it were natural,
thereby eliminating the truth-fi ction distinction). The problem of
the plot, the relationship between truth and memory, is
Resnais 9
slightly different from the problem of the fi lm, which is
representation, or the relation-ship between truth and image. The
problem of the fi lm, as opposed to the problem of the plot, is
that fi lm records events mechanically and permanently, unlike our
sensory apparatus that immediately translates perceptions into
memories that are subject to repression, distortion, and other
forms of forgetting. But fi lm, though it is a very differ-ent and
more permanent storehouse of images than memory, has its own
reliability problems, one of the most basic of which Resnais
illustrates in the opening scenes of Hiroshima mentioned above: if
I see a scene of post-apocalyptic Hiroshima, how do I know that it
is a recording of the aftermath of the bombing, rather than a
studio recon-struction (a question posed by the juxtaposition of
exactly those two kinds of fi lm, see Figures 1 and 2 above)? The
dilemma of perception and memory becomes the dilemma of
representation, the impossibility of moving beyond the fact that fi
lmic representation, like words, exists to try (unsuccessfully) to
compensate for the absence of the signifi ed. Marienbad s
reputation as one of Resnais s most literary works depends in part
on the critical tradition according to which the question of
representation is, for all purposes, pushed aside: if the
connection of the sign to its referent is nonexistent, then only
the sign exists, as an end in itself rather than the means to an
end. Under this interpretation, the question of whether A and X
ever met is at best a pretext, at worst irrelevant; it is also an
interpretation that is strongly rejected by T. Jefferson Kline
(mentioned above), who makes much of Resnais s alleged humanistic
resistance to Robbe-Grillet s modernist self-referentiality and in
fact explicates the entire movie as an expression of this confl
ict.
To support his claim that Resnais wanted Marienbad to be based
on an event outside of and prior to the images we see on the
screen, Kline explores the consequence of another major difference
between the screenplay and the fi lm: the fact that Robbe-Grillet
specifi ed that the poster announcing the play within the fi lm
that is being performed in the opening scenes not show the play s
name, or else give a meaningless title. Instead, Resnais had the
poster announce the title Rosmer , the name of the primary male
char-acter in Ibsen s Rosmersholm ( The House of Rosmer ). The
heroine of Ibsen s play, Rebecca West, is haunted by the memory of
incest; she at fi rst only suspects that her adoptive father, who
committed what today we call sexual abuse, was in fact her
bio-logical father. Her suspicion is confi rmed by another
character, Kroll, who reveals the truth in an attempt to thwart the
love between Rebecca and Rosmer, who both commit suicide at the
end. For Kline, introducing the title of Ibsen s play signals
Resnais s insist-ence, in contrast to Robbe-Grillet, on addressing
the issue of (sexual) violence by repre-senting it through
cinematic means (69). For Resnais, therefore, there had to be a
prior event, and the present violence of X attempting to impose his
version of the past on a possibly traumatized A is a struggle over
truth, just as the relationship of the Japanese architect and the
French actress in Hiroshima is the correlative of the unspeakable
violence of the atom bomb and of the repression of France s
collaboration with the Germans. Robbe-Grillet s screenplay also
contains a rape scene that Resnais excluded, substituting an
ambiguous scene that is overexposed, setting it apart from the rest
of the footage. It is as if Resnais refused to place the rape the
actual event on which Kline believes the entire plot is based in
the same representational limbo in which every other scene resides,
by excluding it from the mechanically produced images of the fi lm
itself.
Resnais 145
-
10 M. MARTIN GUINEY
Kline also remarks on the (possibly noncoincidental) fact that
Freud once interpreted Ibsen s play as part of his abandonment of
the theory that hysteria was caused by repressed memories of
incest, moving instead toward one according to which the
preva-lence of stories of incest among his female patients was
simply the result of childhood sexual fantasies. Ironically, Kline
writes, Freud uses Ibsen s account of the revelation of actual
incest between Rebecca and her father in the process of denying
that such accounts are anything more than the expression of
repressed desires, without real-life counter-parts. Such denial is
comparable to Robbe-Grillet s insistence that nothing in the fi lm
refers to prior or exterior events, beginning with the name
Marienbad which no longer refers to a place, since the town has
been known only by its Czech name, Marinsk Lzn , ever since the end
of World War II (and the expulsion of its German-speaking
inhabitants by communist forces). Kline concludes that The text
[the name Rosmer ] returns, like the repressed itself, to occupy
the screen as a sign of both the reality [of the prior, repressed
event] and the fi ctive nature of the images we have witnessed (86)
.
