The Erotic Dream Machine: Interviews With Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films
Author: Associate Professor Anthony N. Fragola; Roch Charles Smith
Date: 1992-01-01 05:00:00+00:00
Description: In a revealing series of interviews, Anthony N. Fragola and Roch C. Smith examine all nine of Robbe-Grillet’s films, specifically exploring the cultural milieu to which the films are closely related. Readers are encouraged to view Robbe-Grillet from a variety of as the auteur who probes various stylistic techniques and devices, especially the use of eroticism as a structural metaphor; as the international artist; as the detached observer; and as the impassioned creator. The nine films covered are Last Year at Marienbad, L’Immortelle, Trans-Europ-Express, The Man Who Lies, Eden and After, N Too
Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press

The Erotic Dream Machine

Interviews with Alain Robbe-Grillet on His Films

1992, Anthony N. Fragola and Roch C. Smith and Alain Robbe-Grillet Southern Illinois University Press Carbondale and Edwardsville Contents

I llustrations

P
reface

1

. Introduction

Part 1. The Films

2. The First Films:

ast Year at Marienbad and L'Immo

L

rtelle

3. T
rans-Europ-Express

4. T
he Man Who Lies

5. A Film and Its Double:

den and Af

E

ter and N Took the Dice

6. T
he Progressive Slidings of Pleasure

7. P
laying With Fire

8. L
a Belle Captive

9

. P
rojects and Previews

Part 2. On Making Films

10. Technique

11. The World of Film

1

2. The Art of Film

N
otes

F
ilmography and Bibliography

Illustrations

F
ollowing page

94

D
elphine Seyrig (A) in Last Year at Marienbad

S
acha Pitoeff (M) and Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad F rançoise Brion (L, Lâlle, Leyla, etc.) in L'Immortelle

F rançoise Brion and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (N) in L'Immortelle Catherine Robbe-Grillet (Lucette) and Alain Robbe-rillet (Jean) in rans-Europ-Express

T

Jean-Louis Trintignant (Elias, himself) in adolescent's room in TransEur-
p-Express
o

Game of blind man's bluff with Silvie Bréal (Marie, the maid) and Suzana Kocurikova (Laura, the wife) seen through the castle window in The
an W

M

ho Lies

Jean-Louis Trintignant (Boris Varissa) before a firing squad in the castle
e
c llars in The Man Who Lies

The rape scene with Lorraine Rainer (Marie-Eve) at the Eden Café in E
den and After

Catherine Jourdan (Violette) discovers the dead Pierre Zimmer (Du-hemi
c
n, Dutchman, etc.) in the Danube in Eden and After

Anicée Alvina (Alice) painting her body in The Progressive Slidings of P leasure

Anicée Alvina (Alice) seducing Michel Lonsdale (the magistrate) in The
rogress

P
ive Slidings of Pleasure

A
nicée Alvina (Caroline de Saxe) in the bordello in Playing With Fire Philippe Noiret (Georges de Saxe) and Christine Boisson (Christina) playin
g Othello in Playing With Fire

C
yrielle Claire (Sara Zeitgeist) in La Belle Captive

Daniel Mesguich (Walter) and Gabrielle Lazure (Marie-Ange, the vam-i
p
re) in La Belle Captive

Gabrielle Lazure (Marie-Ange) on the road as discovered by Walter in L a Belle Captive

G
abrielle Lazure (Marie-Ange) and her henchmen in La Belle Captive First page of the initial draft of Un Bruit qui rend fou (A Maddening oise)

N

Preface

Widely recognized as one of the leading experimental novelists of the twentieth century, Alain Robbe-Grillet has also received acclaim for his highly successful collaboration as a scriptwriter with film director Alain Resnais in the creation of the 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad. Since that time, Robbe-Grillet has directed eight more films that, like his novels, have consistently challenged the limits of expected narrative structures and have called into question the comfortable assumptions of conventional realism. His films, however, have not attracted the degree of critical inquiry in the English-speaking world that has been accorded to his written works.

Why this inversion of the more common situation of the widely seen film and the seldom read novel? Why is the auteur less known than the author? This book of interviews, providing a forum for the auteur's apologia, furnishes some explanations for that reversal.

But more significantly, it addresses directly the underlying imbalance in the English-speaking public's perception of Robbe-Grillet by seeking to contribute to a wider awareness and a keener appreciation of Robbe-Grillet's films, especially among American audiences.

Indeed, a primary goal of this volume is to encourage informed discussion of RobbeGrillet's cinema among students and scholars by giving voice to the filmmaker's views on his own work. The scholar should find in Robbe-Grillet's observations further illumination of the filmmaker's work and thought as well as issues that call for fuller exploration, while the film student will discover in these pages a distinctive introduction to Robbe-Grillet's filmic world. We have kept the film student in mind by footnoting Robbe-Grillet's references to figures who may not be known to undergraduates and by using translations for all but the most easily understood titles, trusting that the scholar will not be importuned once our purpose has been explained.

Robbe-Grillet's films are intimately, if sometimes problematically, related to their cultural milieu. These interviews attempt to explore that context with the filmmaker as a further means of contributing to a thoughtful consideration of Robbe-Grillet as auteur. RobbeGrillet's commentary is of such latitude -- often touching on issues of aesthetics, philosophy, sociology, and, of course, literature -- that any student or scholar will find much to contemplate in the pages that follow.

Readers already familiar with the range of Robbe-Grillet's oeuvre may also be surprised to discover an unexpected facet of Robbe-Grillet emerging from time to time from these interviews: that of the professor or explicator. Yet the professorial role is not a new one for Robbe-Grillet. He has taught in universities around the globe. He returns regularly to teach at Washington University in St. Louis and at New York University, and he has taught and lectured on several other American campuses from Florida to California. The present interviews were born from just such a tour, which brought him from the University of Florida, where he was teaching in Spring 1982, to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro for a presentation of his film The Man Who Lies. Robbe-Grillet graciously consented to a videotaped interview on his novels and films during that visit. Following a return visit in November 1985, when he discussed his film Eden and After, Robbe-Grillet was appointed Visiting Distinguished Professor of French and of Cinema at the University of

North Carolina at Greensboro for Fall 1987. During each of these stays and on several other occasions between 1982 and 1991, we continued our interviews with Robbe-Grillet.

The idea of incorporating these interviews into a book evolved during his semester in Greensboro in 1987. Yet the final product reflects nearly a decade of dialogue on the films of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

The interviews were carried out in French and were translated, both on site and from the recordings, by Roch Smith, who was also primarily responsible for the preface, notes, and bibliography. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations of published material are his as well. The first draft of the introduction was written by Anthony Fragola. Subsequent revisions of the introduction and editing of the text were a joint effort between the two of us. But the most important collaborator was, of course, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and we are deeply grateful to him for his cheerful and energetic participation over the many years of this project.

No undertaking of this duration and complexity could be completed without the support of several individuals and organizations. Most impor tantly, we offer our heartfelt thanks to our spouses, Anne Fragola and Elaine Smith, who sustained this long effort through their unflagging encouragement and wise counsel. We are indebted to Professor David Michael Kaplan, without whose motivation and support this project might never have been initiated. For his invitation to participate in the International Robbe-Grillet Symposium held at Washington University in October 1988, his welcome upon our return visit in October 1990, and his helpful comments and criticisms, we are most grateful to Professor Michel Rybalka. We take particular pleasure in thanking Maya Rybalka, whose hospitality and wit made our visits to St. Louis festive as well as stimulating. We thank Professor Thomas Bishop of New York University for his help in arranging a telephone interview with RobbeGrillet in October 1985 and for his cordial hospitality during our interviews with RobbeGrillet at New York University in April 1989. We wish to express our gratitude to Professor Royal S. Brown of Queens College of the City University of New York, who organized an Alain Robbe-Grillet Film Retrospective at the Anthology Film Archives in New York in April 1989 and who welcomed us warmly to this exceptional event. We thank Professor Charles P. Tisdale of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, who read the first draft of the Introduction and offered helpful suggestions for improvement. Professor Raymond Gay-Crosier of the University of Florida made possible our initial contact with Robbe-Grillet, for which we are most appreciative. We are especially grateful to Michael Robinson who helped transcribe the early drafts of the manuscript while a graduate assistant and who, following receipt of his M.F.A. degree in English, stayed on to assist us in the preparation of the subsequent drafts. His persistence was invaluable.

We wish to acknowledge the support, in the form of several grants, of the Research Council of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and we are grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the North Carolina Humanities Council for grants that underwrote aspects of Robbe-Grillet's visits to our campus, including his participation in a Graduate Language Institute in French in November 1985 and the 11

November 1987 American premiere of his film La Belle Captive. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Pascal-Emmanuel Gallet of the Ministry of External Relations in Paris in making available videocassette copies of five Robbe-Grillet films.

1

Introduction

Endless corridors of dream time; people positioned around a formal garden in the frozen pose of statues; characters without past or future, existing only for the moment and in the moment; a man peering through jalousies in Istanbul, imagining a Byzantine world of harems and jealous guardians; Robbe-Grillet himself, playing a director on the Trans-EuropExpress headed for Antwerp with his producer, accompanied by his assistant --
actually Robbe-Grillet's wife -- creating a fictional world of drugs in which the sado-erotic urges of the main character deviate from the plot being constructed; a man pursued by Nazi soldiers, running backwards in time, inventing his role as a partisan and local hero, who might also be a traitor; bored students who play at rape and murder and a young woman encountering herself within the labyrinth of a factory; vampirism, lesbian fantasies, and the tortures of the Inquisition perpetrated on naked women in a convent serving as a prison; a father who places his daughter in an elegant brothel; an enigmatic and sensual woman, already dead, emerging from curtains framing a beach to bite the neck of her victim: these images originate from writer-director Alain Robbe-Grillet, whose films such as Last Year at Marienbad, Eden and After, and The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure make use of contemporary stereotypes to reveal their processes of storytelling and to challenge the norms of naturalistic modes of narration.

Conventional realism, with its usual meaning of the well-told tale as "true to life" or

"natural," has never served as a test of worth for RobbeGrillet, whose experiments with the novel have had a profound influence on the writing of fiction in the last half of the twentieth century. A founder of the French New Novel movement in the 1950s and 1960s, Robbe- Grillet departs radically in his narratives from the view established by Honor de Balzac in the nineteenth century that the novel should chronicle social reality. RobbeGrillet's fiction is not a mirror of life carried along the road, as Stendhal would have it, but a mirror reflecting back upon the narrative itself. This "reflexivity" exposes and dissolves the arbitrary conventions of narration, including plot and character. In more recent works, sometimes labeled the New New Novel, even the possibility of a single narrator is subverted. Unlike conventional realists, Robbe-Grillet requires that his reader share in creating the work. This participatory creation, a trait common to many modern artists, is also an important key to understanding his films, in which traditional filmic realism and narrative are challenged.

Steeped in melodrama, early American narrative cinema reflected the norm for American and, ultimately, world-wide sensibilities by catering to the public's appetite for strong plots and easily comprehensible situations: not only should characters be admirable, but the viewer should be able to identify with them; psychological realism should prevail, with consistent characterization. The main conflict must be established quickly and resolved in a positive fashion. Robbe-Grillet's novels and films reject the use of all those narrative conventions that the public is accustomed to and even demands. In fact, he believes the conventional insistence on immediate reality that controls and thwarts creative energy must be exposed and subverted. Robbe-Grillet maintains a high regard for the viewer's capacity to perceive different realities and other truths and to acquire new sensibilities.

Like the surrealists, he is a visionary who seeks to discover unfamiliar ways of seeing instead of allowing the viewer to retreat into the familiar and reassuring worlds of the status quo.

As revealed in these interviews, Robbe-Grillet is gracious, tolerant, well versed in science (he was trained as an agricultural engineer, and his first job was as a statistician), philosophy, and art, but especially in literature and film. He discusses issues with wit, ease, and unassailable logic. Not surprisingly, John Fletcherhas called him "one of the most influential figures on the intellectual landscape in France since the heyday of Sartre and Camus in the 1940s." 1  Robbe-Grillet views the material he uses to organize the narratives of films as essentially ideological. His art incorporates fragments of discourse that contemporary society attempts to impose. If artists are truly revolutionary, they must invent new forms of expression to supersede the previous ones and to free themselves (and us) from the dominant ideology, the "natural order of things." From disorder emerges
energy. From that disorder a new order is temporarily created. One replaces the other in an affirmation of the freedom necessary for creativity and new vision. Robbe-Grillet bases his assault on nineteenth-century realistic fiction in the belief that its language and structure reflect an arbitrary view of the world. He does not expect the language of his own encounter with the contemporary world to be canonized and to serve as the sole means of expression in the future.

To appreciate Robbe-Grillet's contribution to the development of cinema, it is imperative to understand the complexity of his films. Yet they have been grossly misinterpreted and undervalued for a number of reasons, the principal one being the tendency of American audiences to reject experimental approaches. Furthermore, film critics, unlike literary critics, cannot benefit from an established body of works spanning several centuries to serve as a context for their discourse.

