REUNION 2

... in Eckard Alker’s photo series “Last Year at Marienbad.” Here, too, we have a section that serves as a powerful conclusion. On display are 25 digital prints of television images. Eckard Alker offers the following explanation: He experienced the film “Last Year at Marienbad” by Alain Resnais—one of the most famous works of the Nouvelle Vague—in the year of its release, 1961, and photographed it in 2011. Apparently, the film moved him deeply at the time. What has happened in the meantime? Does he see the film differently today? Fifty years lie between 1961 and 2011. Fifty years in which much has changed. This includes a person’s perception, especially when it comes to an artist like Eckard Alker, the painter, graphic artist, and photographic artist. His own eye has become more acute; perhaps it perceives structures even more clearly now—the finest nuances, shades, and hints of change.

Of course, the media have changed as well. In 1961, Eckard Alker saw the black-and-white film in the cinema. In 2011, he saw it on television—still in black and white, but with a hue characteristic of the television image, which he intensified slightly so that the digital prints took on a slightly morbid tint of green in the highlights and violet in the shadows. Just as with the film, Eckard Alker’s technique has also changed. Digital prints instead of printmaking. What is different in this adaptation? What about the much-discussed “flattening” of new media? The flicker of the television image has cast a shimmering grid over the pictures. The beautiful and mysterious face of Delphine Seyrig, the leading actress not only in “Last Year at Marienbad” but in many films of the Nouvelle Vague, is veiled as if by a delicate veil of oblivion. Time, memory, and forgetting are the central themes of this film.
With this adaptation, Eckard Alker has found a very contemporary interpretation of the Nouvelle Vague’s cinematic language—which has indeed aged and is no longer new—without banishing the film’s mystery. On the contrary, through his intuitive photography within the running film, he has collected highly subjective snapshots in which the film’s images blend with his own memories of experiencing the film as a young person. It is precisely through the double exposures and blurring created by photographing moving images that the film’s ambiguous atmosphere—detached from time and space—is further intensified. The hopelessness of human existence, which is the theme of this film, is visualized with just a few but characteristic motifs in a suspenseful visual composition, like a distillation of a deeply human experience.