I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  The symbol of the end of the world and the failure of human relations is a big dull party in both La Notte and La Dolce Vita. But I don’t understand how these film artists can think they are analyzing or demonstrating their own — that is to say, our own, emptiness by showing the rich failing to enjoy a big party. Whose experience are they expressing — or is the party just an easy photogenic symbol of modern life that is being loaded with meanings it can’t carry?

  I suspect many Americans are attracted by this view of fabulous parties, jaded people, baroque palaces; to an American who works damned hard, old-world decadence doesn’t look so bad — all those desperately unhappy beautiful people, surrounded by champagne, lobster, dance orchestras, and a wide selection of gorgeously dressed sex partners to be had for the lifting of an eyebrow. Forgive me if I sound plaintive: I’ve never been to one of these dreadfully decadent big parties (the people I know are more likely to give bring-your-own-bottle parties). And isn’t it likely that these directors, disgusted though they may be, also love the spectacle of wealth and idleness, or why do they concentrate on these so empty and desiccated rich types? If the malaise is general, why single out the rich for condemnation? If the malaise affects only the rich, is it so very important? As usual, there is a false note in the moralist’s voice.

  These movies are said to be “true” and “important” because this kind of high life has been observed (gossip columnists assure us that they have been eyewitnesses); do the people who read the gossip columns get so much vicarious pleasure that they think they’re living it? Here we are in an age of increasing mechanization and dehumanization — with the trends horribly the same under both capitalism or socialism, with no relief in sight, and people go to Fellini’s and Antonioni’s Marxist-Catholic-Hollywood glamour parades and come away carrying the banner that fornication is the evil of our times! And whom do these directors pick to symbolize the victims of materialism: the artists — just the ones who escape into freedom. I’ll admit that I once knew an apparently bored artist, a famous composer, born wealthy, who said to me, “The days are always two hours too long for me.” I wanted to hit him with a poker because the days are always too short for me and I am always trying to prolong them by staying up half the night. But I decided that he was using his boredom as a come-on — a lure so that people would want to fascinate him, to awaken him from his sleeping beauty trance.

  The term “sleeping beauty” provides, I think, a fairly good transition to Last Year at Marienbad — or Sleeping Beauty of the International Set, the high-fashion experimental film, the snow job in the ice palace. Here we are, back at the no-fun party with non-people, in what is described to us as an “enormous, luxurious, baroque, lugubrious hotel — where corridors succeed endless corridors.” I can scarcely quote even that much of the thick malted prose without wanting to interject — “Oh, come off it.” The mood is set by climaxes of organ music and this distended narration; it’s all solemn and expectant — like High Mass. But then you hear the heroine’s thin little voice, and the reiterated questions and answers, and you feel you shouldn’t giggle at High Mass, even if it’s turning into a game of Idiot’s Delight. Surely conversation about whether people met before at Frederiksbad or Marienbad or Baden-Salsa can only be a parody of wealthy indolence — but is the film supposed to be comic? Probably not, but it’s always on the edge — so the effect is ludicrous. The settings and costumes seem to be waiting for a high romantic theme or a fantasy; the people, pawns who are manipulated into shifting positions, seem to be placed for wit, or for irony. But all we get are games, and tricks that look like parodies of old movies and decorators’ versions of film art. Once again the sick souls are damned well dressed — from the look of all these movies, you might begin to suspect that soul-sickness is a product of the couturier.

  The author Robbe-Grillet says: “This movie is no more than the story of a persuasion, and one must remember that the man is not telling the truth. The couple did not meet the year before.” The director Resnais says: “I could never have shot this film if I had not been convinced that their meeting had actually taken place.” But who cares if they met before and who cares what happens to them? Enthusiasts for the film start arguing about whether something happened last year at Marienbad, and this becomes rather more important than what happens on the screen in front of them — which isn’t much. The people we see have no warmth, no humor or pain, no backgrounds or past, no point of contact with living creatures, so who cares about their past or future, or their present? Does it matter if it’s a chess game or a recurring dream game? Resnais dissolves time all right — by destroying any sense of relationship to events or characters. He says he has cut out the “explanatory scenes” and the dialogue whose sole purpose is “to keep the action going” — I think this is exactly what he is giving us: all the mechanics of drama without any drama. We know nothing about these people except that they move up and down corridors, open and close doors, change clothes, so it seems a mere idle game, as idle as the match game the men play, to speculate about what has happened or is going to happen to them. (About the only question I came out asking was: how many changes of costume did the girl actually have?) It is one thing to cut out the unnecessary mechanical transitions of film (as Godard did in Breathless), but Resnais cuts away something that is basic to drama — our caring about the characters and what they are doing. (I don’t mean this in the naive sense that we must like the characters; there are many ways of caring.)