The systematic study of film is a relatively recent phenomenon. Although film as an art form began to develop with some of the earliest films at the beginning of the twentieth century, not until spectacles such as Quo Vadis and Cabiria in Italy and Birth of a Nation in the United States did filmmakers attempt to develop a complex narrative. When André Bazin and his disciples, such as François Truffaut, began writing seriously about film in the 1950s in Cabiers du Cinéma, the study of film had been restricted to a few specialists.

Occasionally a filmmaker such as Sergei Eisenstein also theorized about the way film communicates. His theory regarding montage and the use of sound heavily influenced Robbe-Grillet.

The critics at Cahiers, many of whom later became directors in the French New Wave movement, were steeped in the tradition of realistic narrative. According to Robbe-Grillet, they severely undermined the public's understanding of filmmakers such as René Clair, whose use of sound counterpoint rather than mere reinforcement of the image challenged the realistic conventions of cinematic expression. In fact, it was not the ability of the camera to record external reality objectively that attracted RobbeGrillet to cinema, as many critics believe, but the possibilities that sound offered in subverting conventional reality and depicting the imaginary and the subjective by acting simultaneously on the senses of sight and hearing: "Finally, in the image as in the sound, the possibility of presenting with all the appearance of incontestable objectivity what is, also, only dream or memory, in a word, what is only imagination."  2

Reacting to American studio control of filmmaking, Bazin and the French New Wave critics formulated the theory of the director as author, or auteur. The French term in English permits a useful distinction, not possible in the original French, between a film's "author"

and the author of written works. According to Cahiers critics, film auteurs transcended the Hollywood studio system with its assembly line approach. The Cahiers critics postulated that the body of an auteur's films should be studied in light of recurring techniques, themes, and the discernible personality of the director. Despite many inconsistencies and shortcomings, such as the failure to acknowledge that film is essentially a collaborative art, the auteur theory presented a methodology for the examination of a director's work and legitimized the systematic study of film as a serious academic discipline.

Another factor that impedes the rigorous study of Robbe-Grillet's films, or any non-Hollywood based films deemed experimental, arises from the method of distribution in the United States. Robbe-Grillet has often spoken about the American system of distribution.

In the United States, distribution is controlled by the old Hollywood studios and other distribution companies that expect a high rate of profit on their investment -- five to six times the original investment is considered reasonable. Under the present system, in order to recoup the costs of advertising, shipment of films, and overhead, a distribution company must strike hundreds of 35-mm copies. Such a capital expenditure represents far more than the entire production budget of one of Robbe-Grillet's films. To insure profits, American distributors cater to the mass market that devours films as reassuring entertainment to be passively enjoyed.

In Europe, especially in France, a small but established nework of commercial theaters akin to our art houses offers a viable outlet for RobbeGrillet's films. The American art houses, after enjoying a modest following in the United States during the 1960s and

1970s, now survive, with few exceptions, only in cities like New York and Los Angeles.

While the art houses flourished, they allowed filmmakers such as Robbe-Grillet to show their work in the United States and to make a modest profit for the distributors. This shrinking market is a result of intense competition from commercial theaters, which are increasingly part of chains, but it also reflects a growing conservatism hostile to the notion of film as art and to experimentation. With such severe economic restrictions, RobbeGrillet's films are not easily available for viewing, even by an interested public. A comprehensive retrospective of his oeuvre, such as the one offered in April 1989 by the Anthology Film Archives in New York, is rare. 3  RobbeGrillet's haunting and beautiful La Belle Captive, shot in 1983, was never shown in the United States until it premiered on 11

November 1987 at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, where Robbe-Grillet was teaching. Unavailable in the United States, the print was supplied by Robbe-Grillet's Canadian distributor.

As a result, Robbe-Grillet's films have never received the attention they merit in the United States. Of all his films, Robbe-Grillet is best known for Last Year at Marienbad -- an irony, for although he wrote the script, the film was actually directed by Alain Resnais. After seeing Last Year at Marienbad, the distributors deemed it a failure, and the film remained shelved for six months. Proceeding on their own, the filmmakers surreptitiously entered the film in the Venice Film Festival where it won the Golden Lion Award, thereby insuring its distribution. The film received other awards, including an Academy Award nomination for best original screenplay and the Méliès Prize in France. Though revolutionary, Last Year at Marienbad enjoyed enormous success.

Widely discussed and analyzed, Last Year at Marienbad was nevertheless misunderstood.

Immersed in the realist tradition, critics and viewers felt compelled to superimpose a conventional rational order on the events. Did the man and woman meet the year before?

Did she forget their encounter, or was she being coy? Perhaps she was afraid of her jealous guardian? As Robbe-Grillet indicates in For a New Novel, such questions have no meaning; for like film itself, which unfolds only in the present tense, there can also be no past and no future within the film.

The tendency to expect an a priori rational explanation for Last Year at Marienbad was fostered by the association of it with Resnais' Hiroshima mon amour. Scripted by Maguerite Duras, whose lyrical text added a layered dimension to the images, Hiroshima mon amour resolves divergent worlds and experiences by intersecting them at the present moment with the memory of the past. Guided by a distinct chronological order of the events occurring in history, Hiroshima mon amour travels back and forth in time through memory. The Nazi occupation of France and the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima give the film referents outside the characters and help to orient the viewer.

In contrast, one of the revolutionary features of Robbe-Grillet's approach is that nothing exists outside the world of images. A satisfactory explanation of the events cannot be constructed because nothing happens prior to the first images on the screen. A viewer asked Robbe-Grillet after a showing of The Man Who Lies, "What sense does it make?"

RobbeGrillet's answer is again maddeningly simple to the realist -- it makes no sense, except what the viewer constructs. As Robbe-Grillet states, "Just as the only time which matters is that of the film itself, the only important 'character' is the spectator; in his mind unfolds the whole story, which is precisely imagined by him. " 4

In Last Year at Marienbad, the elaborate stories that X (the man) tells A (the woman) have meaning only in that the viewer constructs them for him- or herself. Instead of themes, coherence, chronological order, RobbeGrillet offers intricate games artfully designed to undermine any ultimate explanation of the events. Like Boris' life in the later Robbe-Grillet film The Man Who Lies, X's life can have meaning only through the telling of stories. Both X and Boris display an urgency to talk, to go from one fabrication to another in a series of variations, repetitions, and contradictions. When they finish their tales they no longer exist, and the film ends.

What remains for the viewer of Last Year at Marienbad is a world of images, frozen moments of time, a layered soundtrack of organ music and lyrical voice-over narration, stylized acting intended to diminish the sense of conventional characterization --
characters do not even have names, only letters designated in the script, which we actually do not hear -- and an endless obsessive quality, as in a dream. In Last Year at Marienbad, we discover striking similarities to surrealism exemplified by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali in their film An Andalusian Dog. Both films deliberately undermine any attempt to impose rational order, linear time, or plausible explanation on the filmic world.

The time that unfolds in An Andalusian Dog is dream time; in it we are voyeurs of Buñuel and Dalí's dream, while in Last Year at Marienbad, we are active participants in the dream.

In Last Year at Marienbad, Robbe-Grillet confuses our normal sense of orientation by subverting our ability to make clear distinctions between divergent points of view. The camera moves with graceful fluidity past the ornate ceilings and weaves among guests who are either immobile or exchanging fragments of dialogue. At times the camera seems to reflect the perspective of X (Giorgio Albertazzi) but then focuses on him, thereby creating a tension between the camera's objective lens and the protagonist's point of view.

In essence, Robbe-Grillet merges the subjective and the objective. Through this technique Robbe-Grillet creates a visual metaphor illustrating the surrealist belief that apparent contradictions between the real and the imagined, the subjective and the objective, can cease to exist.

This breaking down of distinctions and merging of the subjective and the objective lies at the core of L'Immortelle. N arrives in Istanbul infused with stereotypical notions of a city of harems, jealous guardians, mystery, intrigue, and death. The film opens with a moving shot leading towards the city. In the sound track we hear hypnotic Turkish music and sounds of a car crash, which prefigure the end of the film. Then we see N at the window looking through the shutters, or "jalousies," where he sees a woman, L, in different poses at various locations, which he could not be witnessing except through his subjective

"mind's eye."

The two shots of N looking through the jalousies at L, and L seemingly gazing back at N, in juxtaposition to one another, comprise the basic structure of L'Immortelle. Hence, RobbeGrillet employs the revolutionary technique of substituting the shot for the sequence as the basis for narrative. Robbe-Grillet's concept of the shot as the organizing unit of L'Immortelle mortelle refers back to Eisenstein's principle of montage. Contrary to the theory of Vsevolod Pudovkin+, who founded his idea of montage on the linkage of narrative sequences, Eisenstein based his theory of montage on the collision of individual shots. Like both Eisenstein and the surrealists, Robbe-Grillet attempts to establish the primacy of the image found in the individual shot as the basis for film narrative. Keeping this in mind, the viewer and critic must look at each of Robbe-Grillet's shots as though it were a painting.

The key to appreciating Robbe-Grillet's films is not through a process of ratiocination but from a sensory and aesthetic response to the individual shots that eventually comprise a nonverbal universe. Any attempt to explain Robbe-Grillet's world through words immediately compromises the integrity of the nonverbal image. Not surprisingly, RobbeGrillet despairs when he sees an audience watching a video copy of one of his films, for this alteration of the original 35-mm print destroys the beauty of the images and impedes the interior nonverbal response that he so carefully seeks to create.

Critics of Robbe-Grillet's direction in L'Immortelle fail to take into account that he did not work with a crew receptive to his vision and able to contribute to it. Orson Welles, for example, directed Citizen Kane without any experience in film, but he had the distinct advantage of working with the gifted Greg Toland. Welles became famous for utilizing wideangle shots, sets with ceilings, and depth of field, but as the cinematographer Nestor Almendros suggests, Toland had already employed these techniques while acting as director of photography for John Ford in The Long Voyage Home and The Grapes of Wrath.

5 As our interviews reveal, RobbeGrillet felt himself burdened with Maurice Barry as cinematographer. Mistrustful of Robbe-Grillet's vision and understanding of film, Barry sometimes refused to comply with his directions. Robbe-Grillet could have created a more lyrical style for L'Immortelle, but it would not have conformed to his vision of the film. For example, his innovative use of the pan that captures N in different poses at various places suggests a fragmentation of time, place, and perception within the context of an uninterrupted continuum.

Although L'Immortelle further elaborates Robbe-Grillet's techniques and motifs, the stiffness of the acting, which Robbe-Grillet acknowledges posed a problem for viewers, prevented the film from garnering commercial success. Nevertheless, the film enabled Robbe-Grillet to serve his apprenticeship. Like its predecessor, L'Immortelle leaves the viewer with striking images: a boat coasting silently among pillars of the cisterns of Constantine -- as though journeying though a Jungian symbol of the unconscious -- N
staring through the jalousies, the frozen positions of N and L in death, and the massive black dogs staring into the headlights of an approaching car.

Three years after L'Immortelle, Robbe-Grillet directed Trans-EuropExpress (1966), one of his most popular films and one of his favorites. The film revolves around a director, Jean, played by Robbe-Grillet himself; a producer, Marc, played by Paul Louyet; and the script supervisor, Lucette, played by Robbe-Grillet's wife, Catherine.  6 After stopping at a newsstand where he looks at an erotic magazine and then buys the news magazine L'Express, the director, with his companions, boards the train. The producer suggests that they extemporize a movie, with the train as the setting, as they travel to Antwerp. The plot they invent is ostensibly about a man enlisted to carry drugs on the same train.

Subsequently, the actor, Jean-Louis Trintignant, mimics the director's actions by stopping to look at the same magazines and buying L'Express, although he hides the erotic magazine within the covers of the news magazine. Trintignant sits in the same compartment with the trio, then leaves. Jean does not recognize Trintignant but imagines him in the role of Elias, the man enlisted as a drug runner. From there the "story" unfolds with the trio creating different possibilities they reject or alter.

Robbe-Grillet states that critics interpreted the film as an example of the difficulties of the creative process, but they missed the obvious fact that at a certain point the character in the story acts independently of the prescribed actions. Elias even wakes up from a dream of Jean, which places into question the notion that the trio on the train are "real"

characters at all. Perhaps it is not the fictional character of Elias who is imagined but Jean.

From the very outset, this film within a film in Trans-Europ-Express is rich in ambiguities, innuendo, and contradictions that befuddle and amuse; these qualities also defy any possibility of an ultimate solution that might impose a logical order on the material and explain the events according to the realist world of causality and continuity. The choice of participants for the roles is a case in point. It is too facile to assume that Robbe-Grillet, cast as a director named Jean, simply plays himself under the guise of a fictional name.

