An agronomist who specialised in diseases affecting tropical fruit, Alain Robbe-Grillet might once have seemed an unlikely candidate for the esteemed heights of the Académie francaise. It wasn't until his late twenties that he began writing seriously. Yet in the 1950s he published a series of books—The Erasers, The Voyeur and Jealousy—that made him the figurehead and chief spokesman of the nouveau roman, or “new novel.” Conventional story-telling, Robbe-Grillet argued, was hopelessly old-fashioned, merely a sedative against the opacity and chaos of modern life. The nouveau roman sought to capture that chaos and render it in a fresh, authentic language: clinical, dense and oblique. Mainstream writers were weekend water-colourists; here was modern art.
It may be true that Robbe-Grillet's work is the preserve of doctoral theses rather than book groups, but the nouveau roman was a capacious thing. It was, above all, a rallying cry for renewed modernism: for formal experimentation and deliberate difficulty; for an assault on the “obsolete notions” of character, plot and narrative coherence. Robbe-Grillet strove for a literature where Ulysses, The Sound and the Fury and The Castle were considered as revolutions rather than aberrations. For him, those who rejected his project were effectively saying that the world had not changed since the 19th century, when the “realist” novels of Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola were the dominant form.
Early fame came not through the bestseller lists, but with a helping hand from the critic Roland Barthes, who enthusiastically hailed what he called the radical “objectivity” of Robbe-Grillet's first two novels—a perplexing observation, since Robbe-Grillet himself described his style as one of “pure subjectivity.” Yet the two ideas weren't as different as it might seem, for the French word objectif can also mean “lens.” Robbe-Grillet's writing was so oddly compelling because it replaced the conventions of novelistic “depth” with a kind of photographic flatness, the cool indifference of the camera-eye. His characters are not rounded individuals but flat abstractions, emptied of personality; the conventional omniscient narrator is nowhere to be found. In this way the writing is both objective (surgical, precise) and utterly subjective (leaving no room for ambiguity).
For a writer who was so concerned with the visual surface of things, it's not surprising that Robbe-Grillet soon turned to cinema. His first film was Last Year at Marienbad, a 1961 collaboration with Alain Resnais, who had just made his name with Hiroshima Mon Amour (scripted by another practitioner of the nouveau roman, Marguerite Duras). Asked by Resnais to sketch out a screenplay, Robbe-Grillet came back with an entire shooting-script, organised down to the tiniest details of camera angle and shot construction. Here was a precocious auteur, straining for the same level of control over film that an author might exercise over his novels. (Robbe-Grillet once complained about the French legal convention which—for the sake of distributing profits—determines a film to have five authors: for the treatment, the screenplay, the shooting script, the direction and the music. “I would very much like to be a complete author—that is, to make all five parts—like Wagner”.)
Marienbad had all the commercial appeal of Robbe-Grillet's novels—that is to say, none whatsoever. It's hard to imagine a more arduous film to watch, with its endlessly repeating corridors of uncertain memories, indeterminate characters (known simply as A, N and X), and unfathomable storyline. In a certain light, it looks like a send-up of “art house” cinema: severe, self-aware and so stiffly acted as if to be permanently screaming “Nothing is ever for certain! All reality is a construction!”
From the 1960s onwards, Robbe-Grillet's film-making kept pace with his literary work, although until now these films have been hard to track down. Disgusted by the low definition of videotapes, Robbe-Grillet repeatedly vetoed the release of his films on home-viewing formats. Now, with the release of the British Film Institute's DVD and Blue Ray box set, Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films 1963-74, British viewers can catch up with the first (and better) half of his cinematic career.
[gallery ids="24478,24479,24480,24481,24482,24483"]Marienbad was not the first film Robbe-Grillet had written. L'Immortelle, set in Istanbul, had been put on hold because of political unrest in Turkey, and was finally made in 1963. It is here that the BFI box-set begins. L'Immortelle shares Marienbad's unsettling atmosphere and intentional staginess, but, like its more famous cousin, it does achieve a quietly mesmeric effect. It feels inappropriate to refer to the film's “story,” but the theme of L'Immortelle, such as it is, is a frustrated love affair between a Frenchman and a mysterious, unplaceable woman—a retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Euridice. The real romance is clearly with the city of Istanbul, where Robbe-Grillet had met his wife Catherine a few years before: its waterways, cafés and mosques, steeped in dreams and exoticism, become the setting for the Frenchman's desperate search for the woman after her sudden disappearance. We soon start to wonder if any of their encounters ever took place at all. It's a relationship with the city that recalls André Breton's surrealist novel Nadja, the story of a love affair that is really about Breton's love for Paris. (As Catherine Robbe-Grillet remarks in one of the DVD extras, her husband's previous film had been dedicated to Breton.)
In Trans-Europ-Express and The Man Who Lies, released in 1967 and 1968, Robbe-Grillet reveals his (slightly) less serious side, although the humour on offer is more often that of the knowing wink than the punchline. His idea of a joke is to include sound recordings from Pirandello plays, or to incorporate musical elements from La Traviata (a bilingual pun on the idea of a story perpetually “going astray”): all part of the game of “generalised intertextuality” that Robbe-Grillet saw as fundamental to modern art. The three principle locations of The Man Who Lies—the castle, the forest and the inn—are a deliberate reference to those in Kafka's The Castle.
