The discreet obscurity of Alain Resnais

I.

Are there significant disadvantages to your present fame?

    Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, double obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name.

—Vladimir Nabokov, in an interview with Herbert Gold and George Plimpton, The Paris Review, October 1967, reprinted in Strong Opinions, McGraw-Hill, 1973

Was that true at the time? Novelistically speaking, Nabokov was between Pale Fire and Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle, the latter of which would earn him a 1969 Time magazine cover with the line "The Novel Is Alive And Well And Living On Antiterra." Lolita, at least as a concept if not a novel, was still famous. And what about now? You and I might not think so, but I think it's close to being true. it's on its way to being true. One way that it's going to get to be true is via what cannot be called a systematic dismantling of Nabokov's reputation, because to call it a systematic dismantling of Nabokov's reputation is a little bit conspiracy-theory minded. But on the other hand, the notion of an actual zeitgeist is not tinfoil-hat based. Although it might be considered a bit of a stretch for me to base a zeitgeist prediction on literally a snippet of actual evidence, I'm gonna do it anyway, because that really is how such things start: with an offhand, brief dismissal from a modish critic who's thought by his/her editors and at least a certain portion of his/her readership to represent an exhilarating new perspective on that thing we call, in this case, literature. The piece is "A View From The Margins," which was published in the New York Times Magazine late last year, and which reprinted a bunch of scribblings that critic Sam Anderson had made in books he had read over 2011. In June he looked into Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense, written in the late 1920s and published in English translation in 1964, near the height of the author's fame or whatever it was. The translation was prefaced, as all of his translations of that time were, with a short essay on the work by Nabokov, in which he never failed to include a swipe at Freud (got kind of tedious after a while, I gotta say) and in which he generally took a kind of pomp-ironical perspective on his own status as a literary grandmaster while at the same time taking that status very seriously indeed. 

Thus, in this particular preface, describing the process by which he wrote the book, he cuts off some recollections of butterfly-hunting landscapes, like so: "Some curious additional information might be given if I took myself more seriously." Anderson has underlined this sentence, and in the margin written, "Oh please sometimes I hate Nabok."

And it is of course the "Oh please" that will be the predominant attitude in the coming debunking of Nabokov. Unable to best a particularly obdurate mandarin in the field of erudition or ability, the default reaction will be the eyeroll, followed by the shrugging dismissal. Never mind "What is the guy trying to say?" From hereon in the questions are "Who the hell does this guy think he is?" and "What has he done for me lately." And the answers will be "A doubly obscure novelist with an unpronounceable name" and "Wrote a pervy book about a child molester." And Sam Anderson won't have to "hate Nabok" anymore. (I know that Anderson tells a different story in the audio snippet that accompanies the multi-media presentation of the piece that I've linked to. I don't buy it.)

II.

For a guy who's been unfairly made a poster boy for art-cinema self-seriousness on and off for almost fifty years now, Alain Resnais is a pretty cheery fellow. The photos of him shooting, and attending screenings of, his 2009 film Wild Grass show him to be not merely spry but practically jaunty for a near-90-year-old, which he was at the time. (He turned 90 this past June.) The English-language Wikipedia entry on the man has a quote from him that I like, which is, "I hope that I always remain faithful to André Breton who refused to suppose that imaginary life was not part of real life." 

This sentiment is not only attractive in itself, but also as a way into his films. Pauline Kael rather famously grouped the 1961 Last Year At Marienbad, which Resnais made in close collaboration with the the then-almost-notorious novelist and theorist Alain Robbe-Grillet, in her "Come Dressed As The Sick Soul Of Europe Parties" collection of films (along with La Dolce Vita and La Notte), as if the film were really attempting to Say Something Profound about contemporary malaise. Her reading has persisted; a few years ago when the movie, finally, came out in an excellent DVD edition, one critic (if I recall correctly) wondered why the movie hadn't been subjected to a Simpsons parody, given its status as a cultural touchstone versus what was perceived as its risible stiltedness. 