Nevertheless, the fact that Robbe-Grillet does play a director cannot be entirely ignored. In effect, the result is the creation of ambiguity -- Robbe-Grillet may or may not be playing himself, and the same holds true for his wife. The role of Trintignant also functions on several levels. He is, of course, the actor, but strangely, Jean does not recognize him, although Lucette does. This casts into doubt the idea that Jean is a "real" director (note how this term immediately becomes problematic). Perhaps Trintignant is not really playing himself at this moment but a character in the film who then becomes the character in the film that the trio invents.

Later Elias' sexual obsessions with bondage, rape, and death take over the film and the original purported creators lose control. Trans-EuropExpress progresses from the artificial rape scene in Last Year at Marienbad to a more explicit if still stylized depiction of erotic and sadomasochistic games enacted by Elias and the prostitute Eva, portrayed by MarieFrance Pisier, who also plays herself. Trans-Europ-Express marks the point in RobbeGrillet's films where the increased depiction of sexual violence towards women engenders negative reaction by viewers and critics alike. In Trans-Europ-Express, Eva participates in the sadomasochistic games and appears to enjoy them. Eventually, Elias kills her, and his obsession with sexual violence leads to his own death when a policeman lures him to the nightclub, Eve.

In the films following Trans-Europ-Express, the portrayal of women, while retaining a patina of artificiality, becomes even more explicit and violent. With the increased acts of aggression and rape against women in contemporary society, many viewers find RobbeGrillet's images repellent. Although Robbe-Grillet appears impervious to this type of criticism, he does defend his position in these interviews and offers an explanation of his
intentions. For example, Robbe-Grillet points out that the scenes of rape and bondage in Trans-Europ-Express and other films are so highly stylized as to render them "unreal" and therefore nontitillating. In his view, the depictions are not to be thought of as promoting acts of aggression against women but as a means of undermining male-dominated narratives that depict violence against them.

In the interviews that follow, Robbe-Grillet departs from his role as an artist to assume that of a professor who suggests possible meanings for his own films, thereby entering into a conflictive stage between artist and critic, a doubling which mirrors the structure of a film like The Man Who Lies. (Yet Robbe-Grillet is careful to note that his statements are only his own opinions and are not to be considered any more valid than anyone else's.) Set in the mountains of Slovakia, The Man Who Lies (1968) focuses on the attempt to tell stories about a local Resistance hero, Jean Robin, by a character named Boris. Played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, Boris seems to run backward in time from the 1960s to the era of the Nazi occupation and Resistance fighters. The obvious details that Robbe-Grillet provides for this apparent displacement of time are the contemporary clothes that Trintignant wears that could not possibly belong to the 1940s. Although we see explosions and hear gunfire, it is not certain that the Nazis actually exist since Robbe-Grillet never shows Trintignant and the Nazi soldiers together in the same shot. From the outset, Robbe-Grillet manipulates our perceptions of reality through montage. The spectator may think the Nazi soldiers are pursuing this character but only sees images juxtaposed to one another. The possibility then arises that if the Nazis do not exist and they constitute one half of the juxtaposed images, Boris does not exist either; or perhaps both the Nazi soldiers and Boris exist but they are not linked. Instead, they coexist independently yet simultaneously in frozen moments of time. Of course, the opposite may be true as well: one set of images constitutes the real world, the other the imaginary, but the distinction between the two remains illusory. This ambiguous sense of time underscores RobbeGrillet's attempt to offer an alternative to causality and linearity.

In The Man Who Lies, the putative narrator is an actor who seeks meaning for his life.

What does an actor do? As Robbe-Grillet sees it, he portrays fictional characters, and he lies. The essence of good acting is to make these lies convincing, to make them truths. If Robbe-Grillet only wanted the actor to convince us of the veracity of his stories, then he would merely be trying to perpetuate verisimilitude. But the actor in The Man Who Lies tells many stories with numerous variants, with elements of one appearing in the other, only altered, thereby impugning their credibility. Skeptical of ultimate truths, ultimate solutions, Robbe-Grillet does not want to convince us. The narrator's stories lead us away from the ideological to the aesthetic, from what the story may be about to how it is told.

In the words of Carol J. Murphy, "By holding on to the notion of the lie, [Robbe-Grillet]

belies it by making every lie a truth in the generative structure of the creative process of his film." 7 The "truth" of the film is in the telling, not in what is told. Under close scrutiny, even those truths thought to be unassailable may no longer be valid, or they may never have been true and are therefore "lies."

Since The Man Who Lies was Robbe-Grillet's fourth film and funding came easier, he worked with greater freedom, liberating himself from a highly detailed shooting script.

Recognizing that film is a collaborative art and wanting to be free to include the chance occurrences that the surrealists so fervently believed in, Robbe-Grillet allowed the actors a greater degree of participation. Distinguishing between improvisation and "freedom under surveillance," he explains how the actor's contribution is ultimately determined --

"recuperated" is his term -- through writing and montage.

In Eden and After (1971), Robbe-Grillet pushes the fragmentation of narrative to new limits by eliminating the script altogether. Rather than being guided by a linear text, the shooting is based upon a grid whose cells are formed by the intersection of twelve themes and ten narrative series. Robbe-Grillet likens this structure to Arnold Schoenberg's atonal music, but this scheme was not followed rigidly. As Robbe-Grillet explains, many factors contributed to the enrichment and modifications of his anticipated structures.

In part, Eden and After is the result of Robbe-Grillet's trip to Tunisia. After The Man Who Lies, which did not do well at the box office, black and white films were no longer
considered marketable. Yet Robbe-Grillet makes clear he could not envision making a film in Eastman green because he could not abide that color. On Tunisia's island of Djerba, however, he discovered a world of architecture painted blue and white and skies of white and blue, a world that he could infuse with the color red, thus allowing him to explore themes of blood, sex, and death. In essence, to Robbe-Grillet the representational object is secondary to the materials and the manner employed to represent it. This pictorial style reflects RobbeGrillet's lifelong interest in painting, which led him to incorporate into Eden and After allusions to Paul Klee, who lived briefly in Tunisia, and especially to Piet Mondrian and Marcel Duchamp.

Built in a studio in Bratislava, the Café Eden is a labyrinth devised from Mondrian's work, incorporating rectangular shapes, mirrors, and movable panels. These highly visible grids reflect the intersection of themes and narrative series that serve as sources of the narrative sequence. In Eden and After, Robbe-Grillet makes allusions to the artist, Marcel Duchamp, whose "readymades" elevated common objects to the level of art. For the character of Duchamp, Robbe-Grillet creates the figure of Duchemin, alias Dutchman.

Duchemin arrives in the Café Eden where signs such as Coca Cola, Camel, and Drink Blood constitute references to pop art, contemporary culture, and the theme of vampirism that Robbe-Grillet will later explore in The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure and La Belle Captive.

Here the bored students play their games of rape, ritualistic murder, and Russian roulette.

Reflecting deeply embedded cultural stereotypes, Violette actively participates in these abusive diversions, just as Eva did in Trans-EuropExpress. After Duchemin arrives, he offers Violette the "powder of fear," which unleashes her terrifying visions of torture, rape, chains, and murder.

As Violette seeks Duchemin in a factory, she is confronted by images of herself. Through montage, Robbe-Grillet presents the theme of doubling. Furthermore, this technique presents Violette as a woman conditioned by stereotypical expectations of male-dominated contemporary society. Violette is passive, fragmented, split from her true self. When she sees a vis cous, spermlike substance oozing from a pipe, she touches it with fear and revulsion. Seemingly bereft of a sense of her integrated self, she remains fearful of male supremacy. Later, while watching a documentary film on Tunisia, where Robbe-Grillet makes a cameo appearance as a member of the audience, Violette finds herself transported to the island of Djerba, where she sees that Duchemin, now known as Dutchman, is a sculptor who incorporates junk as objets d'art, along with nude women in cages and other enactments of torture. When Dutchman makes love to her, the scene is not portrayed in a realistic erotic mode but more in the sense of a sculptor admiring his creation. This time Violette breaks through her passivity. She literally assumes the upper hand and slaps him. To RobbeGrillet this signifies Violette's independence and liberation from male ascendancy. Critics could argue that a few slaps fail to compensate for stabbing, rape, and torture, but the gesture is symbolic, not realistically representational. When asked what she is looking for, Violette answers, "Nothing, and I found it." The response can be taken literally: she discovered that there was no meaning to be found.

As a by-product of Eden and After, Robbe-Grillet created N Took the Dice (1971). In making N Took the Dice for French television, RobbeGrillet shot some additional footage to be reedited with outtakes of shots used in Eden and After in order to construct a new narrative. The new footage consists of a standard head-on shot of a television narrator, one of the actors from Eden and After. The narrator-commentator tells the audience that in television stories nothing is ever missing, everything is made clear. In a sense, RobbeGrillet undercuts not only the medium but also the audience itself. Robbe-Grillet is playing a game with the audience, one that satirizes the inanity of television games. At one point in the narrative, for example, Catherine Jourdan pulls out a postcard from the dead Stranger's pocket that reads: "Congratulations! You have won a washing machine!"

The structure of N Took the Dice is presented as if it were aleatory. The narrator occasionally throws dice to determine the path the narrative will take, but to assume that this process actually determines structure is also misleading, for the shots that we see are so fragmented and discontinuous that the images could actually represent any narrative that the viewer wishes to construct. In fact, the narrator tells the audience that games never have prior meaning. The only order is the one created by the viewer. In this fashion,

Robbe-Grillet reiterates his conviction that the viewer must not be passive, as with a television audience, but an active participant in the work. The only story is the one imagined by the spectator. Shown only twice on French television and never released commercially, N Took theDice Dice is not readily available to either the general public or scholars at this time. It was shown, however, at the 1989 Anthology Film Archives retrospective on Robbe-Grillet in New York.

In The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure (1974), Robbe-Grillet's surrealist heritage becomes particularly evident in the dreamlike qualities and irrationality of the narrative. The use of objects such as slippers under glass, eggs, a brass bed, and a kneeler act as

"punctuations" 8 that both interrupt and connect narrative sequences. They also restore the sense of the marvelous to the objects themselves. An example of a Buñuelian theme can be found in the obsession of the lead character, Alice, 9 with the trinity of blood, sex, and death following her traumatization when, sorceress-like, she "willed" a young woman's fall from a cliff and then apparently drank her blood.

Alice's vampiric drinking of blood, an act associated with sexual longing for another female, menstruation, and violent death, again suggests rebellion and subversion of the established male-dominated order. Slidings takes place in a prison or a convent for adolescent girls run by nuns and a male cleric. On one level, then, there is a Buñuelian allusion to the repressive nature of the church. But Robbe-Grillet's "church," far more than Buñuel's, is a "prop," a ready metaphor or stereotype of the repressive authority of clerics, of those who control "the word."

Robbe-Grillet brings his indictment against not only clerical authority but also against another institution created by society to control individuals and maintain the status quo through codified language: the legal system, as personified by the magistrate and the lawyer. Alice's illogical and cavalier responses to the investigator's questions indicate her disdain for the dictates of the legal code. Moreover, she takes delight in seducing both the magistrate and the lawyer, as well as the nun.

In The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, Robbe-Grillet extends the idea of doubling, prevalent in all of his films, with another surrealistic technique. The role of the murdered Nora and the lawyer are played by the same woman (Olga Georges-Picot), and that doubling creates a subliminal ambiguity that disconcerts the audience in a fashion similar to that elicited in Buñuel's That Obscure Object of Desire. Whereas Bufiuel is credited with this device, which was the result of exigency when his main actress quit, Robbe-Grillet used it a decade earlier with premeditation to accomplish a desired effect.

The question of pornography cannot be ignored with The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure.

Censors in France restricted the film to persons eighteen years of age or over because of its depictions of cruelty and perversion. In Sicily, Robbe-Grillet was subjected to criminal proceedings based on the perceived lack of narrative structure in the film. Critics are frequently disturbed by the sado-erotic dimensions of Robbe-Grillet's films. John Fletcher epitomizes this view when he states that, "Although the story is more complex than

'sexploitation' movies usually are, being . . . about a transfer of roles leading to a fatal accident, the direction is so pornographically self-indulgent as to alienate all but the most devoted spectators." 10 Like his other films, The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure blends allusions to comic books, novels, paintings, videos, films, and collective images that the audience may not wish to acknowledge openly but that exist and are prevalent either in their conscious or subconscious minds. The film does not so much tell a "story" as it explores the problems and pleasures of storytelling, including the question of narrative control through the progressive slippages and slidings of narrative sequences.

William Van Wert points out that the references Robbe-Grillet adapts for The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure are taken from "the 'sorceress' figure of Jules Michelet, a figure who, accused of a crime, is really accusing the society that engenders such crimes and whose laws petrify creative imagination."  11 Bruce Morrissette describes "open textual references to Lady Macbeth and Jesus, and thinly veiled allusions to martyred saints like Joan of Arc, burned at the stake." 12 In essence, Robbe-Grillet borrows from numerous sources, then transforms and amalgamates that material into archetypal models. For example, Alice's imaginary immolation parallels Joan of Arc's. If we acknowledge Joan as a woman who
threatens the dominance of established male authority and the church and who is subsequently put to death by fire for her passion, and if we accept the stake as the proverbial phallic symbol, we can see Robbe-Grillet's young female protagonist also as a rebel against the imposed codes of church and state. She engages in prostitution and corrupts the established order; therefore, she must be punished for her sins. Reacting to images that are stylized but nevertheless shocking, viewers have frequently failed to understand the deeper implications of Robbe-Grillet's films found in their inventive and complicated structures.

