Blur’s ‘Last Year At Marienbad’ Homage

So last night we finally saw the legendary surrealist classic, “Last Year At Marienbad,” at New York’s Film Forum. The glacially-paced, chilly, and hypnotically opaque (not to mention lavishly stylish) abstraction is not for the impatient at heart. We dragged our roommate to the film and she was so peeved (and praying-for-death) by its slow-moving ellipticalness and absence of narrative, she demanded we at least get some sort of blog post out of it. So here we are. All this reminded us that Blur’s “To The End” video from 1994’s very-excellent Park Life was a direct pastiche homage to the film by Alain Resnais.

Village Voice critic J. Hoberman called the film, “hopelessly retro, eternally avant-garde, and one of the most influential movies ever made (as well as one of the most reviled), ‘Marienbad’ is both utterly lucid and provocatively opaque… It eludes tense. The movie is what it is—a sustained mood, an empty allegory, a choreographed moment outside of time, and a shocking intimation of perfection.”

New Yorkers have one more night to catch this film (tonight) as the print will be moving on to other repetory theaters around the country, but knowing Rialto Films’ close relationship with the Criterion Collection, if we’re lucky we might see this one on DVD later in the year (speaking of that, guys can we finally see “Two or Three Things I Know About Her” and “Le Doulos” on DVD?). Blur’s video for “The Universal,” directed by Jonathan Glazer (“Birth”) was also a cinematic homage, blending Stanley Kubrick’s “Clockwork Orange” and the minimalism of “2001: A Space Odyssey.”

Watch: Blur – “To The End”

Watch Scene: “Last Year At Marienbad”