  Resnais: “Perhaps it may seem pointless to some people to train a camera on the inner minds of the characters rather than on their external behavior, but it is fascinating once in a while.” But that is exactly what we get — their external behavior; we get no sense of what he calls their “inner minds” at all. (I wonder what he thinks their outer minds are like.) He says that in order to “bring the art of film-making to this abstract plane,” he “has eliminated the ‘non-essentials’ — plot, action and rational explanations. . . . My films are an attempt, still very crude and tentative, to visualize the complexity of the mechanism of thought.” But without those “non-essentials” of plot and action and rational explanations we are left with figures going through unmotivated movements. If changing clothes and going in to dinner is all that is in their heads, he doesn’t have much to visualize. And if the crisis of all this thought is whether to change partners, going from one dummy to another, how are we to find the girl’s vacillations and visions anything but faintly comic? If she sees herself as a femme fatale in feathers, posturing like an early movie siren — Evelyn Brent or Marlene Dietrich in a Von Sternberg setting — if this is all that is in her head, then hasn’t Resnais selected a singularly vacuous specimen of woman, and of man, to suggest the complexity of the mechanism of thought? (The international playgirl figure in La Notte, Monica Vitti, can be seen, rather like Delphine Seyrig, as a parody derived from Hollywood’s glamour periods, but is the parody intentional in her case either?)

  I don’t know the source of this notion that film making should be brought to an “abstract plane” (is this plane, by some analogy with mathematics, supposed to be higher than the level on which directors like D. W. Griffith and Jean Renoir have worked?) and I don’t know what battles will be fought on that plane stripped of plot and action and rational explanations, but there seem to be a few skeletons from old movies lying about. The characters of Marienbad, it is indicated, do what they must do: it’s all supposed to be preordained, simple and irrevocable, in a world without choice or responsibility. And in this not so very intellectually-respectable aspect Marienbad is a “classier” version of those forties you-can-call-it-supernatural-if-you-want-to movies like Flesh and Fantasy — only now it’s called “Jungian.”

  Resnais: “Make of it what you will . . . whatever you decide is right.” This is like making a mess and asking others to clean it up; it’s also a cheap way of inviting audiences and critics to make fools of themselves. And they do: they come up with “solutions” like �
��Marienbad is supposed to be interpreted like a Rorschach test — you are supposed to give it whatever meanings you wish.” But, but — a Rorschach test is a blot, an accident onto which you project your own problems and visions; it is the opposite of a work of art, which brings the artist’s vision to you. And Marienbad, though it’s silly, albeit at times amusing and pretty, is in no way an accidental blot. And whatever is there to decide about? A riddle that has no answer may seem deep if that’s your turn of mind or it may just seem silly and pointless. Did they meet before or didn’t they? It’s rather like Which Twin Has the Toni. You have to work hard to pretend it’s a complicated metaphysical question. If you compose a riddle and then say all solutions are right, then obviously there is no solution, and the interest must be in the complexity or charm or entertainment of the riddle and the ideas or meanings it suggests to you — in its artfulness. And at this level, Marienbad is a mess — or, rather, it’s a neat mess, and it’s too heavy to be so lightweight.

  No wonder nobody remembers anything — if the days of the intervening year were all alike and all chopped into pieces like this hour and a half. The fragmentation of conventional chronology doesn’t do more, in this case, than break up in bits and then arbitrarily repeat the externals of behavior. (It has, however, the advantage of disguising the banality of the material by making it confusing — and as an extraordinary number of people take confusion for depth, even the embarrassingly paranoid Guns of the Trees may acquire a following now that Jonas Mekas has re-edited — and fragmented — it.)

