Top 12 Transcendental Movies
by: Paul Kaihla, 
25. Dec, 2007 
10 Comments
Print This Post
Alain Resnais: LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD
No. 11
The oldest film in this series, Last Year at Marienbad is a 1961 art-house classic by the French master, Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour). In real life, Marienbad was a German spa town frequented by the ruling class and artists like Goethe and Wagner (but since WWII, has sat on the Czech side of the border).
In Resnais' film it is a dreamy, timeless, place-less realm. Like the island in the ABC TV series, Lost, the characters seem to be in a feedback loop of back-to-the-future time warps. The lack of linear plot defies the mind's imperative to order events with cause-and-effect certainty — a big reason this film leaves mainstream audiences squirming.
Unlike Lost, Resnais' Marienbad has no violence; the fashionable, beautiful people are so lost in their elegant trappings it feels like they've gone to their own private heaven.
Karma points: Another Lost connection, Marienbad's script is derived from a 1940 sci-fi novel set on an island, The Invention of Morel. English professor Thomas Beltzer explains:
It's about a fugitive, Morel, hiding out alone on a deserted island who one day awakens to discover that the island is miraculously filled with anachronistically dressed people 'who dance, stroll up and down, and swim in the pool, as if this were a summer resort like Los Teques or Marienbad'. It turns out that Morel's invention is a diabolical holographic recording device that captures all of the senses in three dimensions.
NEXT: Being John Malkovich
Print This Post
I can't believe that you guys ranked Last Year at Marienbad so high, or have even heard of it. The first time I saw it I was in university, and it changed my life.
You have all these characters trying to make a connection, and not connecting. All the same, I wanted to be there with them in that timeless dream-state where everyone was so relaxed about it. You rock!
Hey,
Check out "The White Masi" WOW what a movie!!!!!
Where is "The Man From Earth", a story about a professor who reveals to his colleagues that he is actually 14,000 years old. My favorite line: "Piety is not what the lessons bring to people, it's the mistakes people bring to lessons."
1. Razor's Edge (Tyrone Powers version)
2. The Fountain
3. Somewhere in Time
4. The Matrix
5. What dreams may Come
6. Siddharta
7. Meetings with Remarkable Men
8. Phenomenon
9. Contact
10. Cocoon
11. Under the Tuscan Sun
12. The Passion of the Christ
Others
Celestine Prophecy
The Preacher
The Preacher's Wife
and many more....
"You admire the man who pushes his way to the top in any walk of life, while we admire the man who abandons his ego"
~~~
Have you ever seen the movie “Groundhog day”? I did. Sometimes I feel as if I am in that movie. I feel as if all my life spins around events that carry the same essence. The situations that I find myself in have been repeatedly recovering through out my life and would be most well defined as fear and frustration. I can find similarities in the type of the causations that lead to that outcome and I know the signs of it coming. It has its own climax, called depression. Thinking about the reasons and understanding them, however, does not help me much in preventing the consequences. I feel as if I am trapped in it and I will never find the way out of it. I feel as if this “It” – something inside me and will always control me. This is the It that let’s me go when I feel to close to end and let me rebuild myself, so that It can take me back again with the new even stronger force. It is not the suicide that can solve the problem but it definitely occasionally comes as a solution of the last reserve in my mind. What is it that stops me? Maybe that this last reserve would not leave me any last chance?
Great list, just great! I discovered a few new one's to check out (Fur, Marienbad) and have a few to add.
I agree with The Matrix above, hollywood sure, but impactful? Definitely.
Also Into The Wild, the true story of a man searching for himself.
Rock on!