The Buñuelian theme of foot fetishism that first appeared in Last Year at Marienbad surfaces again in The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure. In Buñuel's El, Francisco is mesmerized by the priest's ritualistic washing and kissing of the feet of the innocent looking altar boys. Then Francisco's gaze travels along the feet of the parishioners to the well-turned ankle of the woman who attracts and obsesses him. By an elegant yet simple pan, Buñuel associates religion and purity with deviant sex and neurotic compulsions. In Slidings, when Alice is questioned by the magistrate, she responds, "It is a foot fetish."

She also seduces the magistrate into licking a small cut on her foot, thereby linking the theme of eroticism with blood. Robbe-Grillet's incorporation of shoes and foot fetishism is far more complex than that of Buñuel, who uses them as a direct corollary to perverted sexuality caused by repression instilled by the church.

Although The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure makes intertextual references to RobbeGrillet's past films, it is not simply a mélange of the director's past accomplishments, an accusation critics frequently make about other auteurs, such as Fellini and his later works.

Just when the lawyer, who is also Nora, is murdered, the Inspector of Police, played by Trintignant, walks in to announce that the murderer has been found and the investigation is over. Upon seeing the dead woman, he says, "Ah yes, then everything must start again." These lines are reminiscent of Trintignant's portrayal of Boris (alias Jean) in The Man Who Lies, who, after he is apparently shot, gets up, brushes himself off, and renews his narration, an intertextual reference that is underscored by the fact that Trintignant appears in both films.

In The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, the real crime is not the murder of Nora but the restrictions that the world of church, law, and order places on the imagination and the individual creative spirit. As Van Wert explains, Robbe-Grillet's Alice is a blend of the naïveté found in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the insouciance of Raymond Queneau's Zazie in the Metro, and the eroticism of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita.  13

When a customer engages in paradoxically polite conversation with Nora while expecting violent sex with Alice, who is in the next room, he asks, "You're a prostitute as well?" Nora answers dispassionately, "Ah yes, like everyone else these days." When the young man joins Alice in her bedroom, she, like a mannequin, remains totally unresponsive to his stylized bloodlust. Her actions subvert authority, whether encoded in words or in the private rituals of the sadist. Similarly, Alice's nonchalant attitude towards her various recountings of the murder reflects her disdain for established authority and all of its so-called truths. Although women appear to be the victims of violence, it should be noted that Alice controls the representatives of the established order. No one -- neither police inspector, magistrate, nun, nor lawyer -- can intimidate her. By contrast, Alice undermines, defies, or dismisses them.

Unquestionably, The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure represents a significant addition to Robbe-Grillet's oeuvre and a considerable advance in his cinematic experimentation with images and narrative structures. On the surface, Playing With Fire (1975) seems less complex than Slidings in structure, visual style, or elaboration of theme. In the view of French film scholars Dominique Chateau and François Jost, "Playing With Fire . . . of all the works of Robbe-Grillet, is the most easily assimilated to the body of classical cinema with respect to logical order and the regulation of the film narrative." 14 But Chateau and Jost are able to demonstrate that in this particular film the "preeminence of a narrative reading" (p. 87 ) keeps the viewer from noticing initially an accretion of seemingly insignificant elements that are only later revealed to have thematic pertinence. Thus the details of the opening kidnapping sequence, such as the presence of the train or the words that Frantz uses to control what he claims is a dog in a crate labeled "live animal" on the station platform, seem, at first, to have no particular significance in the story. Later,
however, Frantz uses similar commands with Caroline while "a loud train sound, unjustified in the immediate context . . . announces the rape that ends the sequence" (p. 90  ). Such

"structural embryos," as Chateau and Jost call them, eventually acquire a significance that, in turn, reinvests the earlier sequences with greater complexity.

Many of the elements that reappear throughout Robbe-Grillet's other films are prevalent in Playing with Fire: the inclusion of doubles, circularity of structure and multiple narration, voyeurism, and the use of the detective genre as a pretext for elaborate games. The basic anecdote of Playing with Fire focuses on a wealthy banker who hires the detective Frantz (Trintignant) to find his daughter Caroline (Anicée Alvina, who played Alice in Slidings).

The circular process is reflected metaphorically in the opera house setting with its semicircular lobby. As each door is opened, the viewer comes upon a new installment in the dominant narrative of abduction and incest. Thus the elegant brothel where Caroline is found -actually a Paris opera house that Robbe-Grillet claims he always wanted to turn into a house of assignment -- allows the spectator to wander, like a voyeur, from one door to the next, each of which opens onto a variety of deviant sexual acts.

The basis for the soundtrack of Playing with Fire, as Robbe-Grillet explains, originates before the beginning of the film itself. The themes associated with the music serve as the generators of the film. The film's structure is based on Robbe-Grillet's concept that film technique is like a musical score containing frequent reprises with variations.

For his next film, La Belle Captive (1983), Robbe-Grillet again returns to pictorial art as one of his primary sources. Robbe-Grillet first used the title La Belle Captive for a book in which he reproduced René Magritte's paintings, including some titled La Belle Captive, which accompany his narrative. Subsequently, in the film bearing the same title but with a new text, Robbe-Grillet uses images from the paintings of Magritte and Edouard Manet as a means of generating both images and narrative. At one point, Walter, the protagonist, has electrodes attached to his head and is connected to a machine that seems either to monitor or to generate his fantasies. Robbe-Grillet intercuts from this image to one of Margritte's, which he first duplicated by sophisticated video techniques and then transferred to film. Men in bowler hats descend from a window, and the camera passes through the window frame onto a curtain-framed beach, an image taken from Magritte's Belle Captive paintings. The juxtaposition of Margritte-like images and a machine recalls the film's opening with its close-up shots of a motorcycle ridden by a leather-clad woman with flowing hair. These shots of a woman on a motorcycle are intercut with Belle Captive equivalents of the sea viewed through a picture frame. Such associations of erotic dreams, machines, and art serve as metaphors for the power of art inspired by the unconscious to transform common stereotypes and fantasies into a dreamlike surreality. Robbe-Grillet's self-reflective films eveal their own structuring principles -- the "machine" behind the surrealistic dream. La Belle Captive calls to mind Robbe-Grillet's overt attention to the machinery of narrative in this and previous films, increasingly revealed as an "erotic dream machine," which simultaneously exhibits the dream and its structure.  15

In La Belle Captive, the events that take place in the realm of the imagination are more clearly defined than those that occur in conventional reality. What sparked Robbe-Grillet's imagination was the way in which Magritte's paintings disclosed disparate worlds that should not be linked but that are connected through an opening represented by a picture or a window frame or curtains framing a beach. Robbe-Grillet creates a dialectic between the two separate worlds by having Marie-Ange, the young woman who has captivated Walter's imagination in a nightclub and whom he later finds injured on a road, juxtaposed to Walter's reality. Once Marie-Ange disappears from the villa where Walter has brought her for the night, she appears in surrealist fashion within a picture frame in Walter's room or framed by red curtains upon a beach. Marie-Ange's world exists in the unconscious, where dreams, fantasies, inexplicable desires, and terror dominate. By contrast, Walter's everyday, commonplace world of normal reality seeks rational explanations for all phenomena.

Marie-Ange, a vampire, bites Walter's neck, thereby initiating him into the world of fantasy and the unconscious. The act of penetration can also be thought of in terms of entering from the world of external reality to that of the unconscious and the imagination via the sexual act. To prepare the viewer for Marie-Ange's entry into the world of commonplace,
everyday reality from which she will transport Walter into her world of the fantastic and the imagination, Robbe-Grillet uses sound, such as thunder claps. Here the technique is based on counterpoint, for the skies on the beach are clear. Continuing his use of nonrealistic sound, Robbe-Grillet selects the thudding of marching Fascist troops as MarieAnge's henchmen hurry on the sand towards Walter. Robbe-Grillet's choice of the reverberating sound of marching is far more threatening than the expected crunching of footsteps on sand. This nonrepresentational and unconventional use of sound extends Robbe-Grillet's auditory experimentations found in all his films. In La Belle Captive, RobbeGrillet achieves the goal of creating, through montage, a new surreality in which apparent contradictions between the real and the imagined, the objective and the subjective, cease to exist.

As usual, Robbe-Grillet draws his inspiration for the film from literature as well as pictorial art. He amalgamates Goethe's poem "The Bride of Corinth" with Jules Michelet's The Sorceress, thereby combining classical legend with the theme of vampirism. In addition, like several of his other works, Robbe-Grillet places La Belle Captive within the context of a quasi-detective-spy genre. Walter works for an organization whose exact function is never known. Later his quest is to discover the whereabouts of Marie-Ange, which is purportedly the same intention as that of the Police Inspector.

Walter's immediate superior in the organization is the alluring and mysterious Sara Zeitgeist. The name Zeitgeist, taken from Hegelian philosophy, refers to the spirit ( Geist) of the time ( Zeit), but her name is also derived from popular pornographic comic books.

Sara clearly intimidates Walter. In La Belle Captive, women dominate sexually, psychologically, and within the hierarchy of political groups.

For the cinematographer of La Belle Captive, Robbe-Grillet selected Henri Alekan, then in his eighties, who formerly collaborated with Jean Cocteau. Robbe-Grillet states that Alekan shares an aversion to realism similar to his own. Although much of La Belle Captive is shot at night, the images appear in the same style as prescribed by Robbe-Grillet for Last Year at Marienbad. They possess "a distinct and brilliant image, even in the darker sections, giving everything a kind of varnished quality."  16 Just as Robbe-Grillet's films display cyclical structures, his choice of visual style in La Belle Captive circles back to the origins of his oeuvre and to his initial conception of the quality of his images. The recurrence of visual style, motifs, and consistent interplay between the eroticism of the male vision and creativity illustrate that Robbe-Grillet is indeed a filmic auteur.

As Bruce Morrissette predicted when speaking of The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure and Robbe-Grillet's future filmic works, "The art of Robbe-Grillet continues to evolve, pushing constantly against the previous limits of fictional structure." 17 Robbe-Grillet's films deserve and require informed critical study that will eventually result in a body of film criticism comparable to investigations of his written works. Following a showing of Playing With Fire in New York, a spectator said that it was difficult, if not impossible, to assimilate all of the complex structures, allusions, thematic intentions, and innovative stylistic techniques at a single viewing. Robbe-Grillet responded by first quoting André Gide, "I write in order to be reread," and then added, "I make films that are to be reseen."

The following interviews can help generate informed and pertinent investigations into the nature of Robbe-Grillet's filmic works and an appreciation of their importance in the development of cinema. From these dialogues emerges a clear sense of Robbe-Grillet's personality. His humor, intellect, vast cultural awareness, and aesthetic sensibilities illustrate why he is truly one of the most fascinating and important creative figures of the twentieth century.

Part 1

The Films

2

The First Films: Last Year at Marienbad and

L'Immortelle

Roch Smith: What brought you into the world of filmmaking? Could you describe your first two films: Last Year at Marienbad and L'Immortelle?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: L'Immortelle is the first film that I both wrote and directed. Marienbad, on the other hand, has in a manner of speaking two artists, two auteurs: Resnais and Robbe-Grillet. Between Alain Resnais and myself there are bizarre coincidences. He was born in the same month of the same year, in the same French province, and he is also called Alain. Between us exists a strange kind of understanding, which may be a sort of symbiosis. Nevertheless, we worked separately. I wrote alone, and he shot alone. Resnais was already a respected director, but he made his reputation creating short films so producers assumed that those were the only types of films he could make. Towards the end of the 1950s, two French producers, Samy Halfon and Anatole Dauman, who were still friends at the time, decided to request money to produce a feature-length film for Alain Resnais. Resnais accepted on the condition that he work with a real writer, not just a scriptwriter, so he made his first feature-length film, Hiroshima mon amour, with Marguerite Duras. Although the producers did not necessarily make money with this film, they demonstrated that Resnais could make the transition from shorts to feature-length films.

