Istanbul, Byzantium that was. The
Trial (dir. Orson Welles) is intimately related, The Immortal Story
as well, doubtless. The opening shot of city walls
reflects the headdress of an ancient personification,
also in the soundtrack it prefigures a famous effect in Losey’s Accident.
The cocktail party sequence makes use of Hitchcock’s
transitions from one reel to the next in Rope as a device to shift the
scene. The great mosque is a variant of Kafka’s
“Before the Law”. The French
Lieutenant’s Woman (Karel Reisz) borrows the rowboat and tunnel.
The haphazard cemetery resembles the Selenite kingdom from
Juran’s First Men in the Moon, out of it rise Valéry’s columns.
The headstones every which way are said to be planted that way and used when
they fall as paving stones.
The river café is passed by a steamship close at hand, the
Turkish flag is lowered at the stern in a few seconds to the right of the shot,
a second personification of L stands on the café terrace left, wearing a print
dress of Maltese crosses or croix pattés.
The statuette (left arm and right knee raised) is still in the
bazaar after N has purchased it for L. Her address is not written. M’s two dogs each figure in the death of L and N,
her silver chain signifies la belle captive, he follows the same route.
The palace fronts along the river are ruins behind. The Greek boy shows the underground passages that figure
famously in Young’s From Russia with Love, columns half-submerged
in water.
Trans
Europ Express
A film devised aboard the “train à location obligatoire”. Trintignant as the recruit has Marnie under cover of
Transes (Trances), he hides his revolver
amid “messages maritimes”.
Paris-Antwerp
(Anvers), Hotel Miro. Robbe-Grillet’s soundtrack is
in continual activity. Abbé
Petitjean is the byword. A
bottle of Gueuze, the blind man...
And there you are, done on your second trip by the boss, the
first is a dry run, without “la coco”.
Abbé Petitjean drinks at Chez Samson. Canada Steamship Lines has
seen better days, Lambermont has his memorial. Diamonds
would be better, they do diamonds in Antwerp, is the critique.
A dead prostitute is the key, leading to the Cabaret Eve and “L’Esclave”, where the police close in.
“For comic dialogue,” wrote Renata Adler,
“Robbe-Grillet is no Ivy Compton-Burnett.” Furthermore, it
“begins to seem a bright, arbitrary relief from the serious
artist’s necessary but probably paranoid notion that things make any
sense at all” (New York Times). “The
vague modernism of the project can’t conceal an underlying
pomposity” (Time Out Film Guide). Halliwell’s
Film Guide has “almost succeeds”.
The war, the two wars, one and the same.
L’Homme
qui ment
A singular parallel emanates from Bertolucci in Partner
at this time and continues in Il Conformista (the opening scene) but
above all Strategia del ragno, q.v., finally 1900
addresses the Jean/Boris cul-de-sac.
Trintignant is an actor (un comédien), Boris Varissa, who
tells tales of his Resistance colleague Jean Robin. Each tale is defective or
contradicts another, meanwhile he enters into affairs with Robin’s maid
Maria, his sister Sylvia, and nearly his wife Laura, before Robin returns and
kills him, whereupon Varissa once again embarks on the true story for the
camera’s benefit.
L’Éden
et après
A film about the making of a movie, the students at the Eden
café are actors, the “stranger” who enters is Char’s
“ringleader”, the director.
The film is made up of cinematic metaphors, like Monroe
Stahr’s famous monologue in Kazan’s The Last Tycoon. These
include the Dalian image of a simple abstract picture that turned on its side
becomes an Arab house, this stands for the central performance and the climax
of the film. Others readily identifiable are the Venusian beauty and her mirror
(a double), followed by the complementary image of a man dispatching his rival,
conclusive images.
“J’ai retrouvé la mer,” says the girl
at the seaside, entering the sunshot sea.
The opening credits, partly spoken, are a gift from Welles and
Hitchcock (North by Northwest). Duchamp’s nude descends a spiral
staircase to a saddle. Mirages, dramas, adventures, romance, intrigue, the
representation of these, then back to the café and its neon signboard with half
a pair of dice bearing a quincunx.