What occured to me at the time, and what I failed to articulate in a very constructive way, is (and this is not exactly an original thought, but it's also not a popular one) that Marienbad was already a parody, albeit not a parody of anything that's immediately recognizable to a North American audience. That for all its possibly lachrymose melodramatic posturing there's a vein of playfulness running through the thing, which I've discussed in other blog posts: a cameo from a cardboard cutout of Alfred Hitchcock, a pastiche of postures from Charles Vidor's Gilda in which Marienbad actors Sacha Piteoff and Delphine Seyrig act out in manners similar to George MacCready and Rita Hayworth (which puts persistent suitor Giorgio Albertazzi into the Glenn Ford role). And all of this is secondary or even tertiary to the fact that this is not a lament for the Sick Soul Of Europe in the least but rather something like a science-fiction film in which cinematic conventions and modes of manipulation are used to fold time. Which is kind of neat. But difficult to see if all you can look at are the tuxedoes and the scowling faces and all you can hear is lugubrious organ music. That's all Kael could do. The author of Deeper Into Movies was incapable of looking at Marienbad that didn't hew to her verdict of "empty." Years later, reviewing the droll, ironical, and poignant Providence, Kael persisted: "Resnais's movies come out of an intolerable mixture of technique and culture."

Take out the "intolerable" and she might be on to something. Because, let's face it: Both technique and culture figure strongly in Resnais's films. So let me put this out there: the extent to which you might feel that he's able or unable to imbue his work with that ultimate intangible Kael refers to as "feeling" might depend on how much, or in which way, you respond, or are able to respond, to the culture that informs his films. 

While not necessarily "sick-souled" the milieu of the movie is certainly European or at the very least Euro-centric; I don't know of any convention in North American vacation culture that's quite so, um, formal. the European context renders certain other Resnais pictures more obscure to United States viewers than others. The original French title of the 1997 Resnais movie released here as Same Old Song is On connaît le chanson, which translates as "You know the song;" and indeed, in France viewers likely did know the French pop songs that its characters spontaneously broke into lip=synching, as the originals played on the soundtrack. Here in the U.S., we could get off on the playful movie karaoke but didn't necessarily get the same cognitive rush we might have had the song been, say, "Free Fallin'."

The examples could go on and on. With Resnais films, and with films not by Resnais. Your appreciation of Muriel might well be enhanced by some basic knowledge of the French war in Algeria. That weird prologue to Stavisky with Trotsky might be enhanced by knowing who Trotsky was, and maybe a little more than that. Taking note of the fact that the road signs in the long highway scene in Tarkovsky's Solaris are in Japanese and not Russian might help make the sequence more "interesting," or less "boring." A cursory knowledge of the so-called "Doctors' Plot" in the Stalin regime may not help you all that much with Alexei German's Khrustalyov, My Car!, I'm afraid. But it could. 

Which brings us to Resnais's new film, You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet, which comes up in an essay by Jason Bailey on The Atlantic website entitled "Film Culture Isn't Dead, It's Just More Fun." I met Jason under rather unusual circumstances recently; he was sitting directly to my right, unbenownst to me, as I bitched to Farran Smith Nehme about his piece on Paul Thomas Anderson. The initial mortification that followed his introduction was followed by a constructive conversation, and I don't want to spoil our collegial relations so soon after they've been established. But I don't believe what I'm about to point out will, or should. I'm not going to talk about the thesis, or theses of the piece, which I address, in sometimes oblique and sometimes direct ways in, I think, every post I write on this blog. Anyway, here he is on the Resnais: "Maybe it's blasphemy to give up on a Resnais, but I'll own it: I couldn't find a way into the film, so I looked for a way out of the theater. It's handsomely staged and marvelously cast, but the picture is so frightfully dull that I couldn't lock in on it. He's so busy constructing magical realism and frames within frames that he doesn't accomplish the simpler task of engrossing his audience."

Let's begin with the straw man, which is "maybe it's blasphemy to give up on Resnais." All I can do, whenever someone makes an assertion like that, or like, "pushy film snobs have forced me to see The Master more times than I wanted to" or any such thing, is ask, "Who?" Who are you talking about? Who uses words like "blasphemy" when characterizing your negative reaction to a Resnais film? I love Resnais's work, practically revere it, but if someone doesn't like it or doesn't want to know from it, that's his or her business. On the other hand, when someone disparages it on grounds that I find on examination to be untenable, then I'll debate the point. And even when I disagree, it's never gonna come down to "you better like this, or else you're  philistine who can't be taken seriously." I offer as Exhibit A a passage from one of my favorite writers, Georges Perec, from his novel Things: A Story Of The Sixties: "They were highly suspicious of so-called art movies, with the result that when this term was not enough to spoil a film for them, they would find it even more beautiful (but they would say - quite rightly - that Marienbad was 'all the same just a load of crap!')" Find me one writer who does this on a regular basis. One. (No, not Wells.) The reason this straw man is so irritating is that it gives the writer the opportunity to adopt the pose of the oppressed: "Oh, these film snobs, it's not enough that they like the most impenetrable crap, they want US to like it too." It's no wonder guys like me get paranoid enough to believe that the agenda's being reset to squeeze the challenging stuff out. 