Despite this highbrow frippery, these early films are all idiosyncratic pastiches of popular genres. L'Immortelle disrupts the conventions of a heart-warming Hollywood romance; Trans-Europ-Express is a Jean-Pierre Melville crime thriller (complete with raincoats) turned inside-out; The Man Who Lies is a bizarre refashioning of a “resistance” film, a quasi-genre often characterised as the French equivalent of a Western. In each case, Robbe-Grillet subverts expectations and still ends up with neat little 90-minute works, whose non-naturalistic editing and creative use of sound make them highly absorbing. One related pleasure is in reading themes across from his books: Trans-Europ-Express runs along parallel lines to his warped roman policier, The Erasers; L'Immortelle's recurring image of a set of blinds recalls the central motif of Jealousy (jalousie means both “jealousy” and “blinds” in French); the dubious tales of Jean Robin in The Man Who Lies recall the structure of The Voyeur, built around a crime that is never directly narrated.
[gallery ids="24484,24485,24486"]1970's Eden and After marks Robbe-Grillet's entry into colour, which he avoided in his previous film, The Man Who Lies, because he didn't like the way the green shades of its many forest scenes came out on the film stock. (Robbe-Grillet remained at pains to avoid green imagery for the rest of his film-making career, and Eden and After takes its visual cues from Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee, two painters who happened to share his antipathy to the colour.) The film is structured around a group of young people at the café “Eden,” and their involvement with a mysterious man known as “Duchemin”—suggesting “Duchamp” as well as “Dutchman.” Half the film is set in the café, a labyrinthine space composed of shifting Mondrian-style wall panels; the other half in the Tunisian village of Sidi Bou Said where, as luck would have it, early heritage laws meant that the houses are painted only blue and white. Its unusual appearance facilitates at least one remarkable edit in Eden and After, where a seemingly abstract painting turns out to be an accurate rendition of one of Sidi Bou Said's houses.
Robbe-Grillet's next film, N. Took the Dice, is a reworking of the scenes and outtakes from Eden and After (in the French, the two titles are anagrams of one another). Both films are constructed according to avant-garde musical techniques. This might sound terrifically offputting, but Robbe-Grillet's attention to visual detail—the painting-to-house edit is typical—gives the films a kind of magnetism. N. Took the Dice was made for French television, and its central character (“N”) talks directly to the viewer, insisting on the creative role they should adopt in deciphering what they see. The film is meant as an antidote to “easy” narrative, and is designed to frustrate and provoke its audience. But after this much Robbe-Grillet (six hours, if you've been watching in order) things start to make a strange sense: many of the images really have become memory-images, having already appeared in Eden and After. In this, the film really does touch on the “direct sensual participation” that Robbe-Grillet often spoke of in interviews.
One other effect of the film's origin as a TV film is that, despite an oppressive musk of sweaty eroticism, there is barely a hint of naked flesh to be seen. The bucketful of semen with which Catherine Jourdan smears herself in Eden and After does not make it into N. Took the Dice. Perhaps it was thought too much for television audiences, even in France. Throughout his career Robbe-Grillet explored sexual themes, displaying a more extreme version of what Julian Barnes once called, in reference to Michel Houellebecq, “a very French mixture of intellectuality and eroticism:” sexuality in Robbe-Grillet's work is often lurid, and almost always bound up with violence or power-play. Sado-masochism is less an undertone than a recurrent theme. He wasn't shy about admitting to his own fairly deviant sexual persuasions, and the booklet accompanying these DVDs includes a transcript of the bizarre “Contract of Conjugal Prostitution” between he and his wife Catherine. She apparently never signed it, but was nevertheless well-known as “France's most famous dominatrix.”
All this ultimately had a detrimental effect on his films. Watching Robbe-Grillet develop from the exacting control-freak of the 1960s to a devotee of what the surrealists called “objective chance” (Eden and After was thought up largely on set), one sees his intricate, ambiguous dreamscapes devolving into ever more dissolute sexual fantasies. The problem is not one of prudishness, rather that a dreamscape, well expressed, can be inhabited by more people than its dreamer; a fantasy is one man's domain. It offers no way in. The wit of the earlier films also departs. Looking out for the director's Hitchcock-style cameo appearances normally adds a little fun, but in 1974's Progressive Slidings of Pleasure—the last film included here—his appearance as a potential customer in an unspecified red-light district merely marks the encroaching tendency towards self-gratification. The ridiculous subject matter of Slidings—witchcraft, body-painting—doesn't help matters. Robbe-Grillet continued making films, but it is wise that the BFI stopped here, for in his later work these same themes boil over into a kind of baroque: the visual motifs of beautiful naked women, blood, breaking glass and cracked eggs start to become a kind of self-pastiche. The “proliferation of perspectives” that Barthes so much admired was pushed aside by a wearisome one-dimensionality.
The decline in his filmmaking is nothing compared to what happened in his writing. A Sentimental Novel, published shortly before his death in 2008 but left conspicuously untranslated until earlier this year, revels in a morbid, paedophiliac obscenity of startlingly little literary merit. On the other hand, it didn't make much of a splash, for Robbe-Grillet is not today the unavoidable figure that he was in the 1950s and 60s. Whichever way you look at it, the timing of this collection seems a little odd, yet it makes available some highly original work that might otherwise have been threatened by obscurity. And it isn't as oppressively didactic as one might expect. Trans-Europ-Express and The Man Who Lies are even quite whimsical, and worth a few hours of anybody's time. The interviews included on the DVDs, conducted by film critic Frederic Taddeï, reveal a playful side to the director as well as a catalogue of genuinely interesting insights. Robbe-Grillet went from provocative, to puzzling, to scandalous, to ridiculous, but these films tend towards the first two points: if you wrote him off after seeing Marienbad, look again now.