MARIENBAD S LITERARY INTERTEXT: A NOVEL ABOUT FILM It would
seem, then, that the relationship of fi lm to literature in Resnais
is not one of adaptation or translation of one medium into another,
but rather of trying to achieve the presence of the past, a
throwback to a mimetic and humanist conception of litera-ture
(albeit tragic in its inadequacy) that is at odds with
Robbe-Grillet s radical mod-ernism. Compared to the ambivalence
towards the literary expressed by Nouvelle Vague fi lmmakers such
as Truffaut and Godard, Resnais achieved a kind of synthesis in
which generic lines were clearly drawn (symbolized by the strict
separation of the credits from the fi lm proper), while literature
and fi lm merge symbiotically by addressing their com-mon
philosophical ambitions. Even the fact that Robbe-Grillet based his
plot on the classical theme of persuasion provides Resnais with a
means of subverting the fi lm s modernist solipsism. As he
emphasized in the joint interview that he and Robbe-Grillet gave in
1961 (Labarthe and Rivette 4), Marienbad is structured around X s
attempt to persuade A through words, i.e. , rhetoric, one of the
classical defi nitions of the literary.
There is yet more evidence that Resnais was correct if, as Kline
argues, he saw Robbe-Grillet s text as repressing realism to the
point of denying any referential func-tion to the cinematic image.
One of the sources for Robbe-Grillet s screenplay happens to be a
novel that is structured around the above-mentioned ideal of total
cinema. The intertextual relationship of novel, screenplay, and fi
lm has received little attention, even though one can easily fi nd
published claims that Robbe-Grillet was inspired by a 1940 science
fi ction novella by the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, The
Invention of Morel ; one of the few critics to explore this
connection even suggested that he and Resnais deliberately
concealed the literary source of their project (Beltzer). There was
in fact no deception, as the following excerpt from their 1961
interview (cited in the previous paragraph) makes clear:
[Interviewer] : I might startle you, but while watching
Marienbad , I thought of the book by Bioy Casares, The Invention of
Morel . Robbe-Grillet : Not at all [ i.e. you do not startle me ].
I have almost always been disappointed by the science fi ction that
I ve read, but The Invention of Morel is, on the contrary, an
astonishing
Resnais 11
book. And coincidentally, I received a phone call from Claude
Ollier [ a member, like Robbe-Grillet, of the New Novel movement ],
after the projection of Marienbad, who said: But it s The Invention
of Morel! Resnais : I m not the person to speak of this, as I don t
know the book. [Interviewer] : It s a novel told in the fi rst
person and founded on the myth of total cinema. The narrator lands
on an island where a machine is operating, invented twenty years
earlier, which reproduces in three dimensions the events that it
recorded. Of course, these three-dimensional images combine with
the real world to the point where it is impossible to distin-guish
the ones from the other. Just as in certain shots in Marienbad ,
objects become suspect, they are there, but what are they really?
That s the whole problem (Labarthe and Rivette 14, my
translation).
If Robbe-Grillet ever deliberately concealed the infl uence on
him of Bioy Casares, it was only to his collaborator Resnais, who
seems taken short by the sudden mention of this strange book. Once
again, the border between the literary (represented here as the
infl uence of one novelist on another) and the fi lmic appears to
be sharply drawn by these two men who supposedly collaborated as
one. While Robbe-Grillet readily acknowledged his admiration for
Bioy Casares s novella, he came short of admitting that it infl
uenced his screenplay; but the fact that the name Marienbad appears
in the novella s fi rst pages, as well as striking parallels
between the two works (suggested by the interviewer above), remove
any doubt that the screenplay is somehow indebted to the book.
