At the Crossroads: Last Year at Marienbad

If a text can be said to determine its own reading then Alain Resnais's "Last Year at Marienbad" [...] is a paradigmatic instance of a phenomenological film. Not only does it posit such a reading, but its very structuration can be seen as a meta-cinematic essay on the phenomenological systems of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty." (Tomasulo 58)

Last Year in Marienbad has been revisited by several film theorists, but none with the status of Gilles Deleuze. By focusing on the film, Deleuzeputs into relief not only his own blueprint for the creation of a new film taxonomy but also the importance of other critical approaches, most notably phenomenology. In the process we find, contrary to expectations, that phenomenology and Deleuze have much in common. We also find a rapprochement between literature and film through the categorizations and concepts, which Deleuze uses to "think otherwise," in particular movement and time images. For this reason, it is important to examine what these positions are and how they relate to this most enigmatic of films.

One of the reasons phenomenology accommodates the Deleuzean position is that its orbit is so broad. On the one level, it is deeply planted within the idealism of early Husserl and on the other, concerned with the concrete details of the life world in later Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger. In the idealistic pose, for both novel and film, the phenomenology of artistic intent is prioritized over the substantiality of the work, making it transparent, placing "the locus of art, not in the object or work itself, but in the coincidence of reader consciousness and that of the artist as manifest in the work [... ] the phenomenologists define criticism as 'consciousness of consciousness'" (Houston 242). In practice, however, this interpenetration of consciousness by consciousness brings to life not merely artistic intent but the work itself. It does so because the classical phenomenological position is cast in terms of intentionality, the ineluctable link between subject and object. In Marienbad, varied realities created out of personal visions, rather than imposing any one-world view, become enmeshed in a battleground of multi-perspectival visions, including the inanimate as a "calcification of spatio/temporal Bewusstsein" (Tomasulo 62-63). Not one particular, subjective consciousness but a fullness of intentionality working through the eclecticism of material drawn upon by a unique, and very Deleuzean, film consciousness. Lines of departure and lines of flight writ large through Ariadne's thread:

The measured cadence of the opening narration, the romantic and passionate musical score, and the controlled camera motility create a labyrinthine effect approximating the involved movements of the mind, yet they also present an ontological reality. (Tomasulo 59)

This is not the reality but a reality as defined by the topology of objective perception and subjective materiality, or the reality of externalized thought, its problematized limit points through mute vision and blind word.

Deleuze begins his redefinition of film consciousness by taking issue with this multiple view of several consciousnesses to a view of no determinate consciousness. Rather than present particular views on the world from narrative centers, Deleuze's interpretation of the forks and splitting of unfurling imagery shows that "the characters themselves are attributes in a logic of memory presented by the film's overall strategy" (Rodowick 102), which moves by leaps, temporal disjunction, and fractured identity. This crucial step means that if images are to be read through a logic of memory, we are no longer in the realm of commonly accepted subjectivity but rather within a machinic series emanating from a molecular level of process. This is the formation of realities and objects through assemblages, which include and absorb the brain and body within the indiscemibility of matter and memory.

From the opening of Marienbad a phenomenological epoché has taken place where the rules and chronology of everyday, set within history and culture, have been laid aside. Spectator consciousness no longer intends the world but intends meanings and signification directly, without the benefit of mediating signs. Indeed, the status of mediating signs is immediately questioned in the visual motifs of the hotel when narrator, "X," comments on images that do not correspond to what we see. Tomasulo sees that images in Marienbad reconstruct the subjective perceptual experiences of two or perhaps three characters. Objects in the world literally display their objecthood by being brought into relief, disconnected from their utilitarian functionalism to become, contrary to movement-imagery, objects-for-consciousness through intentionality: "Subjectivity is represented in terms of the phenomenal world, rather than through the conventional action and motivation offered by classical narrative cinema" (Tomasulo 60).

Events that skim the surface in Marienbad are channeled through different sentient consciousnesses at different times, sometimes in the form of objective accounts, other times as rambling monologues to the extent that a strictly phenomenological reading of the film elicits the inherent struggle of phenomenological subjectivity to rid itself of the self-confirming shackles of idealism: