But then there is Alan Resnais' masterwork! -- his marvelous 1961 classic,
L'Année Dernière à Marienbad: "Last Year at Marienbad." It resonates so much with my vision of Western civilization!
There are so many wonderful aspects of Western culture, and I would feel an unutterable impoverishment of my soul if I were no longer a participant in that civilization, particularly its "high culture." Yet, deep in my heart, there is a kind of disgust for the core of that civilization.
What is it that I find so repellent about Western civilization? Well, it is an intensely militaristic culture, and its oppressive armies, tyrannical rulers and proto-policestate brainwashing have been at its core since the days of the Roman Empire.
And then the ugly, heavy impedimenta of European nobility! -- which, of course, was transmitted across the Atlantic to infect America.
So different, so
very different from the lightness, the grace and the elegance of traditional Chinese and Japanese art!
But, from a purely artistic standard, what I find so offensive about the culture of the West can be summed up in a single word:
grandeur. Even worse:
folie de grandeur ! Running like a cancer through the Western soul is an obsessive and unceasing egoism and vanity, an urge to present oneself as more than one really is. There is a dreadful pomposity about so much of the traditional high culture of Europe; one sees it in music, architecture, painting, cuisine, even furniture! Everything is unremittingly grand, crowded with ornateness, so often wearying to eye, ear and mind. All those nobles and prelates insisting on their portraits being crammed into the most sacred works of art!
Since the artists were the creatures --- indeed, the slaves --- of the nobility and the Church, they had no choice but to flatter the obscenely inflated vanity of those who held power over them.
L'Année Dernière à Marienbad exemplifies all this magnificently. There is never a moment's respite from grandeur -- it is stifling, obsessive and hallucinatory. The people are slaves to convention, to formality, to the lies of their delusions. There is not an inch of space on which to relax, to be human. Remember the wonderful scene in the formal gardens of the spa: only the people cast shadows! only the not quite alive people! while all the rest of the world -- the trees, bushes, buildings -- is magnificent and dead and shadowless! The humans wander like aimless ghosts through the grandeur of European civilization --- and through its postwar spiritual wreckage! The film has a quality of dream, nightmare, delirium ---- even of the after-death state.
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