It's fine for Bailey to admit that he couldn't "find a way into the film." But the way he lays all the blame for that on Resnais is flimsy, evanescent. He accuses the filmmaker of being preoccupied with "magical realism" and failing to "engross the audience." Well what does he have to do to engross an audience? It may well be that a French audience finds the cast sufficiently engrossing, as it's packed with some of the best, and most prominent, performers French theater and film has to offer. And it may well be that a French audience, one with a decent liberal arts education, may well be at least intrigued if not engrossed by Resnais's "mashup" of two plays by Jean Anouilh, who is to French theater what, say, Edward Albee is to American theater. Now granted, a cinematic mashup of Virginia Woolf and The Goat would not likely be a box-office bonanza here, but it would not be something that either Jason or I might consider entirely hermetic, particularly were it to be directed by, say, Mike Nichols. An American director who, like Richard Lester, knows from Resnais. 

Again: I'm not saying it's not all right to not like You Ain't Seen Nothin' Yet. I myself was rather surprised to see it got U.S. distribution of any kind, given that its elements of cultural specificity make it a challenging sell. What I'm saying is that as critics we have to take some responsibility for our own ability, or lack thereof, to see as fully as possible what a picture is up to before we put the assessment pedal down. 

The punchline to this will be that Bailey did his master's thesis on Anouilh.

But seriously: in complaining about a supposition that "truly  great cinema must be met (at least) halfway," can one not detect a whiff of chauvinism? If going halfway or further is now unacceptable, do we just throw away works that are "too" French, for instance? This goes deeper than taste, you know. And "taste" is just a function of vanity anyway. Just ask Pascal. Another French dude. 

Comments

[Steve]

I find it ironic that he praises LIFE OF PI (which I haven't seen) for "crackerjack filmmaking" yet denigrates LEVIATHAN, which gave me more sensual pleasure than any new film I've seen so far this year, as a glorified home movie. Something gives me the feeling he'd write off Stan Brakhage's SCENES FROM UNDER CHILDHOOD alongside Resnais.

[iamthelman]

feel like the posts have been especially strong lately, keep up the good work

[Joel Bocko]

Great piece. I'm kind of amazed that people can find Last Year in Marienbad self-serious, when the thing seems so undeniably and irresistably arch. As for "boring" - Resnais is absolutely hypnotic; I recall seeing clips of the long tracking shots looking up a the ceiling of the chateau and being so yanked in, viscerally, that I just had to see the entire film soon after.

Also - re: ""Film Culture Isn't Dead, It's Just More Fun" - really? And not just the title (which I'll deal with in a moment). I find it kind of fascinating how the floodgates have really opened on "Is Cinema Dead? No, It Isn't. Yes It Is!" this season. Not that there haven't always been essays like this, but man have they never poured out in this volume (we've already reached the point, and only in a matter of weeks, where the titles of various essays are referring to other critics' titles as well). Hell, I contributed an entry on this venerable subject myself recently (specifically in response to David Denby's piece, which I loved), and I know another blogger who's got one on the way in a week.

I don't find it surprising so much that the subject is on everyone's lips, as that it's SUDDENLY on everyone's lips; it seems to me American cinema at least has been undergoing a crisis for at least close to a decade but right at this moment everyone seems to want to talk about it. I wonder why, and where it will lead.

Anyway, as far as Bailey's essay title (the essay itself I'll promptly read) and your selected quote - agreed, one of the things that drives me batty about the counter-crisis arguers is their tendency to construct these straw-man cinephiles. Like the Badass Film Digest review you linked to (or linked to a link to) recently, which kind of painted an absurd (to my eyes) picture of Red America/Blue America film culture. I'm as annoyed by stiff film-studies milieus as the next guy, but to throw out a fondness for classic or art films as "pretentious" or "snobby" or whatnot is not just to reject those areas of moviedom, it's to reject movideom altogether, since the richest cinephilia has always consisted of embracing a broad range of both mainstream genre films and obscure art films, and a lot of stuff which doesn't fit into either of those two categories. In that regard, it's remarkably unlike the music scene - which I've always found (even in my brief period as a music enthusiast) rather offputting in its niches, dichotomies, and kill-your-idols obsession (I once compared music vs. movies to Oedipus vs. Hamlet; one actively seeks to destroy the past, and yes I know that Oedipus doesn't KNOW he's killing his father but we'll have to overlook that for a moment for the metaphor to work - while the other values the past and seeks to destroy the present pretender; I think that sums up the way cinephiles and rebellious filmmakers approach the traditions and contemporary practices of their medium).

