From Pompeii to Marienbad: Classical Sculptures in Postwar European Modernist Cinema

Abstract

The statue is a significant motif in many key films of the European modernist cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. Famous examples are Les Statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais and Chris Marker, 1953), Viaggio in Italia (Roberto Rossellini, 1953), L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961), La Jetée (Chris Marker, 1962), Jules et Jim (François Truffaut, 1962), Méditerranée ( Jean-Daniel Pollet, 1963), Le Mépris ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1963), Il Gattopardo (Luchino Visconti, 1963), Une Femme mariée ( Jean-Luc Godard, 1964), Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1964), and Vaghe stelle dell’orsa (Luchino Visconti, 1965). Focusing on Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia (Journey to Italy, 1953) and Resnais’ L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) as cases in point, this chapter not only traces the fascination for sculpture in modernist cinema but also explains it by examining the ways in which statues are presented as tokens of death, time, history, myth, memory, the human body, and strategies of doubling – important topics for many of the leading modernist directors working in the 1950s and 1960s.