Samy Halfon showed me Hiroshima and asked me if I wanted to make a film as both director and writer. I pointed out that my novelistic work had not attracted such a following that he could be sure to draw a large audience to dark theaters. Halfon answered that the only thing that mattered was that we shoot in Istanbul. It may seem strange, but often commercial considerations that have nothing to do with art influence the production of films. In this particular case, Halfon had met a Belgian businessman who had money blocked in Turkey because it was in Turkish pounds and was not convertible to any other currency. Halfon had the idea of shooting the film in Turkey, thereby allowing him to convert the money back into a product that he could take out of the country. Shooting in Istanbul was not at all unappealing to me. Quite the contrary, I had a certain sentimental attraction to this city, for ten years earlier I had met a young woman there -- Catherine --
who was later to become my wife. Consequently, Catherine and I left for Istanbul, a city that had in our existence an imaginary role. We had ample money to spend from the Belgian financier. I began to write the film on location as I was getting ready to shoot, but unfortunately, there was a revolution. After the Chief of State, Adnan Menderes, was hung by the people, considerable turmoil ensued, so I returned to France.  1

At that moment another producer contacted me and said he was glad I was back in France because he needed a scriptwriter for Resnais. This producer had a contract with Resnais, but Resnais refused all the scripts proposed to him. He absolutely insisted on working with someone whom he considered to be a great writer. There was only one problem: he preferred a woman, and he hesitated between Simone de Beauvoir and Françoise Sagan.

Undaunted, the producer responded that I should write a short proposal, and we would see what Resnais' reaction would be. I was delighted to work with Resnais because I had seen Hiroshima and his short films. But Resnais was not particularly interested in working with me. Therefore, rapidly, in just a few days, I wrote three synopses. Each was about three pages long. The producer gave them to, who was very pleased and ready to shoot all three of them. We discussed the choices, and he selected the one he considered to be the most difficult, and that was, of course, Last Year at Marienbad.

The question then arose as to our method of collaboration. In commercial cinema there are entire teams that work on the same film. William Faulkner, for example, tells the story of working in Hollywood and adding bits of dialogue to studio scripts that came to him from
the left and which he would then move to the right in system of mass production, without ever seeing on the screen the least element of anything that he had contributed to the script. Faulkner, who was not earning any money with his novels, which were considered completely "unreadable," was being protected by his friend, the director Howard Hawks. In my case, I answered immediately that I could not work with someone else. Resnais responded that it did not matter, I had only to write alone.

Resnais accepted a stipulation that is unusual in filmmaking: I would not write a screenplay but an entire shooting script -- an imaginary film -- with the shots, cuts, camera movement, all of the technical apparatus, as if I were writing a film that already existed. In effect, it did already exist -- in my mind.

Other filmmakers at that time wanted to work with me but it was always on the question of my control of the script that the discussions would deteriorate. For example, my good friend Michelangelo Antonioni wanted to make a film with me. We met and talked a great deal about a collaborative work. Everything seemed to be going along smoothly, but when we started to discuss the film itself and I spoke about the first image to be seen on the screen, he stopped me and said, Listen: tell me a story and I'll tell you the image that will appear on the screen." Antonioni is accustomed to working with a scriptwriter, and it is he, Antonioni, who will execute the shooting script, even if it requires a considerable modification of the script furnished to him. I said, "Listen, Michelangelo, I am very fond of you. But a collaboration between us is impossible, because when I think of a film, I envision the images that will appear on the screen. If you want a story, take one of my novels." Collaboration with Antonioni stopped there. Whereas Resnais accepted. At the time Resnais had, and I think still has, a kind of modesty as a filmmaker. He intends to be at the service of an author.

Now from the perspective of French law a film has five authors: one each for the treatment, the screenplay, the shooting script, the direction, and the music. These distinctions are important from a legal standpoint because there are many disputes over the distribution of money among these five authors. I would very much like to be a complete author -- that is, to make all five parts -- like Wagner. In general for my films I have been the first four of these, but Michel Fano composed the music. 2 Antonioni in his films is responsible for the screenplay, the shooting script, and the direction.

For Marienbad, I was the author of the treatment, the screenplay, and the shooting script, and Resnais was the director. I wrote alone and Resnais shot alone, for I had returned to Istanbul to work on L'Immortelle, the revolution having subsided and a new contract having been worked out with the new government. When one sees Marienbad, one sees a film by two authors, for Resnais scrupulously respected everything I wrote, but he directed it; he was, as we say in French, the réalisateur. More than the term director, the word réalisateur suggests someone who transfers what was a possibility into the real image on the screen. It involves making that possibility real, bringing it into being.

After it was completed, Marienbad remained in cases for more than six months without anyone trying to bring it out because the distributors felt it was too bizarre. It was not even shown to owners of movie theaters. But through a series of other coincidences that were more political than cinematic, it was shown at the Venice Film Festival after those six months and received the Golden Lion Award. Subsequently, it was distributed in France and Italy and was immediately successful for its snob appeal. For six months it was damned, and suddenly it became stylish.

RS: How would you compare L'Immortelle to Marienbad?

AR-G: L'Immortelle had a completely different career. As soon as the film was finished, it received the Louis Delluc Prize, the highest French prize awarded to a filmmaker. When the film came out a month later, it received bad reviews and was not well accepted by the public. L'Immortelle was unfavorably compared to Marienbad, while in fact they do not resemble each other at all. It is obvious that L'Immortelle is not as good as Marienbad, but the real error is to compare them in the first place.

I wrote Marienbad for Resnais. In Marienbad, Resnais executed many complicated camera movements, but I wrote these movements for Resnais based on my knowledge of his short films, such as The Entire Memory of the World. By contrast, in L'Immortelle, there is no camera movement, or almost none. In Marienbad there exist some elements that you can refer to as sequences, but in L'Immortelle it is much harder to differentiate the sequences because they are mixed.

In fact, the project for L'Immortelle, which is extremely ambitious, perhaps too ambitious, consists of considering as the unit of narration not the sequence but the shot. At the beginning, the spectator sees a series of shots that succeed each other but not in narrative progression. These shots have merely formal relationships between them -- for example, a framing or a movement of the character or a small movement of the camera, which are not narrative elements at all. This kind of montage is much closer, obviously, to the first silent films of Eisenstein than it is to Marienbad. I say that L'Immortelle was perhaps too ambitious because the viewer does not readily identify these elements, yet they are the basis of the film's continuity. Nowadays when a retrospective of my films is presented, often L'Immortelle seems to be the most prestigious, but it is also the film that at the same time draws the fewest spectators and seems to be the most disappointing for the audience.

This formal ensemble of shots nevertheless tells a story, but it is an extremely rigid story, not very realistic, even less realistic than Marienbad. For example, the main character lacks the features of a film hero; he looks more like a narrator. He always seems a little stiff. He is on the screen, but one almost has the impression that he would rather not be there. In fact, much more than in Marienbad, in L'Immortelle everything takes place in the character's mind. Therefore, he is, in a way, superfluous to the image. Critics were shocked that he did not seem to move normally, that he did not seem to be able to touch the actress, as if he were not really in the same world as she was. (In private life the actress was in fact his wife!)

Another element of L'Immortelle that shocked spectators was that the city of Istanbul did not seem to lend itself to a realistic documentary. This hero is a Frenchman who arrives in Turkey and already has conjured up fantasies about the Orient -- picture postcards or memories of novels that he has read, such as those of Pierre Loti, with sequestered
harems, etc. 3 What he sees is obviously heavily influenced by stereotypes of Istanbul and the Orient. I do not understand why critics hold that against me since it is explicitly stated in the film that these are postcard scenes. It is the first film I directed and not my personal favorite. A first film is always, after all, an apprenticeship, and I reproach myself for certain aspects of L'Immortelle. Ironically, what critics faulted in the film is, on the contrary, exactly what succeeds -- all these things that were part of my own plan, particularly what the critics have called false continuities, which are false precisely because that was my intention. In L'Immortelle, as in Marienbad, a relationship is established between a man and a woman who meet once but do not seem to belong to the same universe.

Anthony Fragola: What accounts for the contrast in style between Marienbad and L'Immortelle?

AR-G: Marienbad was shot by a great cinematographer named Sacha Vierny, while L'Immortelle was shot by someone far less accomplished who would not understand my intentions. The camera in Marienbad is extremely mobile and fluid, whereas the camera movements in L'Immortelle are stiff by design. L'Immortelle intends to give an impression of a fixed shot: suddenly there occurs a mechanical movement of the camera that generally attempts to uncover a new scene -- perhaps with the same person in it or perhaps a new scene with characters who have not yet appeared.

The stiffness of those movements was one of my first points of disagreement with the camera operator. For example, I explained to the cameraman that he must carry out a pan at the same time that a character is changing place, but that the character will not have a constant motion -- he will slow down, accelerate, turn around -- and that he, the cameraman, must carry out a perfectly regular movement as if the character were in the field of view almost by chance, so that at certain moments the character will be completely
at one side, or completely on the other side, or he even will risk being lost by the camera.

I wanted to bring out the mechanical aspect of camera work as it accompanies movement.

For the camera operator, these directions proved impossible. The professional cameraman, as he manipulates his handles, is accustomed to following the character. When the character slows down, the cameraman, totally without being aware of it, also slows down.

Of course, that caused great disappointments for me in L'Immortelle. In fact, the image of L'Immortelle was meant to be even more rigid than it actually turned out to be.

I had disagreements with the technicians because they would resist unless I told them what it was supposed to mean. In fact, I could not say why I wanted something done in a particular manner. Quite simply, I just saw it that way. The discussions with the technicians obstructed the shooting in ridiculous ways. They knew what was normally supposed to be done, and they assumed I lacked the technical proficiency. Since I was a novelist, they did not trust my judgment. I remember one time the cinematographer said,

"Look, I know how to do this because I've done it for two hundred and fifty films." And I replied, "If after two hundred and fifty films you are not better known than you are, you must not do terrific work." Clearly, the shooting was tense. But all my othet films went much easier because I selected young technicians who were just completing school and who were anxious to work exactly in ways they had been prevented from doing while still students.

AF: If you are unhappy with the execution of camera movement, are you also dissatisfied with the cinematography?

AR-G: Yes, I also have complaints about the image itself, about the cinematography. For example, there is a shot meant to serve an important role in L'Immortelle as a generating cell of the entire film; it is a shot of N, the protagonist, looking out through the shutters from a completely darkened room, with no source of light, to a violently lighted exterior, the Bosporus. At the beginning of the film, that shot appears four times, and each time I see those shots I become angry at the cinematographer. The character is in a room looking out through jalousie shutters. In the room it is daylight, though there is no source of light, while outside shines the bright summer light of Turkey. Inside one actually sees the shadow of the character against the wall. There is a light behind him, and the room is completely bright -- lit as if all the windows were open, when in fact they are all closed.

While we were shooting I pointed this out to him. His reply was, "You can't know what we'll see on the film because you're not a film technician." A stupid response, because what one sees on the film is what one saw with the eye. This supposedly obscure cell, which is almost always immediately followed by a close-up of the face of the slightly smiling, enigmatic young woman, lost all its power as a generating cell.

AF: Can you define what you mean by "generating cell"?

AR-G: When you abandon the entire notion of narration, of telling a story that someone is going to narrate, then the question immediately arises as to the origin of the story. What is the place, the point, from which this story is produced? The question is an important one in many modern films that do not claim to be realistic. In L'Immortelle, in particular, the discourse originates from the character in the room who is thinking. The room must be dark, and the outside world should be very bright because what unfolds in his imagination lies beyond the confines of his room. Later, when I objected to this image to the cinematographer, he calmly responded that he was afraid that people would have thought he did not know how to light the room. He said he was afraid of losing his union card.

AF: What was your reason for creating false continuities?

AR-G: There were endless discussions of this matter with the technicians. You will recall that the young woman wrote an address on note paper and then crumpled it up and threw it away because she said it was a false address. Once she has disappeared, N returns to the park, finds the paper, unfolds it, and opens it. He sees that there is nothing written on it, and he throws it away again. Normal montage would show the character bending down to pick up the paper, show him looking at it and unfolding it, provide a close-up of what he sees -- which is to say the blank paper without any address -- and then return to the shot
that shows him throwing away the paper. In L'Immortelle the viewer sees the character pick up the paper, unfold it, look at it, crumple it, and throw it away; and after he has thrown it away, there is a close-up of the paper before his eyes. This gesture is repeated several times: crumpling up the paper, throwing it away, and then the close-up of the blank paper, which in each sequential scene is closer and closer to the lens. Here too, the impression that should remain is not a realistic one but a mental one: he saw it, he threw it away, and he remains obsessed with the idea that there is nothing written on it. He sees the paper again several times; he throws it away several times.

Another example of that same type of false continuity has to do with space -- the previous example representing a false continuity in time. Imagine a character who enters a room and sits down. In a normal film the viewer will see him opening the door and taking his first step. Then the camera will cut at the moment his leg is in the air. In the next shot the camera has obviously moved, and he puts his leg in the same position and sits down. That is precise or "regulation" continuity. The rules of continuity normally dictate that when a character is suspended in motion in a given space and sequence, one must return to that character in motion. In L'Immortelle the first shot is standard. One sees him take the first step followed by a cut in the middle of the motion, but in the second shot, the spectator sees the subject sitting, completely immobile. At that moment about fifty technicians on the set raised their hands and exclaimed, "My God, what we have to do to earn a living!"

They asked me why I shot the action with such an obvious jump cut, and I said I did not know. The discussion lasted about three hours. The script supervisor -- the same one as in Marienbad, who happens to teach continuity at L'Ecole de cinéma, the best-known film school in Paris -- said to me, "When you do it that way, it is exactly as if you had two characters, one who comes in and goes to meet himself already seated." I said, "Great!

