Pleasure in Understanding, Pleasure in Not Understanding

Abstract

This paper looks at Alain Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961) and Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962). It rests on a premise of film as a constructed, ordered world that answers only to itself. Both films address particular questions about time: what happens to our anticipation of the future if we move back and forth in time reinventing our past and present? (Marienbad), or can we escape our ruined present by moving into the future? (La Jetée). From Jacques Lacan, it borrows the concepts of the mirror stage by which we recognize ourselves, and of the objet petit a, the looking for which (both in terms of “search” and “seeing”) is that from which we derive our pleasure. From Jean-Luc Nancy it adopts descriptions of how film touches us, and the careful orchestration of the pleasure that is jouissance in being within this moment, not knowing where we are going.

Keywords:

• film
• jouissance
• Jacques Lacan
• Jean-Luc Nancy
• space
• time

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Gabriela Świtek and Willem de Bruijn for earlier readings of this paper before it was presented at the AHRA Conference “This Thing Called Theory.” I extend gratitude to Diana Periton and two anonymous reviewers who offered extremely helpful advice. I also thank Daniel Currie for the original inspiration to write about jouissance.

Notes

¹ Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future; The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (London: Verso, 2005).

² Ibid., 39.

³ Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison, eds., Best SF: 1969 (New York: Putnams, 1970), quoted in Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future, 263.

⁴ In Marienbad, Resnais deliberately references the acting style and Paul Poiret costumes of Marcel L’Herbier’s L’Inhumaine (1924); Renée Tobe, “The Inhuman One: The Mythology of Architect as Réalisateur,” in Architecture and Authorship, ed. K. Grillner, T. Anstey, and R. Hughes (London: Black Dog, 2007) 108–17.

⁵ Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. R. Richardson and A O’Bryne (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 170.

⁶ Ibid., 173.

⁷ Jean-Paul Martinon, On Futurity; Malabou, Nancy and Derrida (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 98.

⁸ Ibid., 1.

⁹ In French, jouir is slang for “to come.” Jouissance is untranslatable and refers to pure enjoyment, unmediated pleasure, beyond the pleasure principle, the desire for immediate gratification.

¹⁰ Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion; Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 39.

¹¹ Alberto Pérez-Gómez, Built Upon Love (London: MIT Press, 2006), 120.

¹² Martinon, On Futurity, 97.

¹³ Jacques Derrida, On Touching Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. C. Irizarry (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 284.

¹⁴ There is a game in the film that, like all other motifs, is repeated as a refrain. This is the game of “sevens” played with cards, matchsticks, and other objets throughout the film. While seemingly a game of chance, it suggests fate and destiny for, as M declares, “You can win, but I never lose.”

¹⁵ Bruno, Atlas of Emotion, 39.

¹⁶ Ibid.

¹⁷ Alain Robbe-Grillet, Last Year in Marienbad, trans. Richard Howard (London: John Calder: 1961).

¹⁸ Ibid., 110.

¹⁹ To create the distinctive soundtrack, Resnais worked closely with Francis Seyrig, who wrote the score and had been a student of Olivier Messian’s. Seyrig was brother of actor Delphine Seyrig who played A in the film.

²⁰ Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, trans. Charlotte Mandell (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007), 14.

²¹ Robbe-Grillet, Last Year in Marienbad, translated by Richard Howard (London: John Calder, 1961).

²² Robert Bresson, Notes on the Cinematographer, trans. Jonathan Griffin (London: Green Integer, 1997), 47.

²³ Chris Marker, La Jetée; ciné-roman (New York: Zone, 1992).

²⁴ Marker adapted this image from one of his first works in which he montaged films of wind tunnel experiments: Cine-tracts 1–16 (Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, et al., 1968). 16 mm.

²⁵ Jean-Luc Nancy, Abbas Kiarastami; The Evidence of Film (Paris: Yves Gevaert, 2001).

²⁶ Nancy, Evidence of Film, 46.

²⁷ For more on the boundaries between architecture, theory and film in both Marienbad, and La Jetée, please see Penelope Haralambidou’s excellent article “The Architectural Essay Film,” in Architectural Research Quarterly, 19, no. 3 (2015): 234-48.