  Mustn’t the movie be seen — if it is to be enjoyed — as an exercise in decor and romantic mystification? I was intrigued by the palaces and parks and wanted to know where they were, who had built them, and for what purposes (I was interested in the specific material that Resnais was attempting to make unspecific). I enjoyed some of the images: an over-exposed moment when the screen is flooded with light; dancers and game-players who might be evocative of something or other if glimpsed just briefly or in the distance. But when this exercise goes on for an hour and a half, the figures abstracted from all living detail become as tiresome as shadow dancers. Lousy story, but great sets. The trouble with sets like this is, what possible story could be told in them? Robbe-Grillet and Resnais tell the audience to do the artists’ work and inhabit the empty movie with life and meaning. This peculiar presumption, all too common in “avant-garde” film circles, can pass for new and daring and experimental in art houses. And those familiar with “avant-garde” film program notes with their barmy premise that what can’t be seen in the film is what makes the film important, will recognize Robbe-Grillet as the definitive, classical practitioner of the genre.*

  Let’s leave the ice palace and go down to Fellini’s hotel in hell, his gilded apocalypse. If Fellini meant it when he said his aim was “to put a thermometer to a sick world,” his method and subject matter make no sense. It’s a waste of effort to stick a thermometer into a pesthole. It’s like poking your head into a sack of fertilizer and then becoming indignant because you’re covered with excrement. The aim, the scale, the pretensions, the message are too big for the subject matter: tabloid sensationalism and upper-class apathy and corruption. Fellini is shocked and horrified — like the indignant housewives who can’t get enough details on Elizabeth Taylor’s newest outrage, and think she should be banned from the screen. I don’t think he’s simply exploiting the incidents and crimes and orgies of modern Rome in the manner of a Hollywood biblical spectacle, but La Dolce Vita is a sort of a Ben Hur for the more, but not very much more, sophisticated. And in attempting a modern parallel with the revelations of the apocalypse, he’s very close to the preachers who describe the orgies of high life and the punishments of eternal hell fire.

  It doesn’t make very much difference in the world if people who have a lot of money or people who want publicity are bored or drunk or autoerotic or queer. They may be disgusting (and they may also be highly entertaining) but they don’t do much harm, and their casual promiscuity which doesn’t hurt anyone except possibly themselves is not so shocking or immoral as, for example, the cruelties that can be found at any social level — like the way middle-class and laboring people can feel virtuous and righteous while taking out their frustrations on their children. Is Fellini really so appalled by the rich girl and the hero making love in the prostitute’s room, by the transvestites, by the striptease which gives the woman gratification? Is he at heart a country boy who can never take for granted the customs and follies of the big city? Perhaps, and perhaps also a showman who knows that these episodes will be juicy fodder for the mass audience — middle-class and working people always hungry to learn the worst about the terrible dirty rich.

  The movie is so moral in its emphasis that all vice (all non-innocent fun?) seems to be punished by boredom and defeat. But why are people looking so eagerly at the movie, hoping for ever more horrifying views of that unrestrained high life? The sweet, soft life is just what hardworking, moralistic people envy; maybe they don’t think it’s so dull and awful as Fellini tells them it is. And Fellini presents more and more and more of it — until the audience is more tired than the characters at the all-night parties. (Perhaps you don’t decide it’s dull until after you’ve had a lot of it? Morality becomes a function of exhaustion.) Surely to audiences the drinking and bodies and striptease parties are more interesting than the message of condemnation, which is like a moral consolation prize for the opportunities they don’t have. He uses the swarming photographers as a chorus of Furies, a remarkable piece of sophomoric self-indulgence: they are as eager as he to “expose” vice, i.e. — to catch the rich in the act. (Perhaps the artists who capture the popular imagination are those who retain the fervor and grandiloquence of a high-school orator: people all over the world were moved by the spiritual message of La Strada that everyone has a purpose in the universe.)

