L'Annee Derniere A Marienbad

Alain Resnais - 1961
Let's mention the music before I start; very powerful, I liked it, almost absurd in the organs strength, matching the arch humour throughout the work.
Lights usually come from back and behind, to mention. We have a camera crawling along walls, strokes in both directions, camera stylo writing, also moving up and down. 'Marienbad' as the anatomy of the track (smooth); dissection of role of that move, of a camera, as desire (When the eventual move backwards comes, falls off the wall, we have its reverse, a dissection, the negation of desire; what is that?).
These erotic tracks are not actually too explicit, then huge orgasm on ironic Italian melo burst in, repetition of a track into the feathered arms, one of the most powerful moments I know in the cinema.
Also worth to say that there are quite a few close views- and why not. That is the feeling, it conveys it.
Marienbad won't be reduced, but let me talk of specificity and abstraction. If time doesn't matter, nor does place; says the man, abstraction. Yet also, there is specificity in eroticism, among the interchangeable walls we have the one moment, the walk I made for you through carpets so thick we had silence. This is all in the same way the voice (over)/ poetry (Robbe-Grillet, yet also the words of some kind of characters)/ acting (mannered, singular, general stand-ins) is specific and abstract.
Where to start on the shadows of the garden; not for blocks, but specific humans? Too easy. The location is at once so clear, big blocks referenced in the final words, yet among them I lose you.
For all, in a way this is quite simple; man meets women, she can't remember, montage cuts between then and now, some maybe true, some not, all indeterminate, maybe, or specific in erotic. The only confusion is deliberate, the need, perhaps, for mystification, the way life is clear, clear blocks, but I still can't find you, the mystery of a white wall, a gaudy stucco. One just needs to accept continuous time has collapsed in the montage.
Returning to the key question of specificity; does time matter between moral decisions? Does what is in between matter? If there was a decision now, and then, does time exist between? What is going on in the cut, in impossible spaces where space is clearly 'unreal'? Does this matter, for life?
Is there a lack of politics here? This is a film from a director of the mouvelle vague, in some way; one occassioanlly realises, in the deliberate humour often, this is after all people dressing up. The nouvelle vague was horribly apolitical in many ways; and like them, you have to say Resnais at least centers erotiticism as much, if not more, than engagement (fatalism?). I would call this, if I could name things, a film about eroticism, really. But eroticism and politics are intertwined; the film is about eroticism in a degraded world, how it can only exist as deliberately obscured, confused, not making sense. This is the fetish element, shoes and bondage.
How can the specificity of desire manage in the degraded world of this hotel/ spa? Marienbad, Fredericksbad, twists these confusions, which are necessary. Desire only possible through what looks like heavy formalism; the only way to save it, by intellectualising it?
For all, there are clear politics; the spa (I want!) is clearly the bourgeois/ aristocracy, the fading abstractions of the brutal walls that enclose, only one way, that turn my footsteps to silence in the carpet, yet can be heard in the gravel that may or may not be under your window.
O.K., Resnais is allowed one symbol, and the quite funny game is perfect for capitalism; he can lose, but never does. Is this my favourite symbol in cinema? Clear, beautfiul, beyond simple unpacking.
The greatest film ever? Never a good phrase- it is on that highest plateau, which isn't even a plateau, but the unsayable.... The most erotic film (Dreyer?), moments of losing control, the voiceover in crashes of specificity. The most visually pleasing? Maybe. Perfectly formed location, architecture geometric and mysterirous, tracks around corners. The most intelligent? Visually, in literature, it achieves greatness.