Alain Robbe-Grillet (French: [a.lɛ̃ ʁɔb ɡʁi.jɛ]; 18 August 1922 – 18 February 2008) was a French writer and filmmaker.He was one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman (new novel) trend of the 1960s, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon.
Eden and After If Robbe-Grillet was both explicit and implicit in relation to the sexual imagery in his work, he found a way of offering the subtle and the stated epistemologically as well. One reason why film has in some quarters never been taken as seriously as literature is because it would seem to lack the gap between the words on the page and the images they create in our mind. The freedom one has reading a book where we have cat as a word in print and cat in the mind’s eye allows for a fundamental imaginative liberty missing from cinema.
We cannot imagine the world that we witness on film: we see it. If readers often wonder exactly what their favourite characters in fiction look like, nobody has that opportunity in cinema: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid look like Paul Newman and Robert Redford; Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro; Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford. Our examples aren’t arbitrary: they are all original screenplays (none are adapted from books), and all could have had a different actor in a leading role.
Butch could have been played by Marlon Brando instead of Paul Newman, Jeff Bridges rather than De Niro, Tom Sellick instead of Harrison Ford. We can muse over other actors in the role, but this isn’t the literary imagination at work; merely idle speculation as we wonder what difference another actor would have made. Seeing is believing in cinema; imagining is believing in literature. In a novel we can imagine as we are reading it a friend we know as Darcy, or an actor we like as Pip, an actor we don’t like as Sikes. Now, of course, there have been numerous adaptations of Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations and Oliver Twist, and on occasion a very strong interpretation might make it difficult to read the book without thinking of, say, Oliver Reed as Sikes, Colin Firth as Darcy.
But if thinking of Bridges as Bickle is an idle thought, having Firth in our head as we read Pride and Prejudice might seem like an imposition. It is intruding on our imaginative faculties. Cinema, then, can seem in a number of ways a lazy medium next to literature, so how does one make it hard work, how to generate the imagination that even bad literature would seem to offer ontologically, and that cinema in its default state cannot? Robbe-Grillet would be inclined to reply that one needs to change its default condition. Instead of film allowing us to trust what we see with our own eyes, why not generate an aesthetic of distrust? When the continuity girl insisted that Robbe-Grillet couldn’t cut from Donoil-Valcroze’s N. Moving across the frame to him sitting down in the next shot, Robbe-Grillet knew that to do so would be playing havoc with the grammar of film all the better to generate a sceptical relationship with what we see.
If the camera is supposed never to lie, in Robbe-Grillet’s films we notice it insistently does so. When at the beginning of L’immortelle we see a series of shots with Francoise Brion’s character, L., she has in all of them long hair, except for one shot where she seems to have shorter hair in a bob. We say seems since she has her back to the camera, and though later we do see her with exactly this hair style, there is also another character seen in the same location with the same bob cut. Can we say for sure this was Brion’s L.
Or was it this other woman? In The Man Who Lies, the voiceover informs us that the central character is entering an empty bar, yet the camera shows us that the bar is full. Are we to assume that the lie takes place in the audio or in the visual, or are we to accept that since they contradict each other we can trust neither sound nor image? If the novel leads us to use our imagination, film often asks us to trust what we see with our eyes. Now, of course, numerous films have asked us to think again the images that we have read naively –from Fight Club (1999) to Nine Queens ( Nueve reinas, 200o), from Stage Fright (1950) to Psycho (1960)–, but the certitude of our initial assumptions are categorically countered so that by the end of the film we have a correct reading after our earlier one has been proved false.
Yet Robbe-Grillet wants something more. While our imaginative faculties are set to work in literature, our speculative faculties can be set to work in film. Obviously literature has this capacity for speculation also, and has long been practising unreliable narration, but perhaps it appears especially uncanny in the arena of film where the image lends itself so well to certitude.
Thus in The Man Who Lies ( L’homme qui ment, 1968) we cannot easily decide what happens to be true and what happens to be false. Right from the beginning we might wonder why this figure who fugitively arrives in a village during WWII happens to be wearing sixties clothing. If we can’t trust what comes out of his mouth, then we can’t even trust the image making that incorporates him.
The Man Who Lies Now often what we call a lie is actually something else first and foremost: it is inconsistency. When someone offers an alibi, it isn’t necessarily true; more that it offers a consistent account that can work in a court of law.
Cinema has its own version of this which accepts while a film is a fiction it nevertheless possesses an internal consistency that needn’t trouble us. It is the very internal consistencies that the script girl (Catherine Robbe-Grillet) in Trans-Europ-Express frequently insists upon when the scriptwriter (Alain Robbe-Grillet) works on ideas for a film during a train journey, all the while the film intersperses these moments with the film that he is generating.
Films might usually be lies (fictions) but they are coherent ones. However it is as though in The Man Who Lies, which he made after the success of Trans-Europ-Express, Robbe-Grillet wanted to push further into the problem of fiction being so fictional that it needn’t even be consistent. If the voiceover tells us the bar is empty and it is full, if the central character Boris (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is in mid-to-late sixties attire in this film about a man turning up in a small Czech village who offers various contrary stories about how he got there, it is as though his manifold lying dissolves the very filmic event. Another experience comes out of this collapse, though, one that Robbe-Grillet has talked about in various manifestations concerning both film and literature. In For a New Novel, a series of essays he wrote in the fifties and early sixties, he suggests that surely changes in the world demand changes in our aesthetic experiences. Trans-Europ- Express In each instance, the honest and normal are called into question, and while Ian Penman in Sight and Sound (6) reckons the director’s work became less interesting after The Man Who Lies, perhaps it is fairer to say, while we are inclined to agree, that also the emphasis shifted. In the first three black and white films ( L’immortelle, Trans-Europ- Express, The Man Who Lies) he wanted to question truth in narration; in the later films he wanted to pervert painting.