You wanted a reason, that is it." Nevertheless, in order to make her happy, I shot it in the standard fashion, and later, I cut it the way I wanted.

AF: Could you comment on the circular structure of the film, especially regarding the recurring shot of the car moving towards the city?

AR-G: That traveling shot of the car moving along the walls of the city was interrupted several times by the sound of the accident that was to take place later. (Marienbad's soundtrack is not as complex. The soundtrack represents one of those rare instances when my intentions were not followed by Resnais.)

AF: If so, there exists the possibility that none of the events actually happened.

AR-G: Yes, that could be true because the viewer might think the character remains in the same cell the entire time and he has never met this woman or any of the other characters.

The events are manifestations of his dreams about the Orient. Nevertheless, I included a detail to prevent the viewer from thinking that nothing occurred. I see the detail myself, but I am not sure it can be seen by the viewer. In the first accident, the one in which "the immortal woman" was killed, the protagonist's hand was wounded. Subsequently, his hand is bandaged. In the generating cell, some shots show his hand bandaged and others do not. Unfortunately, despite all that useless light put there by the cinematographer, one does not easily see the hand.

AF: You wrote a detailed shooting script for L'Immortelle. Is that correct?

AR-G: Yes, in order to reassure the producer, I wrote a shooting script, shot by shot.

Later, that same producer showed confidence in me, and I never again wrote an entire script shot by shot in order to get financial backing. Because I was a prisoner of what was written, I was unable to take advantage of unexpected events that always take place during a shoot. There is only one shot in L'Immortelle that was not written and was therefore due to chance.

We had installed a very high platform tower to look down on the plaza in front of the mosque, which is usually full of people. We had this plaza emptied out by a great number of policemen. In the first shot, there are only a few characters in the plaza, immobile and rigid, as are all the characters of the film. Then I planned to take a second shot in which
there was only one character in the background who would be leaving, after which the plaza would remain empty. But between the two shots the chief of police came to tell me that the funeral of a general was heading towards the mosque and it was impossible for the police to stop the casket of a general. I said it was fine, and the coffin, carried by six officers and accompanied by numerous other people -- all with natural movements -- came through the middle of the field of view as I had prepared it. I said, "Camera," and the camera operator immediately began shooting for a brief moment. But the cinematographer stopped the camera because it was a shot he had not lit! I nevertheless kept the little footage we did obtain.

Ironically, the shot looks as though it were planned because the woman has disappeared, and N is looking for her. Then the burial occurs, and it looks perfectly symbolic. In fact, the action is natural; it happened that way. This moment is what André Breton would have called objective chance. 4  It was one of Breton's great ideas that when it is a question of man's passion, chance will create, in and of itself, the object of his fantasies.

AF: How long do you spend in preproduction, actual shooting, and actual editing. To what extent do you involve yourself in each phase of the process?

AR-G: Preproduction for L'Immortelle was extensive because of the revolution in Turkey and also because I forced myself to write out the entire film. The shooting lasted six weeks, which for me is considerable but short by commercial standards, especially in a foreign country where there are always problems with language and translation. On the other hand, the period of montage was very long, as it always is with me. In the subsequent films, the shooting time was reduced, and the time for montage was extended, up to eight months.

For me, at the present, there are three phases of creation when making a film: when I imagine the film, when I shoot it, and when I give it its final consistency -- the montage and sound. The sound in particular in L'Immortelle and in my subsequent films took a considerable amount of work and time. These phases do not create a serious problem because the only component that costs money is the shooting time. Preproduction does not cost a thing since I do not charge! For the montage, I work in a small room with two or three machines and one or two technicians with whom I get along very well. For the shooting, each hour costs a fortune because one must pay for the equipment, the actors, the lights, the sets, and so on. Perhaps not for L'Immortelle but for all my subsequent films, the montage calls into question everything that I had done in each previous phase.

In the commercial cinema of Hollywood, the directors do not participate in the editing, so there can be no question of cutting here and finding the character sitting there. Hollywood technicians would repair that "error."

3

Trans-Europ-Express

Anthony Fragola: To what extent is the humor of Trans-Europ-Express the result of Jean-Louis Trintignant's creative interpretation?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: The film is controlled by a director after all. When the director chooses an actor, he bases his selection on what the actor will do. I had seen a number of films with Trintignant, and I knew he was an actor whose humor would be consistent with my concept for the film. And indeed it was. While many people -- technicians and so forth --
collaborated in making the film, Trintignant did add humor to it.

AF: The reason I mention Trintignant is that he uses similar humorous body movements from one film to the next. For example, his body movements when he dies in Trans-EuropExpress will be repeated in The Man Who Lies. Or there are Trintignant's gestures with the raincoat in The Man Who Lies and later in Playing With Fire. But humor has not been extensively discussed in your work.

AR-G: In any case, I do not want to speak about humor. You know that one cannot discuss humor seriously. (laughter) Certainly, I enjoyed an excellent rapport with Trintignant because of his humor. Some of the humorous references that you cited were found in what I had written -- the raincoat, for example. On the other hand, the great wave of his arm when he dies is much more his own contribution. An actor who really understands what we want to do is able to invent in the same vein. At the time of L'Immortelle, I constrained the actors completely; but with Trans-Europ-Express, I did exactly the opposite -- I used their personal qualities of play.

In my opinion, that is a preferable method. Besides, my humor is much more apparent in Trans-Europ-Express than in L'Immortelle, where, I must admit, no one has ever seen it!

But if I chose specific actors such as Trintignant or Lonsdale in The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, it is precisely because they are people whose performance as actors already suggests a playful quality.

AF: Since we are still talking about the actors and humor, I am wondering if there is a theoretical principle to humor that you employ?

AR-G: I have already said I do not want to talk about humor. (general laughter) AF: We will let Pirandello talk about humor.

AR-G: In Marienbad I think that the humor of Giorgio Albertazzi, although very discreet, nevertheless is fairly accessible. But I must say that no one saw anything; no one found that film funny except me.

Roch Smith: The public started to see the humor in your films beginning with Trans-EuropExpress?

AR-G: With Trans-Europ-Express, yes. And at the same time, with the novel La Maison de Rendez-Vous.

AF: To some extent, does the humor not result from an exaggeration of stereotypes that you use?

AR-G: Perhaps, among other things.

AF: Why do you use stereotypes when traditionally they are to be avoided?

AR-G: People who try to avoid stereotypes are those who fall the most into stereotypes.

One cannot avoid stereotypes. They are the elements of discourse. There can be no discourse without them. Flaubert said it himself in reference to the Dictionary of Accepted Ideas that was to end Bouvard and Pécuchet. If he had succeeded in completing this dictionary, no one would ever dare to say anything more. Thus Flaubert was affirming that the only elements of discourse available -- events, ideas, and so forth -- are stereotypical ones, that the only way of affirming one's freedom and one's creativity is in the structure that will be given through what Flaubert calls form.

The whole difference between Balzac and Flaubert is not that Flaubert uses stereotypes and Balzac does not, but that Flaubert knows it, and Balzac does not. Balzac's work consists only of stereotypes. He believes his work to be original, but it is simply a catalog of stereotypes, an absolutely incredible one. I believe that stereotypes are a raw material that one cannot avoid; only one must manipulate them in such a way as not to be a victim of them. The best way to be a victim of a stereotype is to believe that you can escape it.

AF: That would give you a certain freedom with respect to stereotypes and to realism in particular. You can manipulate structure more easily because you are aware of the stereotypes.

AR-G: Yes, probably so. In fact, many filmmakers from the moment they decide to become serious are trapped by the stereotypes, and their work becomes grotesque.

AF: I think that humor balances and redeems the work in a sense and saves it from falling into that particular trap.

AR-G: Yes, perhaps.

AF: I have heard you speak about Jorge Luis Borges' influence as a textual source for The Man Who Lies, and it seems to me that the structural principle of circularity and the independence of the character from the creator are other Borgesian themes.

AR-G: And also stereotypes. They are structural stereotypes!

AF: Did Borges also influence Trans-Europ-Express?

AR-G: It is possible, but I was not conscious of it. In any case, writers I might cite with respect to a later film like The Man Who Lies -Pushkin, Borges, Kafka -- are references rather than influences.

RS: You see relationships after the fact perhaps?

AR-G: Yes, and seeing them, I reinforce them. But it is even probable that there may be other references in Trans-Europ-Express. Did you see the only film for which Borges wrote the entire script, entitled Invasion?

AF: No, I have never seen it. I do not know if it has been released here.

AR-G: Never, it has not even been distributed in France. It was made by a young Argentinean named Hugo Santiago, whom I probably influenced. He made some films that resembled mine a little, perhaps also because he underwent the same influences as I did.

Then he wanted to do commercial films, and he immediately foundered. But Invasion is a remarkable film, a chess game between whites and blacks. Each character moves about the city of Buenos Aires in an individual way: the knight in a certain manner, the pawn in another way, the rook in still another, etc. The film is extremely strange.

What is astonishing is that Invasion was done much more completely than any film text Borges had ever written. He had always written projects, but for Invasion he wrote the
entire film, and it is all the more strange because by then he had long been completely blind.

AF: In Buñuel's The Phantom of Liberty, a couple is sexually aroused by postcards that a gentleman has given to their young daughter. We assume that they are pornographic scenes, but in fact they are sightseeing postcards found throughout Europe. In Trans-EuropExpress, scenes from pornographic magazines are juxtaposed to the magazine L'Express, and Trintignant hides the sex magazine inside it.

AR-G: Yes, the erotic magazine was called Europe. It had a picture of the rape of Europa on the cover. First I am seen leafing through this magazine in the railroad station, then Trintignant leafs through the same magazine. When the viewer sees me leafing through it, he sees normal photos of naked women. When Trintignant leafs through it, it is the same women, but now they are chained. One also notices that in his suitcase, when he comes into the compartment on the train, he has a hollowed out book in which he has hidden his revolver. The book is called Transes. He has a magazine called Europe, and he hides it within an issue of L'Express. So you have Trans-Europ-Express. But what is also humorous is that the book is a false book -- in the obvious way since it was hollowed out to hide the revolver but also because of the specific book that was hollowed out. When the book is opened to reveal the revolver, the viewer can actually read the title, and it happens to be Marnie, by Hitchcock. Hitchcock's Marnie is a particularly bad film encumbered with popular psychology. And here with it, as a kind of Freudian joke, appears the revolver.

AF: Icons play an important role in Trans-Europ-Express. In the boy's room, there is a poster of James Bond and another of an Indian chief. What is the significance of these particular icons, and how do you employ icons throughout the film?

AR-G: From the point of view of the diegesis,  1 it is the story of an adolescent who is interested in this form of modern mythology. For this reason, Trintignant walks in front of the posters and begins to imitate the gestures that he sees in them.

AF: One of my favorite shots of the film is when you frame the two ships traveling in different directions. It is almost like a metaphor of a dissolve, where one image disappears and the other one takes over. The same kind of structural principle seems to exist in the film, where one narration is taken over by another narration to form a dialectic. It seems to be a structural principle of opposing narrators, where one takes over and the other recedes.

AR-G: Yes, you could say that, although I had not seen it that way. The ships were there; it is not I who made them move. Of course, it is always good when something moves in the image, and in this case, it turned out to be those ships. That type of shot is often present in the film: for example, the open bridge that slowly comes back into position.

In the exterior shots, there are an enormous number of elements that are not foreseen.

We filmed what was occurring. For the ships, you might say that I chose to shoot at that particular time, but I had not been forewarned when the water suddenly came rushing into the dry dock. None of the workers in the port warned me that they were going to be filling the basin. It even caused some problems because we had to climb little by little. There are some false continuities because they do not take place at exactly the same level since the water had risen too fast.

At the time of L'Immortelle, I would have said, "Cut," because I had not included the rising water. Whereas here, exterior elements play an important role. One time, for instance, it began to rain, and we continued filming. In many shots the camera was hidden so that people would not know that we were shooting. The people in the Jewish quarter of Antwerp, for example, were not told that they were being filmed.

One shot that I really regret losing occurred when we were filming with a hidden camera while Trintignant was crossing the street to enter the Hotel Miro. Lelouch's A Man and a Woman, which had made Trintignant very popular, had just been released, and a young woman who suddenly noticed Trintignant with his suitcase rushed over to ask for his
autograph. Trintignant handled it very well. He did not stop acting; he put down his suitcase, took the woman's notebook, and signed it. Then he went on his way with his suitcase. But the fool of a framer had cut, even though I had not said so. Ethically he had no right to cut without my permission. He did so because the scene had been interrupted, but it would have been striking if that had been left in the film. I told the cameraman that I had not said to stop shooting, and he replied that all we had to do was to ask the young woman to come back and shoot it again. Of course, I refused.

RS: I was struck by certain kinds of drawings in the apartment of the adolescent that were done as if on frosty windows.

