A PROPOS [DE] L'HUMANITE

Regarding Alain Resnais' L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso (1964) revisited in 2003

What world is pictured in Alain Resnais' L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad)? Is it the same world that is pictured more bleakly in Michelangelo Antonioni's Il Deserto Rosso (Red Desert)? These films both emerged from the early 1960s as tentative critiques of a mid-century malaise ... perhaps a spiritual malaise, which renders all the more piquant the flavors of each tale. Insofar as ‘Versailles’* (the implied mise en scène for Last Year?) represents in Romantic terms everything that is wrong with the world in its formulaic (formalistic), constrained, highly-regimented form, and the industrial, watery wasteland of Ravenna represents the crisis in the experience of the world ravaged by technology, one might be forgiven thinking that Resnais and Antonioni are nostalgic for something else ... something nominally 'antediluvian', or perhaps (god forbid) Arcadian. Yet the distressed nature of the female psyche in both cases, both films, registers as an unspent, as-yet-unrelinquished claim on an elemental reality that is masked (made forbidden and formidable) by the banality of the masculine, structured and de-natured world of both the Baroque chateau and the industrial landscape, picturing respectively an image of society as endless, devilish game and progress as psychic denudation and dysfunction -- each a slide towards a complete breakdown of singular things, things that reside in both the interior of the soul and the world as it mirrors that interior ... No Freudian, nor Lacanian analysis could ever undo these Borromean knots ... as this condition is a 'topological' condition ... each negative form (absence, hole, fissure or void) structured by the contortions of positive forms (presence, geometric shell, architectural object) ... things held in tension, and things cantilevered into present-times while suspended in empty 'space' ... anchored in nothingness ...

And if each set of illicit lovers in both films seems to being pressing closer towards one another while drifting sideways past one another, it is the irredeemable nature of intersubjectivity that seems to be at risk in these two worlds gone awry, the critique structured accordingly by each director to index and document a set of conditions that are essentially at war within the modern world and the imperiled individual because each condition produces its opposite, extreme reaction 'topologically'. Modern individuality, a.k.a. Cartesian subjectivity, is the foil against which the onrushing monster must dance ... this foil called as well 'the tain' in the mirror ... the world as mirror-writing ... The Hall of Mirrors (monsters) ... the labyrinth ... again ... ‘Versailles’ or rotting industrial wharves ... the soul distended and warped in this phantasmatic mirror ...

Antonioni seems at once to reach backward by reference to another time while actually reaching inward ... for dreams ... There are shades of Flaubert's Madame Bovary here ... reception and empathy conditioned by dual (dueling) concerns ... though the implied tragedy takes an inconclusive end. The elective liaisons of both films suggest that as the world falls into subjugation, its semi-tragic largesse beckons ominously within things ... looms larger ... and, as the deserted street (Via Alighieri) or the deserted garden (Versailles) grows longer in shadow, deeper in its emptiness, a second shadow-land emerges in the souls of each film's respective victims. This second shadow-land -- also a circular monologue, or a fractured and broken industrial city (a line between self and something else) -- draws with it (within it) the detritus of dashed ideals, perhaps phantasmatic shards of memory never to be reassembled. Antonioni's Red Desert compensates, not unlike the second half of Jean-Luc Godard's Eloge de l'Amour (2001), with garish color and chromatic dissonance, as if this compensation were also toxic. (Was Eloge also an elegy to Antonioni and his first foray into color?) And the hubris of the technological juggernaut is measured both in the small hands of a child and in the grasping, relentless 'scientific-industrial' pursuits of his father ... while the child's mother collapses under the weight of her own dreams set adrift only to admit that her life, indeed, must be seen to include everything that went wrong. The story she tells her son, about a young girl swimming in a remote lagoon, and the arrival of a strange ship followed by a mysterious song and a vision of the rocky crags of the coast as flesh, portends one awakening against a larger awakening to a reality that, in turn, demolishes dreams as landscapes are demolished ... a destroying, insatiable hunger ... and a model world for endless dysfunction ...  The world, then, of Lacanian ‘symptoms’ …

Robbe-Grillet's maddenly manneristic and hollow screenplay for Last Year drives monotonously towards a moment when its language simply collapses ... When the two lovers leave ‘Versailles’ ... slipping away finally (or do they?) ... The grim games of chance that animate the parlor games of the new aristocracy (the high-capitalist bourgeoisie and nouveaux riches versus the ancien régime) signal the random, ineluctable rotation upon a wheel that the world devolves towards deprived of its inwardness and its spontaneous, elective affinities ... And as in Goethe's Elective Affinities, there is an elemental matrix of associative forms, cross-breeding in this film (in Robbe-Grillet's deconstructivist imagination), leading towards catharsis, a falling into the pit of extreme subjectivity, by way of the objective, architectural oppression pre-figured in the assault of the baroque ... the timeless, a-historical baroque-as-mask behind which moves a gnostic demi-urge ... The same baroque that drove, no doubt, Peter Greenaway's obsession, and the baroque that came to expression historically not in religious ecstasy so much as in secularized mise en scène, built propaganda -- or, a machine aesthetic before the advent of the machine age ... Last Year grows slowly, parasitically, over the mind insinuating itself into the pores of its audience until, like a toxin, it produces the effect of shock and revulsion at its very source, that is, subject-object antagonisms and conflicting readings of things and the world. 

