Last Year In Marienbad

Historical Markers of the Modern Soundtrack

Developed for RMIT Media Arts

Nouvelle Roman Cinema

Predating and overlapping the Nouvelle Vague (NEW WAVE) film making movement in France in the 50s, the Nouvelle Roman (NEW NOVEL) movement was a development that took place in contemporary literature. Key writers associated with the 'movement' were ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET and MARGUERITE DURAS. They worked with filmmakers like ALAIN RESNAIS, and collectively produced a body of work which spans the late 60s into the late 70s.

The ideas of the NEW NOVEL were centred on the relationship between the writer (author), the reader (subject) and the story (text). Complex linguistic, semiological and narrative concepts were explored by the methods these writers used to generate experiences of time, space, memory and perspective. Because of their preoccupation with the shifts that continually occur between objective and subjective realities, writers like GRILLET and DURAS were fascinated by and attracted to the cinema. There they could more sensuously and more potently shift time and space and engage the viewer with multi-dimensional experiences of narrative which allowed the subject to acknowledge these effects and concepts.

Mostly, NEW NOVEL literature and cinema dislocates the reader/viewer and prevents them from holding onto a fixed, defined, rational and tangible construct of meaning and significance. Typical textual aspects explored include:
1. Plot lines go nowhere or in endless circle;
2. time spans collide with each, cancel each other and overlap each other;
3. truth value is continually ascribed yet simultaneously denied;
4. characters are posited as 'semes' or artificially constructed figures which function as carrier-vessels for the reader/viewer to be transported through the narrative; and
5. the narrative itself is riddled with gaps, ruptures, fissures and other holes which continually affirm that the narrative itself is perversely aware of itself as a narrative with no reference to any imaginable social reality.

In reference to the soundtrack, most of the above aspects are translated into cinematic language through a dialectic relationship between Sound and Image. That is, whatever is happening on the soundtrack sets up a series of tensions and ambiguities with whatever is happening in the image-track. Mostly, this is conveyed through having Voice Over Narration underscore, undercut and undermine the supposed 'truth value' of what we are witness to in the film's images.

As such, New Novel cinema is a radical addresses the submerged inconsistencies which are at the heart of much conventional cinematic language whenever we hear a voice over narration. For example, when you see an image and hear a voice-over, there is much about the relationship between the two that is never clearly defined:
1. Is the image in the past of the story or the present of a character's mind?
2. Is the voice of that character telling the truth or not?
3. Was that character privy to each and every detail of each and every event we witness in the images?
4. Who exactly is the character addressing?
5. Are the events being told through the character - or is the character the creator of the events?
6. What is the relationship between the voice-over character and the meta-narrative (ie. the 'whole' of the film's story)?
7. Is the voice-over designed to give us privileged information or is its presentation casual and indifferent?

Many questions like these the New Novel writers and directors found begging and unanswered in much American cinema of the 40s and 50s - particularly pulp detective fiction which was heavily dependent on the Detective figure as someone who talked over most action and often functioned as a stand-in for the reader/viewer, giving true and false information as part of a 'whodunnit' guessing game. Consequently, much New Novel cinema is characterized by puzzles, riddles and other perplexing forms which both drive the narrative and prevent it from being resolved.

Close analysis

While many have ridiculed the incomprehensibility of this film, Last Year n Marienbad can fairly clearly be viewed as a hysterical ride through confused emotions which arise from fractured relationships, repressed memories and problematized desires. Robbe-Grillet and Resnais have constructed the film to not only foreground this, but they have chosen baroque architecture as the visual symbolic layer for this hysteria, and theatrical melodrama as the stylized means through which the actors enact the scenario (often gesturing and posturing in stilted tableaux fashion.

What follows are some general points raised by the film which prompt us to consider how cinematic language is formed through a dialectic relationship between Sound and Image (particularly through the use of Voice Over Narration in the film).

1. Volume of the voice-over narration. Note how during the opening sequence (over the credits and across the establishing tracking shots down the multiple corridors) the voice-over fades up and down, and how its repeated fragments appear to be slight variations of a general description of a non-specific space.

2. Much of the film is based on the mystery as to who own s this voice-over - or, more precisely, when and where that who is uttering the words we hear. The opening sequence of the corridor tracks, the play ending and the meandering after-play social digressions which follow are all potential locations for this voice. But just as neither the architecture nor the editing of the framed spatializations convey a clear linear or causal logic in how everything fits together, nor does the voice-over fix itself to any one place. This is a reversal of the major logic in conventional narrative narrations, where one always is aware of who speaks to whom and from what spatio-temporal location. It could also be asserted that the endless tracking shots are symbolic of how this voice-over - this central seme to the mystery of the film's melodrama - acoustically floats down corridors and into spaces. Of course, the voice we discover 'belongs' to the main man chasing the woman throughout the film - but that information alone does not explain every moment and location of his continual utterances.

3. In the after-play social chit-chat, dialogue is treated not as information passed between characters, but as points of intersection and dislocation between any two persons. Typical of how social gathering s in reality function, the audio-visual continuity in this scene highlights fragmentation and disjuncture in two main ways: (i) people suddenly freeze en masse in a tableaux of interaction; and (ii) people are clearly shown to be talking, but the mix selectively gives us fragments of what they are saying. Both these approaches cause psychological tension on our part as we try to either fill in the gaps of silence with meaningful content, or as we attempt to attach a logical significance to this deliberately disjunctured audio-visual continuum.

4. Note the continual flatness of the voice-over's recording. This is juxtaposed against two sonic aspects of the narrative: (i) the voice often describes the sound and/or silence of spaces; and (ii) acoustic characteristics of spaces are always clear on the soundtrack (ie. the echoed chambers, the muffled talking from behind walls, the deadness of outside speech, etc.).

5. Note also the blurring between: (i) on-screen, off-screen and voice-over presences; and (ii) whether any of those on-screen, off-screen and voice-over presences are monologues or dialogues. Sometimes characters talk at each other rather than to each other; other times characters in isolation passionately talk to someone who isn't there with them. An other times, there are transitions between the two - sometimes leaving us unsure as to whether an actual transition occurred or whether we misread the function of the voice in the beginning of the supposed transition.

6. The organ music is often employed to embody the voice-over and move it through a passage of the film (architecturally and narratively speaking). The mix levels between these two key elements of the soundtrack heighten tension (when the organ overwhelms the voice) and provide an illusory respite (when the organ dissolves behind the voice).

7. The organ music and its relation to the voice works as a base template to exemplify the film's core tactic in employing melodrama (the original meaning of melodrama comes from the joining of melo - music - with drama - action). Note how the start, development and ending of any of the organ passages give the film a feeling of musical movements. There is always a sense of things commencing and then resolving - but once again, such 'linguistic' effects (ie. through using musical language conventions which we comprehend) does not necessarily aid in our 'meta-comprehension' of the film.

Text © Philip Brophy.