Few people have undertaken to examine the parallels between
Morel and Marienbad , some of which the following synopsis will
highlight. The narrator of Morel escapes from the law by fi nding
refuge on an abandoned island in the Indian Ocean. Nobody visits
there any longer because of the belief that it harbours a terrible
illness, in which people lose their skin, hair, and fi ngernails
before dying. As the novella begins, he lives alone on the island
where years ago, for unknown reasons, someone built a museum, a
chapel, and a swimming pool. Then one evening he notices something
strange: . . . suddenly, unaccountably, on this oppressive summer -
like night, the grassy hillside has become crowded with people who
dance, stroll up and down, swim in the pool, as if this were a
summer resort like Los Teques or Marienbad (11) . As mentioned
above, the reference to Marienbad leads one to infer that it
provided Robbe-Grillet with the title and the baroque visual style
of his screenplay. A more important parallel is the relation-ship
between X and A in Marienbad , which is prefi gured in the novella:
at fi rst horrifi ed by the apparition of the vacationing
strangers, the narrator hides; he is soon drawn out, however, by
the sight of a beautiful woman named Faustine, who walks every day
to a hillside to watch the sun set, but when he declares his love
for her, she gave no indica-tion that she had seen me (23 2 4) . He
sometimes sees her in the company of another man, whom the other
visitors call Morel (and whose role is similar to that of M, in
Marienbad ). Over time, the narrator hears people repeating
conversations he already heard them having, which he rationalizes
with a plausible theory of human behaviour: Conversations are
subject to repetition . . . all conversations spring from the
pleasure of speaking . . . . Scenes are repeated in life, just as
they are in the theatre (36) . It is at this point that book and
screenplay diverge signifi cantly, as Bioy Casares gives his
readers an
146 M. MARTIN GUINEY
-
10 M. MARTIN GUINEY
Kline also remarks on the (possibly noncoincidental) fact that
Freud once interpreted Ibsen s play as part of his abandonment of
the theory that hysteria was caused by repressed memories of
incest, moving instead toward one according to which the
preva-lence of stories of incest among his female patients was
simply the result of childhood sexual fantasies. Ironically, Kline
writes, Freud uses Ibsen s account of the revelation of actual
incest between Rebecca and her father in the process of denying
that such accounts are anything more than the expression of
repressed desires, without real-life counter-parts. Such denial is
comparable to Robbe-Grillet s insistence that nothing in the fi lm
refers to prior or exterior events, beginning with the name
Marienbad which no longer refers to a place, since the town has
been known only by its Czech name, Marinsk Lzn , ever since the end
of World War II (and the expulsion of its German-speaking
inhabitants by communist forces). Kline concludes that The text
[the name Rosmer ] returns, like the repressed itself, to occupy
the screen as a sign of both the reality [of the prior, repressed
event] and the fi ctive nature of the images we have witnessed (86)
.
MARIENBAD S LITERARY INTERTEXT: A NOVEL ABOUT FILM It would
seem, then, that the relationship of fi lm to literature in Resnais
is not one of adaptation or translation of one medium into another,
but rather of trying to achieve the presence of the past, a
throwback to a mimetic and humanist conception of litera-ture
(albeit tragic in its inadequacy) that is at odds with
Robbe-Grillet s radical mod-ernism. Compared to the ambivalence
towards the literary expressed by Nouvelle Vague fi lmmakers such
as Truffaut and Godard, Resnais achieved a kind of synthesis in
which generic lines were clearly drawn (symbolized by the strict
separation of the credits from the fi lm proper), while literature
and fi lm merge symbiotically by addressing their com-mon
philosophical ambitions. Even the fact that Robbe-Grillet based his
plot on the classical theme of persuasion provides Resnais with a
means of subverting the fi lm s modernist solipsism. As he
emphasized in the joint interview that he and Robbe-Grillet gave in
1961 (Labarthe and Rivette 4), Marienbad is structured around X s
attempt to persuade A through words, i.e. , rhetoric, one of the
classical defi nitions of the literary.
There is yet more evidence that Resnais was correct if, as Kline
argues, he saw Robbe-Grillet s text as repressing realism to the
point of denying any referential func-tion to the cinematic image.
One of the sources for Robbe-Grillet s screenplay happens to be a
novel that is structured around the above-mentioned ideal of total
cinema. The intertextual relationship of novel, screenplay, and fi
lm has received little attention, even though one can easily fi nd
published claims that Robbe-Grillet was inspired by a 1940 science
fi ction novella by the Argentine writer Adolfo Bioy Casares, The
Invention of Morel ; one of the few critics to explore this
connection even suggested that he and Resnais deliberately
concealed the literary source of their project (Beltzer). There was
in fact no deception, as the following excerpt from their 1961
interview (cited in the previous paragraph) makes clear:
[Interviewer] : I might startle you, but while watching
Marienbad , I thought of the book by Bioy Casares, The Invention of
Morel . Robbe-Grillet : Not at all [ i.e. you do not startle me ].
I have almost always been disappointed by the science fi ction that
I ve read, but The Invention of Morel is, on the contrary, an
astonishing
Resnais 11
book. And coincidentally, I received a phone call from Claude
Ollier [ a member, like Robbe-Grillet, of the New Novel movement ],
after the projection of Marienbad, who said: But it s The Invention
of Morel! Resnais : I m not the person to speak of this, as I don t
know the book. [Interviewer] : It s a novel told in the fi rst
person and founded on the myth of total cinema. The narrator lands
on an island where a machine is operating, invented twenty years
earlier, which reproduces in three dimensions the events that it
recorded. Of course, these three-dimensional images combine with
the real world to the point where it is impossible to distin-guish
the ones from the other. Just as in certain shots in Marienbad ,
objects become suspect, they are there, but what are they really?
That s the whole problem (Labarthe and Rivette 14, my
translation).
If Robbe-Grillet ever deliberately concealed the infl uence on
him of Bioy Casares, it was only to his collaborator Resnais, who
seems taken short by the sudden mention of this strange book. Once
again, the border between the literary (represented here as the
infl uence of one novelist on another) and the fi lmic appears to
be sharply drawn by these two men who supposedly collaborated as
one. While Robbe-Grillet readily acknowledged his admiration for
Bioy Casares s novella, he came short of admitting that it infl
uenced his screenplay; but the fact that the name Marienbad appears
in the novella s fi rst pages, as well as striking parallels
between the two works (suggested by the interviewer above), remove
any doubt that the screenplay is somehow indebted to the book.
Few people have undertaken to examine the parallels between
Morel and Marienbad , some of which the following synopsis will
highlight. The narrator of Morel escapes from the law by fi nding
refuge on an abandoned island in the Indian Ocean. Nobody visits
there any longer because of the belief that it harbours a terrible
illness, in which people lose their skin, hair, and fi ngernails
before dying. As the novella begins, he lives alone on the island
where years ago, for unknown reasons, someone built a museum, a
chapel, and a swimming pool. Then one evening he notices something
strange: . . . suddenly, unaccountably, on this oppressive summer -
like night, the grassy hillside has become crowded with people who
dance, stroll up and down, swim in the pool, as if this were a
summer resort like Los Teques or Marienbad (11) . As mentioned
above, the reference to Marienbad leads one to infer that it
provided Robbe-Grillet with the title and the baroque visual style
of his screenplay. A more important parallel is the relation-ship
between X and A in Marienbad , which is prefi gured in the novella:
at fi rst horrifi ed by the apparition of the vacationing
strangers, the narrator hides; he is soon drawn out, however, by
the sight of a beautiful woman named Faustine, who walks every day
to a hillside to watch the sun set, but when he declares his love
for her, she gave no indica-tion that she had seen me (23 2 4) . He
sometimes sees her in the company of another man, whom the other
visitors call Morel (and whose role is similar to that of M, in
Marienbad ). Over time, the narrator hears people repeating
conversations he already heard them having, which he rationalizes
with a plausible theory of human behaviour: Conversations are
subject to repetition . . . all conversations spring from the
pleasure of speaking . . . . Scenes are repeated in life, just as
they are in the theatre (36) . It is at this point that book and
screenplay diverge signifi cantly, as Bioy Casares gives his
readers an
Resnais 147
-
12 M. MARTIN GUINEY
explanation for these mysterious phenomena. The narrator spies a
new scene in which Morel, surrounded by his guests, confesses that
he has used them in an experiment. He has invented a machine, a
kind of hyper-movie camera that not only records light and sound
but also everything : depth, taste, texture, smell , and so on, in
