| Author | Message | ||
     Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.16.86.75 |
So I finally sat down and saw (after finding!) LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD. And there's a game the characters play in the film, which is called "Nim." Nim is pretty simple: you have four rows of 16 "things" - cards, sticks, objects - that are laid out 1, 3, 5, and 7; you remove as many objects as you want from each row, up to the length of the row, in your turn. The next player does the same. The last player to remove an object, loses. It's fascinating, and maddening, at once. I found a Nim player online, you play against your computer - the computer always always wins. I read that it's a rigged game, and that whomever moves first wins - not so, even when the computer goes second, it always wins. Does anyone have any idea at all what the secret behind this !@#@! game is?!? Oh, wait - remove "game" in that last sentence, and insert "LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD" - I guess I am talking about the movie.... | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.157.91.38 |
I guess it's like noughts & crosses (tic-tac-toe) in that there are set moves depending on whether you're first to move or not... I'll be a-settlin' down to watch LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD in a few minutes; not seen it for over twenty years (at the National Film Theatre in London) and I only picked up the DVD recently. Looking forward to a dreamy 90 minutes! | ||
| Zed (Gary_mc) Username: Gary_mc Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 81.96.242.126 |
I bought this DVD recently too. Terrific film - maddening, beautiful, creepy and enigmatic. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.16.86.35 |
Tell me what you think, Mick, your thoughts. Is it out on DVD?! I found a really grainy scratchy crappy VHS copy, and had to live through that... still mesmerizing, nevertheless.... | ||
| Mick Curtis (Mick) Username: Mick Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 86.157.91.38 |
It's out on DVD here in the UK, Craig, for not much at all:- http://www.play.com/DVD/DVD/4-/597323/-/Product.html?searchstring=last+year+in+m arienbad&searchsource=0 ...however, that's neither here nor there as you probably can't watch it on TV as it's PAL and region 2, although you could on a computer. You wouldn't want to buy it on DVD from Amazon.com though - look at these prices! http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/1572524308/ref=dp_olp_2/103-9530197-81494 40 $300 for a DVD? Argh! | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 90.199.0.117 |
I got it on DVD for a couple of quid on a ?Virgin sale. I've never seen it but I'll watch it tonight if I get back soon enough. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.4.232.60 |
Nope, I ain't paying those prices, Mick... I would love to see an actual nice cleaned up clear dvd print though, I'm jealous... albeit there is something to be said for the unintended creepiness factor of this horribly film-scratched version... when you see the film, you may relate.... There's some fascinating critiques online, depending where you look. One guy claimed the entire "key" to the movie in fact IS the Nim game. Then, he went on to not explain that. I remain skeptical.... | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 212.50.191.46 |
I played that game at school. It's about odds and evens. You have to always take the number of cards that leaves an odd or even number. I can't recall which. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 212.50.191.46 |
I personally think the film is brilliant nonsense. It is no more than it seems. Some think it is based on a sci fi story about a man in a world of robots. Testing the memory of a robot about something that didn't happen would surely be an attempt to mess with the robot. Perhaps to send it mad or to instil a greater consciousness. Or maybe to actually rescue erased memory? I liked the many tricks that were used to jar the watcher's view of what is happening. Like the camera searching out faces while someone repeats the same words. As if the words are coming from nowhere or are simply a voice over that none of the characters are aware of. Clever tricks, in themselves, but the effect is the same each time. Disorientation. Which became tiring after a while. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.12.141 |
I played that game at school. It's about odds and evens. You have to always take the number of cards that leaves an odd or even number. I can't recall which.... I don't think so. Or I've tried that. The computer's to smart for me.... No matter what I do, it wins. It's pummeling me with my own lack of wit. It doesn't even let me win once just to make me feel good... it just keeps pounding, and pounding, and pounding, and pounding again my black ignorance back into the cram-hole from which it oozed.... | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.12.141 |
The computer's to smart for me.... POUND! | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 90.199.0.117 |