AR-G: Yes, we put a fog on the windows so that one would not be able to look out and see the building across the street too clearly since the apartment in the story is supposed to be in a different location. And in order to decorate that surface, I myself made a few drawings on it. I included the phone number of the Editions de Minuit 2  and other details of that nature.

AF: To talk about the music: Why did you select La Traviata in Trans-Europ-Express?

AR-G: You know that traviata means "gone astray" or "off course." Therefore, this is one of those hardly perceptible jokes. It makes me laugh, but it makes no one else laugh because it is never discerned. Very curiously, all of Verdi's titles have been translated into French.

For example, we do not say Il Trovatore, we say Le Trouvère. So we should have called the other opera La Dévoyée since it is the story of a woman who has left the narrow path or voie. Yet in French it is called La Traviata, and no one knows what it means. It is the story of a woman of a good family who becomes a whore, who has gone off course or off the right track. Then there are all those railroad tracks [voies in French] and the story itself, which leaves the right track for a perverse one.

I also use this particular recording of La Traviata because it is very expensive to pay the rights for recorded music for film. It happened that Verdi had just fallen into public domain so we had the right to use his music but not the mechanical reproductions of his music. So I used a Russian recording. They do not worry about authors' rights since they, at least at that time, had not signed the international copyright convention. They publish my books without sending me royalties because they have not signed the convention, so I took great pleasure in using a Soviet recording. Moreover, I find it amusing that she is singing in Russian.

In Trans-Europ-Express, La Traviata worked well during the montage. But it could have not worked, and then we would have used another piece. When the music works, then we adjust the image slightly as a function of the soundtrack. I do not know if you remember in the rape scenes in particular a concordance between the events of the music and the events of the scene. That is partly by chance and partly because we made slight adjustments of the image to the soundtrack.

RS: And you cut the music into fragments as well?

AR-G: The good thing about Verdi's music in comparison to other music (for example, the compositions of Gustav Mahler) is that it is very sectionable. In this case, we used chords, just chords or a series of chords, which were then cut on the sound tape and were later synchronized with the image. It is great fun to adapt music to the image and then to rectify the music as a function of the image, which cannot, after all, be cut at random.

4

The Man Who Lies

Anthony Fragola: American audiences have trouble understanding your films, whereas in Europe they reach a commercial market. What accounts for this discrepancy?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: I am not sure that I, myself, understand a particular film. The entire problem stems from the use of the word understand. When one stands before a painting in a museum, for example, the first subjective reaction is to say, "I like that painting," and it is only later that one asks whether or not one understands it. The question of understanding is, in the final analysis, less important than a more direct or sensual participation. It would be an error to think that the ultimate significance of Bufiñel's films, for example, lies in meaning imposed by reason. Bufiñel's films go well beyond those meanings. Film does not belong to conceptual art but to plastic art. The spectator looks for something to understand, and if he does not understand it, he will say to himself, "I missed the point of this film." But, in fact, he may not have. It simply may be that the film has within it an enigma that is not to be understood. As for European spectators, be assured that they are very much like American audiences, only they are more accustomed to seeing enigmatic films because they are regularly shown in commercial theaters, whereas in the United States they are never shown. As a result, some extremely interesting American films have never been distributed in the United States but were shown in Paris. This question of comprehension is an important one. I think the question, as formulated, suggests frustration about an absence of overall meaning. One's own experience of the world, outside of movies, reveals that the world is sometimes understandable, sometimes contradictory. This world cannot be summarized by an overall meaning. When young, one believes that at the moment of death, life's meaning will reveal itself. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Roch Smith: And your films are closer to actual experience than the typical commercial film?

AR-G: Without a doubt. The passion of a living being for his life is the passion of experience, whereas American commercial cinema, in particular, is made to be reassuring.

Life is enigmatic, but American film is made to reassure because there, at least, meaning is certain. Everything takes place as if the commercial cinema were a drug designed to insulate the viewer from the enigma of life.

AF: In essence, your films are similar to those of Buñuel because he defies our normal expectations regarding film.

AR-G: Yes, surely. Nevertheless, like Buñiuel, I can furnish not the meaning but some meaning. For example, the main character in The Man Who Lies seems to refer to a past, but quickly we discover that is not what interests him. Instead, he is interested in creating himself through his own words. He speaks in order to be. He tells stories to various people so that he might be believed and justified.

The myth of Don Juan is significant in the film, for he is one of the first figures in the history of Western civilization to have chosen his own word against the word of God. He addresses himself especially to women; he wants to persuade women, whereas he kills men. Women are supposed to have more freedom with respect to the truth of the established powers. In comparison to men, the women in our civilization are believed to have a more open and adventurous spirit. I am not saying this assumption is true, but that notion floats about in our ideology. For that reason, they burned many more witches than warlocks in the United States. Many feminist movements have taken the witch as their emblem because it is precisely the witch who in our tradition opposes established truth embodied in the adult white male. A young woman is a human being who is not on the side of order but rather on the side of adventure and subversion, the possibility of another world, etc. Again, I am not saying it is true, but that idea has been prevalent in our civilization for hundreds of years. Therefore, Don Juan, who wants to create a new world that will be his own, against the world of society or the world of God -- it is the same thing

-- sees women as the objects of his desire. The question is not one of simple sexual desire.

Don Juan exists only because there are women who exist.

An ancillary question arises: Why are there lesbian scenes in The Man Who Lies? It is, in fact, a world where man is absent. Only young women are left in that castle. The men who remain are old. In that context, where man has disappeared, there is nothing else, and yet love endures; it is a constant. Consequently, lesbianism emerges.

The man returns, but it is not the man who lived there previously. He says he is that other man, but the young women see immediately that he is not the one they had known. He admits their assertion is true, but he claims he is the previous man's friend and returns in his place. From that moment on, this main character will have a double: on the one hand, the man who speaks; on the other, allusions to the one about whom he speaks. The relationship is constantly conflictual: he might help him or then again he might kill him or else protect him and so on. Both men also have the same voice. The main actor is Jean-Louis Trintignant, and his double is a well-known Slovak actor who does not speak French and who therefore articulated French in an awkward way. Both voices were then dubbed with that of Trintignant, who ultimately speaks French with a Slovak accent since he follows the movement of the Slovak actor's lips.

This hero has two names; sometimes he is called John and at other times Boris. John is Don Juan, of course. Boris is from Pushkin's play Boris Godunov, which Mussorgsky later turned into an opera. The allusions to Boris Godunov are as frequent as are those to Don Juan. Boris is a false czar, a usurper, who assassinated the last son of Ivan the Terrible in order to reign in his place. When he is the czar, in a way, he is truth. Concurrently, he is not the real czar so he is also the lie. Boris Godunov was pursued his entire life by the ghost of the heir whom he assassinated. The same kind of doubling exists in The Man Who Lies, where some scenes are borrowed directly from the Pushkin play. For example, when Trintignant is in an attic full of objects, he backs up while speaking to someone who is advancing on him but whom nobody sees; it is the ghost of the heir who was assassinated.

This allusion already creates some meaning. Don Juan, the free hero, and Boris Godunov, the imposter, the usurper: both of these networks of meaning permeate the film.

AF: When you talk about the character who uses words to create meaning, it is reminiscent of Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author, who are characters in search of an author to give meaning to their lives. It seems to me that is the reason you selected the applause from a Pirandello play to include in The Man Who Lies.

AR-G: It is true. I have a great admiration for Pirandello and not only Six Characters in Search of an Author but Tonight We Improvise, To Each His Truth -- in short, for all his dramatic production, which has been in existence since the 1920s. I would like for people to say that I was influenced by Pirandello. Unfortunately, Pirandello is not in vogue.

Many scenes in The Man Who Lies allude to another group of elements of meaning related to the actor -- the stage actor, with all the paradoxes included in being an actor. The actor is the one who is who he says he is; therefore, if the actor comes on the stage and says he is Agamemnon, the audience must believe him. It is not a question of saying, no, you are Mr. Dupont.

In The Man Who Lies, the reference to the actor on stage is made several times with precision. In the scene I just referred to, where the hero is backing up before a ghost, he finishes by entering a room where the father's body is laid out. He bumps against a table that he overturns, he spins around suddenly, he sees the body and the two young women, and he says, Don't be afraid, I am merely rehearsing. I am an actor, Boris Varissa.

Perhaps you have heard of me?" In another scene, the actor wakes up in bed with the servant girl. The father and a servant enter, and at that moment, the audience hears sounds from a stage play recorded during the presentation of a Pirandello play at the Comédie-Française. The sounds are unrecognizable as to a particular play, but they are recognizable as originating from a theatrical scene: the sounds of the curtains opening, then people shifting in their chairs and shuffling papers, and at the end, applause. But one sound is recognizable to anyone who knows the play in question: the sound of someone beating eggs to make an omelet.

AF: I think that the key problem is one of transferring the association of these sounds of this particular play to the audience; that is, these sounds and references are rich and have a particular context for you, but there is almost no way in which an audience could possibly know that they came from the Pirandello play.

AR-G: It is not a problem that is peculiar to my films; it is a problem for art in general. On the one hand, I do not think it is terribly important for someone to recognize that particular sounds came from a Pirandello play. It is perfectly possible not to know it and appreciate the film. I do not normally explain these details. I was, in fact, even surprised that you knew that it came from a Pirandello play. Besides, there are always many more elements in a work than the public can ever see. I admire Joyce's novel Ulysses. But I am persuaded that I do not see more than about a tenth of what Joyce put into that novel. He had a Shakespearean culture, a Catholic culture, an Irish culture, and I see these intersecting at only a few points while he himself was permeated by these three cultures. I fully know that I will never see the wealth of allusions that will, in a single word, draw together Shakespeare, Ireland, and the Catholic religion. But there will always be someone who will see one aspect or another. When a work will have had enough readers or spectators, this totality -- what Riffaterre 1  has called the arch-reader (or arch-spectator for cinema) -- will have, in essence, recovered something close to the totality of the meaning. All I have talked about here so far are cultural facts that can be learned through the culture, but there are in a work many personal facts that only the author will ever know. I do not think we would still be studying Shakespeare's works with the same interest if we immediately saw everything that he included. The thrill of seeing a film, or reading a book, or seeing a Shakespeare play is one that is always renewed, as if one were the first spectator or reader. Therefore, if film is an art, it must be able to answer to this characteristic of always having a deferred meaning. If, on the contrary, someone has ambition to make television programs for American networks, it is obvious that these kinds of preoccupations will no longer apply.

AF: What is your method of collaboration with Michel Fano?

AR-G: In principle Fano attends the production of the entire film, including the shooting, and that is what happened with The Man Who Lies. He was on location, and he would notice ambient sounds in the forest or the castle, sounds that were not part of my own script. When certain sounds seemed interesting, he would record them. Thus, when the film was finished, he already had a collection of sounds. Then I did the montage of the image without consulting Fano. When I finished this montage, Fano reassumed his role. He looked at the visual reel along with the direct sound, which included the words that were recorded during shooting but that were not available to me during the montage of the images. Then he and I discussed what should be done with the sound track at various points. During the course of this discussion, I would have my ideas, but he could propose some of his own changes. From that moment forward we worked as collaborators. I gave him a copy of the film to work with in the sound lab, and every day or so I met with him to hear what he had created. At any particular stage, the sound was not on a single reel but on three, four, five different reels. These synchronous reels, as they are called, all have the same length as the film, but they have only part of the sounds of the final mixed reel.

At that stage, obviously, one can never hear the final results. They must be imagined because one hears only the separate sound elements that are later mixed. The elements in question are the sounds that he recorded during the shooting -- sounds suggested to him by the images, those he will create and musical motifs that he will then compose. The final stage, and the most interesting, is when all these sounds are mixed. Then the image is projected onto a large screen with the possibility of putting into play up to fifteen sound reels simultaneously. On the bottom of the screen a series of small points called tracks move forward. The mixing operation lasts eight to ten days, and it is fascinating, for at that moment the image takes on its presence. One might notice, for instance, that if the footsteps are made slightly louder or lower, it completely changes the image itself. During those ten days we try different versions. This process is done sequence by sequence, reel by reel, until all fifteen sound reels have been mixed on the same reel with the appropriate level, the appropriate filters, and at the appropriate point in the film for each recorded sound. For someone who is a stranger to the profession, it is fascinating to witness this experience because, in fact, he sees the image change according to the way it is oriented by the sound in one direction or another.

AF: It is also very expensive.

AR-G: Yes, mixing is an expensive operation, but in comparison to shooting, it is relatively cheap because there are only a total of four technicians at work on this big machine.

AF: How do you receive funding for your films? You seem to be successful at it.

AR-G: It is true that I have always been lucky enough to find funding and often without having to look for it. People propose to me that I do a film. In the case of The Man Who Lies, the director of the Slovak cinema admired L'Immortelle and wanted me to make a film in the Slovaklan Republic without any constraints and with all of the support from the state cinema, a nationalized cinema. Yet I find that normal. I find it much more strange that in Europe, and sometimes even in America, large sums of money continue to be allocated to directors who have repeatedly ruined their producers. I have always had good relations with my producers, both before and after the films. In fact, I have done several films with the same producer because I know how to make low-cost films. In the United States the idea that there is only one public, one cinema, and one system of production is pervasive. In Europe we admit that there are several publics and that, in fact, the people who go to see Rambo are not the same as those who will go to see The Man Who Lies.

