MovieChat Forums > L'année dernière à Marienbad (1962) Discussion > Their names

Their names

posted 18 years ago by paris_texas
2 replies | jump to latest

Where do their names come from? I don't remember any of the characters being refered to as A, X, and M in the film, as far as i remember they aren't refered to as anything. So where does A, X, and M come from?

[–] cobratriangle 18 years ago

I don't know but it would seem that their names could be derived from where the letters are sequentially in the alphabet. A = the beginning, M = the middle (13th letter), and X (not exactly last but strongly identified with the last section of the alphabet), perhaps the ending of the moving exists outside of the rest of the timeline, like a coda of some sort. Possibly the names are used to setup a referential timeframe of sorts. Just a thought.

[–] exeterbohemian 18 years ago

while no character is ever referred to by name within the context of the film, the (overwhelmingly comprehensive) screenplay originally penned by robbe-grillet refers to all of the characters as such. a, x, and m, respectively. while no english version has ever existed in print form, the original french version is currently in print by éditions de minuit and available from amazon.fr