a 360-degree radius. When the recording is played back , it imposes
a virtual reality indistinguishable from the original event. It is
only upon viewing the scene of Morel s confession that the narrator
realizes he has been witnessing for several days the repeated
playback of a recording, triggered by a power generator that is
fuelled by the motion of the tides. 3
Morel is therefore the master fi lmmaker, as well as a character
in his own fi lm. Honouring the well-established sci-fi tradition
of mad-scientists, he explains that with his invention he has
equalled God, because [i]f we grant consciousness, and all that
distinguishes us from objects, to the persons who surround us, we
shall have no valid reason to deny it to the persons created by my
machinery . . . . When all the senses are synchronized, the soul
emerges. When Madeleine [the name of one of the guests] existed for
the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, Madeleine
herself was actually there (63) . Alan Turing s model of artifi
cial intelligence, the creation of a com-puter that in turn creates
the impression of humanity, merges with Morel s virtual reality:
both claim that the creation of a realist effect is the same as
reality. Morel has solved the eternal problem of representation,
and also the problem of memory, by mak-ing an apparently perfect
recording of events: he has successfully compensated for the
absence of the signifi ed. If he is not God, he is the only
successful, perfect (realist) artist, and so had might as well be
God. His manner of describing his achievement is im-portant: if we
grant consciousness to one another, then we must also grant it to
his re-cordings; a debatable but provocative argument that, like
Turing s hypothesis, is diffi cult to refute, except by appealing
to the scientifi cally unfounded belief that consciousness is the
product of a God-given soul, and not its cause.
Morel is like M in Marienbad , who stands between X and the
desired woman A not only as a possible erotic rival but also as the
guardian of the perpetually unchanging, conventional, and ornate
world in which she is imprisoned. Morel is also like Resnais and
Robbe-Grillet, who together create a literary-fi lmic world with
which one cannot interact, and yet which stakes its claim to truth,
just as Morel claims a soul for the humans reproduced by his
invention. Since we will never know whether X and A had an affair,
and whether she indeed promised a year ago that she would leave
with him, we must be satisfi ed with the moving images and sounds
that present this dilemma. If Resnais rejects the contamination of
the medium of literature understood as pure fi ction (and I argue
that his refusal to remove the barrier between the extradiegetic
and diegetic in the opening credits is partly an expression of such
rejection), he at least has in common with Bioy Casares and with
Robbe-Grillet a willingness to create a parable of representation
that in his fi lm takes on the aspect of narrative literature (the
problem of reconciling word memories with reality), and in Bioy
Casares s novella, conversely, takes on the aspect of fi lm (Morel
s machine and the more explicitly phenomenological problem of
reconciling sense perceptions with reality).
While there are many parallels between Morel and Marienbad , the
conclusion of the novella is absent from Robbe-Grillet s screenplay
and Resnais s fi lm. I mentioned earlier that the island was
shunned by travellers because of rumours of a deadly disease
that
Resnais 13
causes people to lose their skin, hair, and fi ngernails. The
narrator, after discovering the answer to the mystery of the
island, then discovers the recording machine itself, hidden in the
basement of one of the buildings. He cannot resist the temptation
to record him-self, especially as he thinks this might bring him
closer to (the image of) Faustine: Then I committed the imprudence.
I put my hand in front of the receiver; I turned on the projector
and my hand appeared, just my hand, making the lazy movements it
made when I photographed it (81) . He then records himself over a
period of time, even though he knows that his image and that of
Faustine still cannot interact; what he accomplishes is nothing but
double exposure (or, more precisely, superimposing one fi lmstrip
over another so as to merge the two scenes), one of the oldest
effects in the history of fi lm, invented by Georges Mlis almost
immediately after the Lumire brothers fi rst introduced the new
medium to the public. Bioy Casares leaves unsaid, however, what the
effect achieves: to a third party, in other words, to a
hypothetical spec-tator of the double image of the narrator and
Faustine, it will appear that they are together. Their images might
be nothing but mechanical reproductions, but the next castaway on
the shore of the island will see a man expressing his love to a
woman who may seem indifferent to his desire but, so far as the
spectator knows, is not necessarily blind and deaf to it. In other
words , he will be viewing the plot, if not the actual scenes, of
Marienbad .