Antonioni's own aesthetic reductionism treats the toxins of modern alienation and abjection with a similarly constituted antidote -- the remains of individuality in an oddly collectivized and atomized world (one inducing the other and vice versa) ... such that a way out seems all but impossible and time's arrow (irreversible time, per Guy Debord) seems inescapable as a result, an elective cosmogonic Eros blocked and/or forever misplaced ... The same cosmosgonic Eros that has haunted literature forever, but more plausibly since Huxley and Orwell ... The time of such a vision of horror is the time of High Modernism and its supreme stranglehold on everything and everyone.

The language of cinema since the early 1960s has contained an anti-modernist modernist lament that is symptomatic of the fall of High Modernist rhetoric (not the full-bore denunciation often misascribed to such works), as has architectural criticism contained since Manfredo Tafuri's 1969 essay "Per una critica dell'ideologia architettonic" (expanded in 1973 to Progetto e Utopia, or, in English, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development) a similar questioning of the broken premises of the technological-utopian hubris within modern architectures. Perhaps nowhere else was this hubris most formalized than in the modernist disposition of 'space', a transposed sign of the Universal, emptied of meaning and set free. Hence Tafuri's bemoaning formalisms in general and the vacuum within architecture in particular ... Hence, too, his endless pessimism ... his pro forma anti-ideological ideology ... a negative dialectics ... and a provisional love of the 'useless' ...

Late-modern cinema has gone further in this regard, laying out coordinates for the re-colonization of subjectivity in the face of this vacuous mise en scène within formalized, instrumentalized systems. The struggle to liberate cinema from its subservient role within the modernist machine has led to the new cinematic languages that came to expression post nouvelle vague French cinema ... privileged in different ways in the West by Bergman, Kieslowski, Tarkovsky, Tati, Roeg, Angelopoulos, Wenders, Kusturica, Greenaway, Jarman, Jarmusch, etc. -- such that a tableau of signifiers formerly suppressed and set nominally 'free' are, in fact, re-deployed in service against the machine and for subjectivity and authenticity. It is the redefinition of authenticity (of what constitutes authentic experience) that works within parallel literary and artistic genres, perhaps nowhere more trenchantly than in criticism itself (something that has always to a degree resided inside the work of art but has in the modern period come free and dissociated itself from the work of art). This critical thing is always a reference back to language ... and language (discourse) is a system residing atop a second language, that is, the source code for intersubjective relations, or, the ur-language in things (Zizek’s hysterical female ‘voice’ of the operatic aria?), such that things and language overlap and engender a de facto critique of systems hand-in-glove. Cinematic languages that rely on mise en scène gesture wildly (and enigmatically) towards this truth, an uncomfortable truth to modernist hegemony wherein language has been stripped of all signifying agencies other than instrumentality and rote symbolic value.

Antonioni and Resnais (as Tarkovsky) do not use symbols so much as complexes ... complex associations that engender the realization that milieux form further milieux (Walter Benjamin's neo-Platonic concept of 'anamnesis' perhaps), and that things and language derive from the same source (immanence) ... and that, in time, inversions lead to inversions ... to topple the truly out-moded ... This realization, while a nominally 'modernist' realization, also prepares in the human soul a site that is antithetical to the plundering forces of materialism and technology. The wasteland in Red Desert is a universal wasteland in that it could be anywhere ... anywhere technology has run amok ... or anywhere the nature of time has been hammered flat and re-fashioned in the image of the technological sublime. Versailles as mise en scène, whether emptied of the totalitarian hubris of the Sun king, or 'Versailles' as the location for the punitive peace, post World War I and/or II (conjuring Aragon's reading of the armistice as a fist within a cloak) ... such things matter little when the agencies that produce such wastelands are abstracted and set free as faux universal set pieces ... relentless and unavoidable ... image of progress and progress as image ...

It is the contradictory nature of cinema to use the image against the image, leading Godard no doubt to present the idea of the death of images ... the idea of the depletion of images ... as he did with his King Lear (1987) by way of the image of the space of cinema reduced to a bare light bulb in a cardboard box ... or as he did with JLG/JLG: Autoportrait de décembre (1995), a self-portrait concluding with the arrival of a blind film editor. Milan Kundera's warning regarding 'imagology' (in the novel Immortality) is the formalization of the pernicious capitalist use of images to substitute for reality ... when images are, in fact, intimately related to the production of reality ... if/when fully radicalized (that is, when they go to the 'root' of things) ... And Walter Benjamin's warning that immediate reality is an "orchid" in the land of technology has more profound implications today with the arrival of cyberspace (and dematerialized capital) than it did in his own day when cinema was first gaining ground.

In-between 1963 and 2003 the cinematic image has indeed died a thousand and one deaths ... It is only now, however, that it is about to be embalmed and preserved forever as a vast contiguous lie ... laided out in its mausoleum ... It is this moment, then, now, that requires the most aggressive instances of retrieving images from the technocratic, nihilistic machine that has not only stolen language, through rendering it meaningless (by rendering language propaganda, 'intelligence', and info-tainment), but also reduced the power of dreams to fantasy (by rendering them, en masse, nightmares) ... 

GK (DRAFT 09/09/03)

*The location/castle where the film Last Year takes place (was filmed) is not Versailles, per se, but a combination of Schleissheim and Nymphenburg.