Alain Robbe- Grillet: Six Films, 1963-1974

L’Homme qui ment (1968)

“When a body of work is inherently made up of intricately layered themes and hidden caches of ideas, surmising the work as a whole can be extremely difficult.  This is never more prescient than in the BFI’s release of six films by French film writer and director, Alain Robbe-Grillet; a seemingly missing link in French cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.  His work is so ingrained within the era’s dismissal of formal ideas and overcoming paranoia over narrative conjecture that it’s surprising that his name is not bandied about in the same manner as Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, and Alain Resnais, but Robbe-Grillet’s work violently defies its role as a hyper-active pilot fish of the new wave. Robbe-Grillet may perhaps be best known for writing Resnais’ Last Year in Marienbad (1961) but his work as director begins to showcase the real ideas behind his role as an auteur, diluting Resnais’ film in hindsight and making it easier to spot where each other’s input begins and ends.  Watching the earliest film in the box set, The Immortal One (L’Immortelle, 1963), is akin to creating the diffusion between creative inputs in a similar fashion to watching Donald Cammell’s solo work and then reassessing his role on Performance (1970) with Nicolas Roeg; the delineation between individuals becomes interesting and easier to spot. When a body of work is inherently made up of intricately layered themes and hidden caches of ideas, surmising the work as a whole can be extremely difficult.  This is never more prescient than in the BFI’s release of six films by French film writer and director, Alain Robbe-Grillet; a seemingly missing link in French cinema of the 1960s and 1970s.  His work is so ingrained within the era’s dismissal of formal ideas and overcoming paranoia over narrative conjecture that it’s surprising that his name is not bandied about in the same manner as Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, and Alain Resnais, but Robbe-Grillet’s work violently defies its role as a hyper-active pilot fish of the new wave. …”
Celluloid Wicker Man
Mondo Digital
YouTube: Alain Robbe-Grillet: Six Films 1963-1974

L’Immortelle (1963)