Morel s recording device does something that no other technique
does: because the recording superimposes itself over, and replaces
reality, it causes the narrator s death even as it produces an
immortal facsimile of his body, as it did the others: [I]t began in
the tissues of my left hand . . . I am losing my sight. My sense of
touch has gone; my skin is falling off . . . I have no beard, I am
bald. I have no nails on my fi ngers or toes, and my fl esh is
tinged with rose. My strength is diminishing (89) . Morel s machine
may indeed take away their souls from its subjects (a suspicion
that people in societies without modern technology sometimes
harbour towards cameras) but physically speaking, it only removes
what can be seen .4 Like our own senses, Morel s camera cannot go
deeper than the perceptible parts of the objects it records; but
unlike our senses, those parts it records it also destroys, and in
so doing, it kills, as if humans were completely contained within
the surface of our bodies. For all the reality of the projected
images, they still are a world made only of surfaces, creating an
illusion of substance.
Bioy Casares ends his narrative with a pathetic reminder that
Morel, for all his genius, failed to recreate the world completely,
because he did not break the fourth wall , the barrier between the
viewer and the work being viewed: To the person who reads this
diary and then invents a machine that can assemble disjoined
presences, I make this request: Find Faustine and me, let me enter
the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of piety (90) .
This plea to salvage humanity from the grips of technology,
assem-bling disjoined presences (a phrase that describes the
communion-like faith underlying the act of reading a book or
viewing a fi lm), like X urging A to remember her promise and to
keep it, is the elusive quest of many narratives, and we have yet
to fi nd the means of representation that will bring it within
reach. As Louis Sass argued in his analysis of Bioy Casares s
novella in Madness and Modernism (1992), the story is an allegory
of the world understood as a view , as dependent on consciousness
or a representative device (the perfect camera resulting in total
cinema) in order to exist (308) . As such, it
148 M. MARTIN GUINEY
-
12 M. MARTIN GUINEY
explanation for these mysterious phenomena. The narrator spies a
new scene in which Morel, surrounded by his guests, confesses that
he has used them in an experiment. He has invented a machine, a
kind of hyper-movie camera that not only records light and sound
but also everything : depth, taste, texture, smell , and so on, in
a 360-degree radius. When the recording is played back , it imposes
a virtual reality indistinguishable from the original event. It is
only upon viewing the scene of Morel s confession that the narrator
realizes he has been witnessing for several days the repeated
playback of a recording, triggered by a power generator that is
fuelled by the motion of the tides. 3
Morel is therefore the master fi lmmaker, as well as a character
in his own fi lm. Honouring the well-established sci-fi tradition
of mad-scientists, he explains that with his invention he has
equalled God, because [i]f we grant consciousness, and all that
distinguishes us from objects, to the persons who surround us, we
shall have no valid reason to deny it to the persons created by my
machinery . . . . When all the senses are synchronized, the soul
emerges. When Madeleine [the name of one of the guests] existed for
the senses of sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch, Madeleine
herself was actually there (63) . Alan Turing s model of artifi
cial intelligence, the creation of a com-puter that in turn creates
the impression of humanity, merges with Morel s virtual reality:
both claim that the creation of a realist effect is the same as
reality. Morel has solved the eternal problem of representation,
and also the problem of memory, by mak-ing an apparently perfect
recording of events: he has successfully compensated for the
absence of the signifi ed. If he is not God, he is the only
successful, perfect (realist) artist, and so had might as well be
God. His manner of describing his achievement is im-portant: if we
grant consciousness to one another, then we must also grant it to
his re-cordings; a debatable but provocative argument that, like
Turing s hypothesis, is diffi cult to refute, except by appealing
to the scientifi cally unfounded belief that consciousness is the
product of a God-given soul, and not its cause.