Lately, though, I've been noticing trends towards movie buffs actively hating on classics or art films with a kind of proud, chip-on-their-shoulder "look-Ma-I'm-so-rebellious" attitude that just makes me depressed. At least since the New Wave, reverance for the past has been one of the traits that marked revolutions in the medium. Lose that and I think, rather than move forward on the road to the future, movies and the people who love them will become stuck in a rut, spinning their wheels, and congratulating themselves for taking their own course.

[David Ehrenstein]

Thanks for this very welcome defense of Resnais. While Night and Fog, Hiroshima Mon Amour and Last Year at Marienbad have remained his most "famous" films, my particular faves are Providence, Muriel, Stavisky, Je t'aime Je t'aime and Not on the Lips. He's a far lighter and more playful filmmaker than his enemies can possibly grasp, muc less give him credit for.

Back in the late 60s'/ early 70's when I was still based in New York I used to run into him all the time -- once quite memorably at the first public screeing of Kazan's The Arrangement. "Shall we go?" said his companion Florence Malraux when the end credits ran. "No," said Resnais. "We are going to stay and see it again!"
This was the period when Resnias became a Sondheim obsessive, seeing "Company" and "Follies" many many times. As a result Strich got the role of a lifetime in Providence and Sondheim wrote the great score to Stavisky.

Lately he's been using composer "Mark Snow" who back when he was known as Marty Fulterman was a classmate of mine at Communist Martyrs High (aka. The High School of Music and Art)

Lambert Wilson, who freqently visits L.A., tells me that Resnais has all sorts of physical difficulties. But his spirits are high and he is preparing his next film even as I post.

[Griff]

You've got it: when someone has the apparent integrity to write "I'll own it: I couldn't find a way into the film..." there's a good place to stop. But Bailey trudges on, refusing to 'own' it.

[A different Brian]

How can the swipes at Freud grow tiresome? In the intro of maybe 6 books and a handful of interviews? Maybe 500 words against without a doubt the most influential and important fraud of the 20th century? And N. was completely right!

[A different Brian]

Sorry to harp (and hijack), but Nabokov's reputation isn’t going anywhere new. This crap has been put forward by poshlusty dimwits since 1926 (Sirin is cold-hearted, unserious player of silly games, etc.), for heaven’s sake (and is more or less Edmund White's problem, as well). It’s not a new development, but a change of tide between the fortunes of the self-serious Dostoyevsky-lovers and those who believe that the only really serious thing about literature is its formal invention and uncanny beauty. Nabokov already decisively answered these rubes in chapter 4 of The Gift (or Dar, as Glenn prefers!).

[David Ehrenstein]

My favorite Nabokov is Pale Fire which like Altman's O.C. & Stiggs manages to be homoerotic and homophobic at the same time.

It would be nice f someone made a film of it -- but Raul Ruiz is dead.

[A different Brian]

David Ehrenstein: hear hear!

[Rand Careaga]

Over forty years ago I was first exposed to Nabokov at an impressionable age (nineteen, in Berkeley, via a remaindered copy of Ada--the UK edition with the proper flap copy) and fell in love. I gobbled up the remainder of the available oeuvre by the end of 1972, and have revisited most of them since. His influence on my own prose style was regrettable, and I still have pages and pages of cringeworthy stuff from that period buried in a filing cabinet somewhere...

Anyway, Nabokov's critics today aren't saying anything he didn't anticipate long ago. From "Spring in Fialta" (1936) the narrator describes a "Franco-Hungarian writer" of whom he disapproves:

****

I had known his books before I knew him; a faint disgust was already replacing the aesthetic pleasure which I had suffered his first novel to give me. At the beginning of his career, it had been possible perhaps to distinguish some human landscape, some old garden, some dream-familiar disposition of trees through the stained glass of his prodigious prose…but with every new book the tints grew still more dense, the gules and purpure still more ominous; and today one can no longer see anything at all through that blazoned, ghastly rich glass, and it seems that were one to break it, nothing but a perfectly black void would face one’s shivering soul. But how dangerous he was in his prime, what venom he squirted, with what whips he lashed when provoked! The tornado of his passing satire left a barren waste where felled oaks lay in a row, and the dust still twisted, and the unfortunate author of some adverse review, howling with pain, spun like a top in the dust.