  La Dolce Vita wants to be a great film — it cries out its intentions — and it’s frequently clever, as in the statue hanging from the helicopter, and it’s sometimes effective, as, near the end, when Marcello throws the feathers. And that is all it is. Perhaps what it needs to be more than that is some more serious examination of human folly: perhaps we need to see some intelligent, hardworking or creative people who nevertheless have the same outlets — or vices, if you will — as these shallow people. There are plenty of serious artists, as well as plenty of business and professional men, who are lecherous, promiscuous, homosexual; there are plenty of narcotics addicts on Wall Street (maybe it helps, if you’ve got to wear one of those hats). Why use the silly publicity-seekers or aimless rich as scapegoats for all our follies? Does no Communist or working-class girl ever fantasize taking off her clothes in public? Does no American college girl ever fantasize changing places with a whore? The rich are in a position to act out our fantasies, but surely an artist like Fellini, knowing that these fantasies are general, should not allow the middle class to cluck with glee and horror at seeing the rich do just what the middle class secretly wants to do. The world wouldn’t end if they did, nor would capitalism or Communism rise or fall. Fellini’s desire for a great theme notwithstanding, even if the subject of “vice” were treated more seriously, it still wouldn’t make an apocalypse.

  La Dolce Vita is very different in directorial style from the semi-abstract kind of movement in La Notte, and the fooling around in the intellectual sports arena of Marienbad. I’d better say that very clearly, because as I dislike all three, there is a temptation to lump them together. And they are lumpy. Structurally, all three are disasters, and perhaps that’s why it’s so easy to confuse them. If you remember a scene at a party — was it in La Dolce Vita or La Notte, or Marienbad, or was it in the big hotel of L’Avventura? The Morandi paintings link the Steiner episode of La Dolce Vita with La Notte; and both have the same dull writer-hero played by the same actor. Who can remember who did what to whom in which movie? The rich hostess of La Notte, who greets her guests in the garden, and points to the h
ouse, saying, “They’re all dead in there,” might just as well be pointing at the hotel in Marienbad. Are the people who play the Marienbad game any different from those who play games on the floor in La Notte? Did they meet last year in La Dolce Vita?

  The episodes in these films don’t build, they are all on the same level. The view is panoramic, and there’s even a rather peculiar concept of documentary — many people playing themselves, some using their own names, or names like their own, or no names (names, like definite characterization, seem to be regarded as unimportant). Despite the length of the films, so much is vague and unspecified, and the characters are inexplicable. We sometimes get the impression that Fellini thinks that the lives and fates of the people in La Dolce Vita are very important, but we can’t tell if Emma, the hero’s mistress, is supposed to be some kind of life-force the hero should cling to in order to be saved, or just a jealous nagging ninny. People say the girl in Marienbad is an anima or perhaps they say she is the eternal feminine. But what clue do we have for her? You could say of Garbo that she was all women, but this girl is no woman, she’s just a nameless puzzle for those who want to create artificial problems for themselves. And who can say what the wife in La Notte is — is she weak or strong, does she stay with her husband out of inertia or pity or indifference? The directors show us people playing pointless games in order to reveal the pointlessness of their lives; like the fairground in recent English movies, it’s an oddly simple-minded device (and a maladroit symbol — as some of the most active and energetic people relax with games of chance and skill). And, depressingly, it’s a boomerang: the latest intellectual game is devising interpretations of these movies. If it is all a dream, it is a bad dream.

  All these films have their source, I think, in Renoir’s great The Rules of the Game [1939] — but how different his party was: it was a surreal fantasy, the culmination of the pursuit of love, a great chase, a great satirical comedy, a dance of death. The servants were as corrupt as the masters. And how different were the games — the shooting party in which almost all living creatures were the targets, and then the unplanned shooting party. But the themes were set — the old castle that seems to symbolize the remains of European civilization, and the guests with their weekend activities — sex and theatricals and games. Renoir’s film was a dazzling, complex entertainment, brilliantly structured, building its themes toward a climax. These new party films are incoherent message movies — at least La Dolce Vita and La Notte are. Who can say what Marienbad is? (Marienbad has at least one definite relationship to The Rules of the Game: Chanel dressed the ladies in both.) They are important, not because they are great movies (they are not) but because of the way people are responding to them. Their audience may be enormous (as for La Dolce Vita) or small, but Fellini, Antonioni, Resnais have caught its pulse: they are telling people what they want to hear, which, I think, means they are obscuring problems in a way that people like to see them obscured. The message of La Dolce Vita or La Notte isn’t very different from what they might hear in any church, but it looks different, and so they are being struck and moved by all sorts of “profound” ideas (our lives are a living death, we have lost the capacity to act, we are losing the “life force,” and all that).