The intoxicating erotic dreamworld of Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet was a wholly unconventional filmmaker, perhaps due to the fact that before he picked up the camera, he was well versed with the pen, establishing himself, first and foremost, as a writer.
Concerned with unconventional techniques, such as extreme repetition, Robbe-Grillet’s novels deal with the abstraction of truth, always leaving readers to piece together his sentences and form their own subjective interpretation.
After releasing four novels, beginning with his 1953 debut, The Erasers, Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay for Alain Resnais’ Last Year At Marienbad, which was nominated for ‘Best Original Screenplay’ at the Oscars. However, that would be the first and only time Robbe-Grillet would brush shoulders with the Academy Awards. When he started making his own films, his complex approach to the medium allowed his work to remain in the realm of ‘erotic art house’; there was no Hollywood or box-office recognition for Robbe-Grillet’s cinematic world.
Just like Last Year at Marienbad, his directorial debut, L’Immortelle, is preoccupied with the blurring of reality and fantasy, leaving the audience unsure of what is real and what is imagined. The 1960s saw the director release two more black-and-white movies, Trans-Europ-Express and The Man Who Lies, both starring Jean-Louis Trintignant. Within each, Robbe-Grillet continued his exploration of the opposition between dreams and the real, often using bizarre, sexually explicit images as accompaniment.
“The true writer has nothing to say. What counts is the way he says it.”
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Robbe-Grillet’s world is one of instability, violence, and artificiality. He toys with the audience, leaving us more perplexed than when we entered the film. By using striking imagery, whether that be sensual monochrome shots in Trans-Europ-Express or bright, Mondrian-inspired set design in Eden and After, Robbe-Grillet envelopes us in a surreal world of game-playing and distrust – both between the characters and between filmmaker and viewer.
Trans-Europ-Express explores the deceit that occurs through filmmaking, with Robbe-Grillet expressing how the truth can never fully be represented. The medium’s artificiality is highlighted by scenes of a film crew discussing their next idea (with Robbe-Grillet serving as the director), contrasting with images from the very film they’re thinking up. Within their proposed film, Trinignant stars alongside Marie-France Pisier, and the pair engage in sexual acts that incorporate bondage and twisted rape fantasies.
Robbe-Grillet’s use of sexual images can often veer a little too heavily into the realm of the male gaze, with women taking on the role of prisoner – literally caged up (Eden and After) or chained to the bed (Successive Slidings of Pleasure). There’s no denying that Robbe-Grillet’s depiction of women in this respect is often uncomfortable, especially when male characters are inflicting pain and violence against them.
Simultaneously, it is fascinating to examine how the director uses the naked form as a symbol of ultimate desire and fantasy, yet one that is tainted by the destruction of reality. These female bodies are covered in blood, mutilated, and controlled – no longer are they symbols of freedom and possibility, only carnage, obfuscating the margin between concrete objectivity and the vivacity of dreams and impulse.
By blending eroticism with horror, submission, captivity and death, Robbe-Grillet deliberately imbues the narrative with a greater sense of confusion and ambiguity, subverting the way the naked body is typically consumed on film by confronting the audience with a menagerie of conflicting themes and imagery. Fear intersects with desire, lust collides with mortality, and Robbe-Grillet’s films become vessels for opposing emotions to meet and coexist, where time is fluid and unfixed, and reality is merely a place for dreams (and nightmares) to come to life.
In Eden and After, a group of students find themselves wrapped up in a psychedelic dreamscape after a mysterious man named Duchemin supplies them with hallucinatory drugs. However, before this, Robbe-Grillet destabilises the narrative, imbuing the supposed real world with as much distrust as the subsequent dream world. The students play strange games with each other, tricking us into believing that characters have died, only for them to appear unharmed. The film progresses into a psychosexual hallucination, with Robbe-Grillet venturing so far into abstraction that many viewers have cited Eden and After as his most confusing and incoherent work.
By working with ambiguous images and non-linearity, the director allows the audience to form their own narrative around this bridge between the real and the imagined. The director wants us to remain in a constant state of questioning, encouraging us to think about what we take at face value. What should we question? And what should simply be accepted? To do so, Robbe-Grillet manipulates cinematic form with the efficiency of a skilled writer, experimenting with structure and defying many of the cinematic techniques we are familiar with.
While Robbe-Grillet’s movies are certainly an acquired taste – narrative structure and resolution are nowhere in sight – his work reflects an era of radical experimentation that has had a significant impact on modern cinema. Robbe-Grillet’s marriage of form and content, destabilising the narrative through bold aesthetic choices, is truly spectacular.
