Parentheses in time : L'Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961) as amorous event

Alain Resnais’ cinema is as entwined with the question of time as are the lovers with each other in the opening scene of his and Marguerite Duras’ 1959 masterpiece, Hiroshima mon amour. Just as Hiroshima’s lovers are here disembodied and depersonalised in an anonymous embrace, so too Resnais’ cinema can be seen to establish its own anonymous time: a timeless time, a time which is paradoxically outside of time. Indeed, this is one of the more immediate ways by which we might understand Jacques Rivette’s famous observation, made at the time of Hiroshima’s initial release, that Resnais’ work constitutes “a parenthesis in time”. For the ‘parenthesis’ in question does not simply refer to Hiroshima’s ostensible circularity (whereby “at the end of the last reel you can easily move back to the first, and so on”) but highlights the film’s ‘timeless’ nature, its out-of-time-ness. It is this peculiarly ‘untimely’ aspect of Resnais’ cinema that I will examine in this essay, specifically with regard to his enigmatic (and equally circular) second film, L’Année Dernière à Marienbad (1961). Drawing on the philosophy of Alain Badiou and in particular his concept of the event, I will argue – contra Gilles Deleuze for example, who famously held that the film captures the idea of time itself – that the whole of Marienbad is in fact situated within a temporal rupture, in the ‘cut’ between two heterogeneous times, namely, a pre- and post-evental time. Or again, I will argue that the film’s ‘timeless’ nature results foremost from its presentation of what Badiou would call an ‘amorous event’.