N. a pris les dés
The famous anagram of L’Éden et après. “Chance, too, has its laws,
they say.”
The chancy, revelatory proposition that a detective story
isn’t reality, it’s art. That “the
string of images has no meaning, hopeful or otherwise, than the one given by
the spectator or abandoned, out of laziness or out of fear.”
N., one of the students, performs this operation of “three
dice with six sides”.
Imagery from Wesselmann and Lichtenstein and Antonioni (Il
deserto rosso).
Glissements progressifs du plaisir
A vicious
circle.
Simply a tribade murder, a pair of
scissors in the heart. It was a man, surely! Joan of Arc in the convent ward convokes a Sapphic salon. Her avocate
is the spitting image of the corpse!
It is a desperate struggle, of words and ideas, the verity of
the thing. A crime always reconstructed, the inspector
tells the camera.
Robbe-Grillet’s great masterpiece on a theme of French
poetry (Baudelaire, Verlaine) turned to cinema by grace of the detective and
Dreyer and The Exorcist. A few frames of
Dreyer’s Vampyr are all the basis.
Giochi di fuoco
The Italian version of Le Jeu avec le feu has its points,
in terms of hilarity.
The one about the dodgy banker’s girl who’s abducted
for ransom, or rather some other girl with a birthmark on her left breast
resembling a pawnbroker’s emblem.
The banker’s girl is put away for safekeeping in a
high-class bordello with reference to Le Sang du Poète, and it all ends
happily, the banker shoots himself, Frantz a pris la demoiselle et les
dollars.
One of the funniest films ever made, to be sure.
La Belle captive
There is a beautiful key (Sight and Sound points this
out) in Goethe’s “Die Braut von Korinth”, but there is another
even lovelier and much closer to home, No, No, Nanette (dir. Herbert
Wilcox).
Robbe-Grillet’s hero has no niece to save his bacon from a
generosity born of happy wedlock, he goes before the firing squad and gets it
in the neck.
Such is criticism (the BFI likes not this picture).
Un Bruit qui rend fou
The Blue Villa (Hong Kong). Der fliegende Holländer (Frank, Le Voyeur).
The continuous Robbe-Grillet soundtrack (colonne sonore). Mah jongg tiles shuffled,
“a sound that drives one mad”.
Vermeer at police headquarters (The Typist).
Beckett’s dance numbers have the implacability of the
game. Who murdered the girl, her stepfather who stood to gain, or pale Frank (L’Immortelle,
Le Jeu avec le feu)?
Frank et Santa,
“pitié pour eux”. Fred Ward,
looking like Ezra Pound. Herzog’s taverna band (Letzte Worte) plays the overture. Nordmann (the accused, Edouard).
Mars runs the place, a name from Chandler and Hawks and Winner. “Exterior. Day.” It was not to be understood by critics.
“A dreamy puzzle of a film” (Stephen Holden, New York Times). “Commercial
chances look watery in the extreme” (Derek Elley,
Variety). “We’re
unsure” (Geoff Andrew, Time Out
Film Guide). “An aesthetic tease without
many payoffs” (Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago
Reader).
Co-directed with Dimitri de Clercq.
C’est Gradiva qui vous appelle
An absolute masterpiece of pure Surrealism, on the model of
Cocteau’s Le Sang d’un Poète, the art historian and his book
on Delacroix.
Robbe-Grillet’s last film is very easily understood as a
simple or complex variant of La Belle captive, set in Marrakesh where
John Locke the art expert imagines he’s Eugène Delacroix at length, in
pursuit of Hermione or Leïla or Gradiva Rediviva (1806-1842), while the lovely
Belkis repines at home.
Madama Butterfly has a substantial part to play in this,
Delacroix’s carnets as well, Cocteau’s Orphée, also
footage from L’Éden et après and Glissements progressifs du
plaisir.
An actress, model, memoirist, “dream actress”,
Gradiva, published by Macmillan.
An earlier version by Albertazzi or the original novel is the
reference in several synopses mentioning Pompeii, so little is this great work
known.