Villa Valmarana ai Nani
With a link to the movie ‘L'année dernière à Marienbad’ by Alain Resnais, 1961
Despite the title ‘
L'année dernière à Marienbad’ apparently locates real coordinates, these prove to be fictitious as one enters the vision of the movie: we are not in Marienbad, and we are not even sure of the reality of the present. We perceive that we are inside a huge fortress, with the appearance of an infinite labyrinth, where endless corridors succeed other corridors and mirrors. The narrative of the film is not linear, it leaves room for imagination - space and time are exclusively mental categories. The peculiarity of the movie lies in fact in the mechanisms that move the camera, which seem to follow a logic located in the unconscious, rather than in the
cause and effect relationship.
Gilles Deleuze has seen in the work of Alain Resnais the material to formulate what the writer calls “a crystal image”. The universe built by the film is a “membrane that, in the most diverse ways (continuity, but also discontinuity, winding, etc.), matches the layers of the past with the layers of reality”.
Gilles Deleuze, ‘L’immagine-tempo’, Cinema 2, Ubulibri, Milano, 1989, p. 229.