Just watched LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD & really enjoyed it. It felt like an affair set in the world of Carnival of Souls crossed with the Twilight Zone. The wanky arthouse guff on my DVD was a bit over the top though. Thank God I didn't do media studies - writing essays on accepted theories of interpretation of movies like this would have killed my enthusiasm for them stone dead. (And I know you can't 'kill something dead' - when I was little my Dad was always criticising that Domestos advert, but I liked the sound of the sentence). | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 67.116.103.241 |
I kept thinking CARNIVAL OF SOULS too, John... I wonder about the influence level there.... I also noted that: once I became aware of who the protagonists were - man, lady, lady's "significant other" - I realized I was relatively late in the movie... I then raked back over my memory, to remember when I first saw them... I found I couldn't... it had that dreamy fading-into-reality feel, to where I didn't realize I was watching these two until some time had passed already... they were parts of an identity-unclear group, gradually seperating from it, until they achieved the foreground... don't know how to describe this sensation... do you know what I mean?... | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 212.50.191.46 |
>>I don't think so. Or I've tried that. You seem vague about it. Where is this game? Do you have a link? There has to be a way to win or the computer wouldn't pound you. | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 212.50.191.46 |
http://www.cs4fn.org/binary/nim/hamsternim.php | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 212.50.191.46 |
Mmm. http://www.cut-the-knot.org/nim_st.shtml If this is the same game then it is impossible while you go first. | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 90.203.130.130 |
Craig - my own personal reading of the film is that it's actually a metaphor for an affair between a man and a married woman who has to keep denying to herself that it's ever happened. It was relatively late in the film that I picked up on this but I think that's the point, as is the fact that it's pretty much the last lines of dialogue that confirm this for me. And the geometrical structure of both the garden and the hotel are metaphors for the fact that what they embarked on seemed easy enough to negotiate at the beginning, but they soon got hopelessly lost, doomed to go round and round in circles but always coming back to each other, the other people in their world merely actors in a play. And I think I really really like this film | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.8.153 |
Here you go, Albie: I defy you (or anyone) to figure this out.... http://www.archimedes-lab.org/game_nim/nim.html# That's a good analysis John. I was fascinated by that opening, the seemingly endless circling of the manse, with the ghostly phrases being repeated equally endlessly... you keep anticipating that finally stopping, but it keeps going... it was a great way to sort of tamp down the audience's "tension" through suppression, sort of brilliant actually... since all viewers (in my belief) begin any work of narrative in a "heightened" state of tension: So you're going to tell me a story? I'm now tense, waiting for it to manifest... here, you simply have to be calm, dreamy, nearly drugged.... I read on some post somewhere that in the present, everyone is wearing black; in the past, white. I didn't get that in my viewing. I get the impression I will have to see this a few times, to get anything.... | ||
| Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey) Username: Ramsey Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 87.203.107.68 |
I've loved the film ever since I saw it in my mid-teens (when it showed me how to rewrite "Concussion"). I also recommend Muriel, Melo, La Vie est un Roman and others by Resnais. The only people who could beat me at Nim were our daughter and our late bookseller friend John Roles (until a friend of Niki's showed me a variation). | ||
| Gary Fry (Gary_fry) Username: Gary_fry Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 82.3.65.135 |
Has anyone seen Private Fears in Public Places? | ||
| Albie (Albie) Username: Albie Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 195.195.236.131 |
I think there must be different ways of winning for each variation. But the game we played at school I did discover how to win at. The layout was more like the one you have, Craig. | ||
| Craig (Craig) Username: Craig Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 75.5.8.153 |
The only people who could beat me at Nim were our daughter and our late bookseller friend John Roles (until a friend of Niki's showed me a variation).... Which means, Ramsey, you were nearly unsurpassed at Nim, until you actually became unsurpassed at Nim... why am I not surprised?...  | ||
| John Llewellyn Probert (John_l_probert) Username: John_l_probert Registered: 03-2008 Posted From: 90.208.48.69 |
Thanks Craig I presume the significance of the game is that no matter what strategy the characters adopt, the chances of the outcome being anything other than losing are minuscule. I think I will have a look at some of Resnais' other work |