It is a point he makes in the DVD extras when insisting that it wasn’t until he moved into colour with Eden and After that he became interested in painting and film. The cafe in Eden and After resembles Mondrian, whereas numerous shots in La belle captive invoke Magritte and Manet. Where the first three accept that formal emphasis will be absorbed into location specificity – Istanbul, Paris and rural Czechoslovakia – the later films will utilize location (Tunisia in Eden and After for example), but also escape from its pro-filmic force. Where the tension exists between the fictional need to explore a subject on Robbe-Grillet’s own terms and film’s demand that the reality he records can’t easily be ignored is evident in the earlier works, in the later ones the tension isn’t between the form colliding with the location, but the form contained much more by the notion of the frame.
All films possess a frame of course but not all filmmakers seem to think of the frame. Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard and Robbe-Grillet often appear to frame images rather than film them, and this became in Robbe-Grillet’s work especially evident in the post-sixties films where, as he says in the DVD extras, moving into colour led him to become more exacting about the image. Deciding that he didn’t like the greens in Eastmancolor (7), it was as though this moment forced upon him a painter’s thought rather than a novelist’s or filmmaker’s one. He wondered what colours he could utilise; and thought about Piet Mondrian and Paul Klee’s dislike of the colour green, so played up red, white, yellow and blue in Eden and After. Whether it is the blue and red with dashes of yellow in the cafe, or the blue doors and white walls, with dashes of blood red in a bath or a blindfold, in the later Tunisian section, eradication of green created an aesthetic specificity. This allowed for the use of blocks of colour evident in the cafe with the Mondrian emphasis on rectangles of a particular colour, and in Tunisia where the blocks of white walls against blue doors brought out a geometrical precision to the imagery.
Before Eden and After Robbe-Grillet was interested in making location his own. Moments in L’immortelle look like they could have come from Giorgio de Chirico with the emptied out squares and quietened streets. But this isn’t to play up the frame but to play down the location: to find ways in which to make it his Istanbul. It remains chiefly a pro-filmic space, just as Trans-Europ-Express and The Man who Lies emphasise the collision between the formal requirements and the milieu captured. If Penman and others regard these three works as his finest films, it rests partly in the tension between these oppositions generating a tension of its own. If as Penman amusingly notes that Robbe-Grillet’s background in agronomy indicated he was more interested in plots of land than narrative ones, nevertheless he created in his sixties work a pressure between opposing forces. When in L’immortelle L.
Spend time at the beach, we notice that they have the beach to themselves, which might seem odd in the first place, but even odder could be that L. Is wearing two different swimming costumes, indicating in most films that we should take this to be two separate occasions, but in Robbe-Grillet’s that we should instead question the status of the image: is it a dream, a recollection, a fantasy, an indeterminate memory? This isn’t the suspense of working a plot out, but working an image through.
The location feels real enough, but what is going on within the image of it? In the former, in working a plot out, the image is taken as given and we merely have to comprehend what is going on, but in working an image through we have to think of all its possible permutations as an image. Take our earlier example of the brief moment at the beginning of the film where we appear to see L.
From behind with bobbed hair. Can we say this is really L. Or is it actually the other woman who resembles her from behind? Imagine the moment of L. With shorter hair; is he projecting onto the other woman L., or has he conjured up this first meeting with L.
Retrospectively in his imagination since, chronologically, it would seem to be inconsistent with a scene shortly afterwards? If this is their first meeting, then her hair grows awfully quickly between the first and the second where she turns up at a soiree with her hair now twice the length. Instead of the more or less singular and categorical working out of the plot, we have the manifold working through of the image. The location is vivid but the events are troublingly vague.
La belle captive This isn’t to undermine or dismiss films like Eden and After and La belle captive, simply to say that for all their aesthetic ingenuity they might just be missing a temporal texture that should never be underestimated in film. “Unfortunately American audiences are conditioned to see events as reality. Since they fail to distinguish between reality and the stylized reality of Eden and After, they view the rape scene as realistic.” (17) One’s reservations towards Robbe-Grillet’s comments here are not those of representation, of suspect sexual politics, of objectifying women and illustrating male fantasies. That would be for another debate.
But while American audiences in Robbe-Grillet’s formulation are naive to take film for reality, perhaps the brilliantly sophisticated Robbe-Grlllet was himself ever so slightly naive in underestimating its importance to the film image. We might think again of the indexical sign that is cinema, and the ‘illegal’ images that Robbe-Grillet extracted from it. His is a great body of work, but the soul of it resides as much in absorbing time into the image and hinting at the real as it lies in countering cinema’s basic ontology. “I have never spoken of anything but myself” (18), Robbe-Grillet proposes in his autobiography Ghosts in the Mirror. Yet in his finest films the images of Istanbul etc. Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films 1963-1974, DVD Notes, British Film Institute 2. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the “Frenzy of the Visible”, London: Pandora, 1990 3.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1989, p. For a New Novel, p. Ian Penman, ‘Nouveau Riche’, Sight and Sound, v. 24, n.7, July 2014, pp. Fragola and Roch C.
Smith, The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films, Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992, p. Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films 1963-1974, DVD Notes, British Film Institute. 95 11.Alain Bergala,‘The Other Side of the Bouquet’, in Raymond Bellour & Mary Lea Bandy (eds.), Godard: Son + Image 1974-1991, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1992, pp. For a New Novel, p. For a New Novel, p. Fragola and Smith, p.
For a New Novel, p. Fragola and Smith, p. Alain Robbe-Grillet, Ghosts in the Mirror, London: John Calder, 1988, p.