Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist
Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities
It was as useless as a memory; it was as off kilter and hollow and wretched as a memory.
Annie Dillard – The Abundance
Personal emotions and memories merge with the momentous events of the era and history is refracted, as though in a prism, through the images stirred in her mind by a sudden thought of the past
Max Hayward on Anna Akhmatova
Last Year at Marienbad exposes the disorienting symmetries and asymmetries of memory and nostalgia, and how the ambivalences they engender can manifest and transform the very space around us. The psychosomatic riddle of our past selves becomes a spatial, geographic riddle writ large. In this respect the ambiguities of memory become the ambiguities of space and place.
As we try to locate a stable locus within the mist of our past reflections, so too do we grasp in vain to locate stable signifiers in our environment. And when we consider what the forms around us signify we never perceive them as merely what they are. We infuse them with the self-referential, so that mundane objects become signifiers for our psychotraumas and emotional puzzles. In this way the deceptions of memory become the deceptions reflected within our surroundings.
Two lines from the Russian poet Anna Akhmatova are instructive, and illuminate some of the currents explored in the film:
Or is that ghost myself / Returned to my old haunt / And this a new edition of my buried life?
Last Year at Marienbad is about an encounter with ourselves, refracted through the prism of the past. We are constantly populating our lives with the detritus and ephemera of our past lives and identities and in that sense our future only contains a ghost mired in what has already come before. Is this a new edition of my buried life? – it begs the question: am I merely repeating what has already occured ad infinitum, with minor variations? Am I a ghost inhabiting a day without end?
I have enough treasures from the past to last me longer than I need or want / You know as well as I…malevolent memory won’t let go of half of them
Memory is malevolent, even when it concerns the remembrance of the treasures of our past and the trophies of our histories. Memory ensures that we bear witness to what we once had, and what we can have no longer. Even when the material of the past is reanimated, it lacks the patina of the original, offering us merely a tarnished iteration.
Last Year at Marienbad is about the vise of memory, about the presence of the past in our encounters with space, time, and form. Nostalgic ruminations taint our spatial and psychosomatic perceptions, and ultimately, our perception of our very selves.
