Last Year at Marienbad

2014
Inkjet on watercolour paper
90 x 80 centimeters

I have yet to see this film despite a familiarity stemming from my student years when I was educating myself about the art forms that a visual artist has a natural affinity for, such as cinema. That familiarity came from still images illustrating articles written by film critics who reverently analysed Alain Resnais' famous film, Last Year in Marienbad, describing how it told its story visually. Because those images reproduced so well in print they have stayed with me despite the naysayers who have judged the film as baffling and pretentious.

The most often reproduced images from the film feature the splendid formal gardens with the dramatically topiarised conical shrubbery bordering the broad paths leading to the eponymous hotel where the story of an encounter between a man and a woman takes place. Those outdoor images have a dreamlike timeless quality but in making this interpretation I opted for an interior scene where the woman, who can barely be identified by the shadowy reflection in an ornate gilt mirror, approaches the man whose reaction is ambivalent. I chose this setting because of hotels I have stayed in which inevitably feature the banal geometry of long corridors, here seen framed by the mirror.

Last Year at Marienbad : Roger Ebert
Last Year at Marienbad : Slant Magazine

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