****

Incidentally, read the opening lines of "Spring in Fialta" and tell me that they weren't echoing at least subliminally in young John Updike's mind when he sat down to compose "Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu" in 1960.

[Peter Labuza]

Great piece, Glenn. I hate this idea that "this movie doesn't present itself easily to me what to do ho hum." I knew some of the actors from seeing other French movies and they were playing themselves, but I didn't know who Jean Anouilh was or that he had written an adaptation of the Orpheus myth until I began reading the press notes later. But that didn't stop me from loving the hell out of this film by watching how it created a world of magical realism and the conversation in sparked between the old and the young.

If there isn't an easy entry point into the film, YOUR JOB IS TO FIND ONE. I did that with "Khrustolyov," a film so Russian it might as well not even bother with subtitles (hell, I used to have a job where I watched foreign films without subtitles - the very good ones didn't need them). But I immediately engaged with its almost Looney Tunes-style humor, and loved getting lost in its absurdest world.

This goes the same with issues when people talk about "the film didn't do what I wanted it to do." Well what is it doing and why? How about thinking for five minutes? A lot of critics out there love to just throw their hands up and give up when they might actually have to use their brain. You don't have to like it still, but how about engaging with the text? That's what I did with "Holy Motors," a film I didn't like, but I worked really hard to investigate all of its pieces and consider why they were on screen. Grow up and do your job.

[kdlough]

I wouldn't mind at all if the dominant meme about Alain Resnais swung from "dour and obscure" to the much more accurate "formally playful." Mon oncle d'Amérique, with its giant mouse costumes and documentary segments, probably better reflects Resnais's overall sensibility than Last Year..., although I don't hear it talked about anywhere near as much.

[David Ehrenstein]

And it should be.

At length.

[haice]

How radically different would Resnais' filmography be if he had been able to film the adventures of Harry Dickson?
Would a future critic be saved from blasphemy or forever doomed to spend an eternal night on Muriel's couch?

[nrh]

And Smoking/Non-Smoking isn't available either, still my favorite Resnais...

[David Ehrenstein]

The script of "Les Adventures de Harry Dickson" was published in French several years back, illustrated with photos Resnais took in preparation for shooting. He wanted Dirk Bogarde and Delphine Seyrig to star and he wanted to make it in 70mm.

But he's not a "visionary" like Paul Thomas Pipsqueak so he didn't get the chance. It would have been beautiful -- like Feuillade with sound.

[Gordon Cameron]

>His influence on my own prose style was regrettable, and I still have pages and pages of cringeworthy stuff from that period buried in a filing cabinet somewhere...

Yeah, Nabokov is one of those 'don't try this at home, kids' writers. He's one of the few writers whose prose can practically make me swoon, though.

[Brian Dauth]

From "Ada":

"That was love, normal and mysterious. Less mysterious and considerably more grotesque were the passions which several generations of schoolmasters had failed to eradicate, and which as late as 1883 still enjoyed an unparalleled vogue at Riverlane. Every dormitory had its catamite. One hysterical lad from Upsala, cross-eyed, loose-lipped, with almost abnormally awkward limbs, but with a wonderfully tender skin texture and the round creamy charms of Bronzino’s Cupid (the big one,whom a delighted satyr discovers in a lady’s bower), was much prized and tortured by a group of foreign boys, mostly Greek and English, led by Cheshire, the rugby ace; and partly out of bravado, partly out of curiosity, Van surmounted his disgust and coldly watched their rough orgies. Soon, however, he abandoned this surrogate for a more natural though equally heartless divertissement."

Brian Boyd and others have argued that "Ada" seems to be the novel where Nabokov most fully tries to come to terms with regard to his brother Sergei through the character of Lucette. I would have to read "Ada" again to see if it were true, but I was always struck by both the work's homophobia and their need to have queer characters in them. It was only much later when I learned that VN had a queer brother who died in a Nazi camp that things made more sense retrosepctively.

[David Ehrenstein]

Here's more about the Nabokov brothers

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2000/may/21/books.booksnew

No real way to get to the bottom of this now.

I've always felt VN's antipathy to Thomas Mann stemmed from homophobia and the deadly fear that "Lolita" would be compared to "Death in Venice."

Nothing gay in Resnais -- save the bartender character in "Coeurs," and the lovely Lambert Wilson.