Morel is like M in Marienbad , who stands between X and the
desired woman A not only as a possible erotic rival but also as the
guardian of the perpetually unchanging, conventional, and ornate
world in which she is imprisoned. Morel is also like Resnais and
Robbe-Grillet, who together create a literary-fi lmic world with
which one cannot interact, and yet which stakes its claim to truth,
just as Morel claims a soul for the humans reproduced by his
invention. Since we will never know whether X and A had an affair,
and whether she indeed promised a year ago that she would leave
with him, we must be satisfi ed with the moving images and sounds
that present this dilemma. If Resnais rejects the contamination of
the medium of literature understood as pure fi ction (and I argue
that his refusal to remove the barrier between the extradiegetic
and diegetic in the opening credits is partly an expression of such
rejection), he at least has in common with Bioy Casares and with
Robbe-Grillet a willingness to create a parable of representation
that in his fi lm takes on the aspect of narrative literature (the
problem of reconciling word memories with reality), and in Bioy
Casares s novella, conversely, takes on the aspect of fi lm (Morel
s machine and the more explicitly phenomenological problem of
reconciling sense perceptions with reality).
While there are many parallels between Morel and Marienbad , the
conclusion of the novella is absent from Robbe-Grillet s screenplay
and Resnais s fi lm. I mentioned earlier that the island was
shunned by travellers because of rumours of a deadly disease
that
Resnais 13
causes people to lose their skin, hair, and fi ngernails. The
narrator, after discovering the answer to the mystery of the
island, then discovers the recording machine itself, hidden in the
basement of one of the buildings. He cannot resist the temptation
to record him-self, especially as he thinks this might bring him
closer to (the image of) Faustine: Then I committed the imprudence.
I put my hand in front of the receiver; I turned on the projector
and my hand appeared, just my hand, making the lazy movements it
made when I photographed it (81) . He then records himself over a
period of time, even though he knows that his image and that of
Faustine still cannot interact; what he accomplishes is nothing but
double exposure (or, more precisely, superimposing one fi lmstrip
over another so as to merge the two scenes), one of the oldest
effects in the history of fi lm, invented by Georges Mlis almost
immediately after the Lumire brothers fi rst introduced the new
medium to the public. Bioy Casares leaves unsaid, however, what the
effect achieves: to a third party, in other words, to a
hypothetical spec-tator of the double image of the narrator and
Faustine, it will appear that they are together. Their images might
be nothing but mechanical reproductions, but the next castaway on
the shore of the island will see a man expressing his love to a
woman who may seem indifferent to his desire but, so far as the
spectator knows, is not necessarily blind and deaf to it. In other
words , he will be viewing the plot, if not the actual scenes, of
Marienbad .
Morel s recording device does something that no other technique
does: because the recording superimposes itself over, and replaces
reality, it causes the narrator s death even as it produces an
immortal facsimile of his body, as it did the others: [I]t began in
the tissues of my left hand . . . I am losing my sight. My sense of
touch has gone; my skin is falling off . . . I have no beard, I am
bald. I have no nails on my fi ngers or toes, and my fl esh is
tinged with rose. My strength is diminishing (89) . Morel s machine
may indeed take away their souls from its subjects (a suspicion
that people in societies without modern technology sometimes
harbour towards cameras) but physically speaking, it only removes
what can be seen .4 Like our own senses, Morel s camera cannot go
deeper than the perceptible parts of the objects it records; but
unlike our senses, those parts it records it also destroys, and in
so doing, it kills, as if humans were completely contained within
the surface of our bodies. For all the reality of the projected
images, they still are a world made only of surfaces, creating an
illusion of substance.
Bioy Casares ends his narrative with a pathetic reminder that
Morel, for all his genius, failed to recreate the world completely,
because he did not break the fourth wall , the barrier between the
viewer and the work being viewed: To the person who reads this
diary and then invents a machine that can assemble disjoined
presences, I make this request: Find Faustine and me, let me enter
the heaven of her consciousness. It will be an act of piety (90) .
This plea to salvage humanity from the grips of technology,
assem-bling disjoined presences (a phrase that describes the
communion-like faith underlying the act of reading a book or
viewing a fi lm), like X urging A to remember her promise and to
keep it, is the elusive quest of many narratives, and we have yet
to fi nd
