Endless Corridors. The Paradoxes of Architecture in „Last Year in Marienbad” by Alain Resnais
Paulina Kwiatkowska
pd.kwiatkowska@uw.edu.plUniversity of Warsaw (Poland)
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0884-8626
Abstract
As it has been underlined in numerous analyses, complex spaces of palaces and parks, which are the setting of Last Year in Marienbad, play the role of a significant background and sophisticated scenography; they become a vital theme of the film, suggest important interpretations and are decisive for the unobvious psychological makeup of the main characters. A more detailed analysis of Resnais’s film allows to indicate the key paradoxes governing both architectural and narrative structures, as well as their mutual interrelations. The space created in the film is at the same time continuous and interrupted, closed and open, finite and infinite, dynamic and static, flat and powerfully accentuating the illusion of perspective and depth. These paradoxes are also characteristic of Baroque art, and the fact that Resnais’s film was shot in such spaces allows to perceive it as a theoretical utterance, concerning also the relations between cinema and architecture. Last Year in Marienbad treats these two branches of art not so much as opposing, but rather complementary, facing similar desires and limitations.
Keywords:
Alain Resnais, French cinema, French new wave, architecture, filmic space, film narrative, labyrinthReferences
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Authors
Paulina Kwiatkowskapd.kwiatkowska@uw.edu.pl
University of Warsaw Poland
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0884-8626
Assistant Professor at the Institute of Polish Culture at the University of Warsaw, where she heads the Section for Film and Visual Culture; editor-in-chief of Pleograf. Kwartalnik Akademii Polskiego Filmu (www.pleograf.pl). She specializes in film theory and history. In 2011 she published Somatografia. Ciało w obrazie filmowym [Somatography. Body in the Film Image] (Russian translation in 2014). She also co-edited the monographs: Nie chcę spać sam. Kino Tsai Ming-Lianga [I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone. Cinema of Tsai Ming-Liang] (2009), Spojrzenie Antonioniego [Antonioni’s Gaze] (2015), Sztuka w kinie dokumentalnym [Art in Documentary Film] (2016), Kultura wizualna w Polsce. Fragmenty [Visual Culture in Poland: Extracts] (2017), Kultura wizualna w Polsce. Spojrzenia [Visual Culture in Poland: Glances] (2017) and Nowa kinofilia. Przestrzenie i afekty [New Cinephilia: Spaces and Affects] (2018). She was a research fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation for Arts and Humanities (2016) and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (2018).
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