What must be avoided is to take the budget of Rambo to make The Man Who Lies.

RS: Did you experience political censorship while shooting The Man Who Lies?

AR-G: Yes, for The Man Who Lies I had political problems involving censorship. The film was shot in Czechoslovakia before the period known as the Prague Spring, when Czechoslovakia thought it would be able to escape from Stalinism, at a time when the bureaucracy was already beginning to weaken. Although bureaucratic clearance was always granted, several points posed problems for them. Number one, they considered it impossible for a son of the bourgeoisie to have been a hero of the Resistance. I said, "You must be joking," and I cited many examples to the contrary. They answered that it was true in those days, but in film, former truth was now impossible. In short, they gave a definition of ideological truth.

The second point was that they said it was impossible for an old noble family inhabiting a castle to have kept its servants. In fact, where we filmed there lived a ruined baroness, and the same old domestics had remained, without salary, in order to stay with their former employer. When I was back in France, a Hungarian nobleman wrote me a letter to say, "You shot this film in the . . . castle. I was raised there, and I would like to meet you to talk about it." I met the man," and he said, "You must have met my cousin, the old baroness." I said, "Yes." And he said, "Well, do you know what she is doing there? How is she getting along? Because the castle is, as you saw, rather in ruins, and there is no longer any means of supporting her. How does she survive there?

What is she doing?" I said I did not know. The Hungarian nobleman added that she was waiting for her brother. Her brother had disappeared in those mountains in the War of 1914! So it turns out that my story of The Man Who Lies was true. This is remarkable because, in fact, he was a hero who had disappeared, and she was sure he would return.

For fifty years she waited, and every time someone opened the door, she was persuaded that it was he who was returning.

The third point is the newspaper Pravda. One sees a soldier reading a newspaper with the name Pravda written in Roman rather than Cyrillic characters. It was not the Russian edition but the Slovak edition of Pravda. A bureaucrat then informed me it was absolutely impossible for a man in a German occupation army to be reading Pravda because it did not appear until after the occupation. Then he forgot about all those objections, because he sensed, after all, that they were trivial. The film was finished and the Prague Spring erupted, followed by the invasion of the Soviets and other troops of the Warsaw Pact. The film, released at that very moment, was immensely successful with students as a resistance film, for there were German officers in the new occupation forces who wore the same Wehrmacht uniform. They were officers of the German Democratic Republic who could well be reading Pravda. The fact that Trintignant hits one of the officers with this newspaper, which is the official newspaper of the Party, thrilled the spectators. All the more because Pravda, as you know, means truth.

RS: You mentioned the political response to the film. What was the aesthetic response to a film that transcended the very limited confines of social realism?

AR-G: One of the particularities of these regimes is that it is enough to have a highly placed protector who covers everything. The director of the Slovak cinema, who was a former poet of the Slovak surrealist group, protected me, and consequently I had no real difficulties. But this is fairly frequent. The Hungarian filmmaker Miklos Jancso, 2  for example, is absolutely extravagant from the perspective of social realism, but he is protected by a highly placed individual. He has all the money he wants because he has a protector. Another example in Poland is the well-known filmmaker Has,  3 who made The Manuscript Found in Saragossa and who had all the money he needed for this expensive film simply because he was protected by someone placed in the Party. It is absolutely essential that the person be a member of the Party. You must remember that these regimes, which are extremely coercive, are also regimes of accommodations where everything can be "fixed." 4

RS: Did your relations with Slovakia not end rather badly?

AR-G: Yes, but it had nothing to do with The Man Who Lies. It followed the shooting of Eden and After, that is, after the repression had once again progressively gained ground over those years. I was coming back from a difficult day of shooting, and I probably did not look like a good Communist. I had long hair and a beard, and a policeman took me for a hooligan and completely destroyed my face. He hit me with brass knuckles, broke my top teeth, and split open my lips. It was one of those special days where one has to be wary of the police in any country in the world -- a day when the police are nervous. It was the anniversary of the entrance of the Soviet troops, and like police anywhere in the world, when they think there is going to be trouble, they look for a fight. Of course, it was a scandal because I was an official guest. I was completely protected by the regime. They brought me to the hospital, stitched me up, and put in some temporary dentures. Then a representative of the Party said, trying to reassure me, "Don't worry. This unfortunate incident happened only because they did not know who you were."

AF: The print we saw of The Man Who Lies vibrated a great deal. I think what obviously happened is a problem with the equipment and sometimes with the condition of the film.

AR-G: The image of the film is perfectly normal. The narration is not normal, but the image is normal. It is likely that you had a copy where the perforations were worn and so it jumped. You can only get old copies here because these films are no longer available for export; so it is not possible anymore to get these films legally.  5 They are not making any new copies, and as it gets more worn, it will vibrate more and more, and people will say,

"You know, modern art is amazing."

But you asked an interesting question, because if the film is not normal, you can, indeed, always believe that you are seeing what was supposed to be seen. If a film has anomalies, it is difficult for the viewer, unless he has already seen the film, to know if it is a question of a departure from the norm that the filmmaker wanted or whether it is a question of a badly manufactured track. Misunderstandings of this type always occur. For example, in one of Marguerite Duras' films [ L'Homme Atlantique (1981)], the screen goes dark for about 15 minutes -- the sound continues but the screen is dark -- the spectators are convinced that the lamp burned out, and so they all start shouting, "Light! Light!" But in actuality it is simply dark. They carry on without realizing it was meant to be like that.

At the premiere of Last Year at Marienbad in Warsaw, I explained that Marienbad was on wide screen and that it was projected through a system of anamorphosis; that is, the entire image is compressed on the film, but when it is projected through an anamorphic lens, it is once again broadened out to normal size on a wide screen. When the film arrived in Warsaw, they did not notice the label that said Cinemascope so they projected it though a regular lens, and of course, the audience saw it on the screen in a 1:33 format. All the figures appeared thin -- and Pitoeff is already a thin person! Immediately some Polish spectators who had seen the film in Paris began to protest "Stop! Stop!" because they knew it was not supposed to be that way. But all the other viewers responded by saying,

"What are you doing? You don't understand anything about modern art!" There was such a respect for this film, which had already been viewed around the world, that they projected it that way in its entirety, finding Resnais' idea of flattening the characters highly interesting.

AF: Some of my students saw no intrinsic purpose to the game of blind man's bluff that the women played in The Man Who Lies.

AR-G: Did they like it?

AF: Yes.

AR-G: That was the purpose! Nevertheless, speaking in this instance not so much as an artist but as a professor, I can surely give some meaning to it. These young women who are playing blind man's bluff appear at the beginning of the film. Trintignant has begun to tell a story in which he gets a little confused. The story is suddenly interrupted by a woman's head of hair that blocks the screen for a second. He stops at that moment. Then the hair disappears, so he picks up with his story, followed by another interruption. This time one sees an entire face. These elements multiply, and it is as if there were another story that is trying to impose itself against the one that Trintignant attempts to invent.

Consequently two series develop: Trintignant, who speaks and who stops each time the other series intervenes, and the series where the young women play blind man's bluff in the yard and the rooms of the castle. This second series that interrupts him is special, for it is a game where a person tries to recognize someone with just her hands. As the young woman who has her eyes covered wanders through the rooms, she finds portraits of the man who disappeared. She even touches the portraits. Trintignant finds that this second narrative becomes so important that he introduces it into his own, saying, "Yes, I have to talk about John." At that point in his is own story, he begins to talk about his own relationship with John, the supposed hero of the Resistance.

Trintignant then arrives in the village and hears the conversations in the inn where he discovers the identity of John, who was the hero of this region. But Trintignant had already begun to talk about John because John was so much a part of the images that had interrupted him -- something obviously contrary to realism since he should not know what the viewer sees. At the inn he also learns that three young women are awaiting his return in the castle, so he immediately goes there. The young women are still playing blind man's bluff. Trintignant opens a door and, once again, John's wife, who is blindfolded, approaches Trintignant with her hands out and touches the face, not of the portrait, but of Trintignant. In essence, this game of blind man's bluff has already brought about a substitution of one for the other. The young woman says, "Who are you?" and Trintignant answers, "I come on the part of John." It seems to me, therefore, that blind man's bluff should no longer be a puzzle for your students. And if it is still a puzzle, so much the better!

AF: Did your actresses ever object to what you wanted them to do? And if so, how did you direct them?

AR-G: I generally get along very well with actors and even better with actresses. The relationships are never coercive; the atmosphere on the set is always good, and the scenario is always open enough so that no one ever feels compelled to do something in a particular way. To give you an example, two of the Slovak actresses were immediately fascinated by the cosmetics that were shipped from Paris. Imagine what that shipment meant in Slovakia. On the very first day of shooting, the person in charge of makeup called me over and said, "Look what they did!" They had put on their own makeup, and they had done it in very artificial ways -- thick and exaggerated, not at all natural. The makeup person thought that I was going to ask these young women to wash off the makeup so that they could be made up correctly. I said, "You know, maybe I should shoot them that way." After all, it was really not a natural style of makeup. That was obvious.

Since I am not at all interested in what is natural, I let them apply the makeup as they pleased. I believe that, to the extent possible, it is important for the actors to have fun, that it not be a form of drudgery. Of course, there are limits. The young woman who is called Laura in the film chewed gum all day long. I had to say, "You know, that won't do.

That cannot be accepted." I actually prohibited her from chewing gum. She would stop chewing right before the shot, put the gum somewhere back in her cheek, and speak her lines. Maybe I mistreated her a bit.

AF: Although The Man Who Lies was written for Trintignant, and he was given a certain degree of freedom, he says that he was really not given as much freedom as he would have liked.

AR-G: True.

AF: Why did you write with a particular actor in mind and then not give that actor a great degree of freedom to improvise?

AR-G: Because to write a film for an actor is to write a role that you will be able to draw from that actor. I know with a specific actor I can do a particular thing, which does not mean that I am going to let him do anything he has a mind to. I do not really like the term to improvise, because improvisation seems to imply that the actor has the liberty to say whatever he pleases. On the contrary, I find it important that the actors recite the text exactly as it is written. I will give you two instances of freedom with Trintignant to illustrate the extent and the limit of this freedom. In the first instance, we completed a shot, and I was pleased with what had been done and thought we could proceed. At that point, Trintignant said, "I feel like doing it differently," and he proposed an alternative. I said, "Okay, we'll shoot that also." He explained what we were going to do, and we did a second take, but in his version. Consequently, we now had the two versions. When it came time for montage, I had the possibility of taking one, or the other, or a piece of each, or both. That is a creative intervention on the part of the actor, but recuperated by montage.

The second instance of the freedom I allowed an actor is when we learn that the servant is a traitor. He is called Judas. I started by having Trintignant improvise the scene. I told him the general sense of what was going on; he improvised the script, gestures, etc., and we shot it -- a method considered improvisational in the usual sense of the word. That evening I listened to the tape, and I reorganized the entire scene. Starting from what he had impro vised, I wrote a new scene, and we shot it the next day. In essence, his participation was creative as well, but recuperated by me, not at the time of the montage but during the actual shooting. For example, he had not said "Judas," but "Ganelon," the traitor who betrayed Roland. 6 Outside of France, Ganelon is not well known, but all over the world people know Judas. Moreover, Ganelon did not have the right rhythm, and Judas sounded better; so from what he improvised, I changed Ganelon to Judas. This method constitutes another kind of collaboration of relative freedom that might be called "freedom under surveillance."

AF: Could you respond to the men's control and power over women?

AR-G: In The Man Who Lies, one character speaks, while all of the others, men and women, are ghosts. This central character is the only one to have any existence in the film, yet he must convince all of the nonexistent ghosts of his existence. Obviously for these young women, the role of Don Juan requires that their sexuality be emphasized because Don Juan's language aims at seduction. These young women are convinced in bed, which is, of course, central to the story of Don Juan.

AF: What impact would you ideally like your films to make on the viewer?

AR-G: It is not something calculated in advance, but, for example, I think that The Man Who Lies is a funny film because Trintignant's acting is funny, and when the spectators do not laugh, it disturbs me. I once was at a university where they were showing this film (normally I do not attend showings of my films, but I came in toward the last part), and until I arrived, people were laughing. When they noticed me, they stopped laughing, and they were embarrassed to have laughed because this, after all, was an "intellectual film."

One of the factors that I really appreciate in viewers is their open-mindedness -- viewers who will not be bothered by the fact that the actor dies four times in the same film. I address openminded viewers who know that we do not kill the actor, so there is no reason he should not reappear.

5

A Film and Its Double: Eden and After and N

Took the Dice

Anthony Fragola: Would you describe the genesis of Eden and After?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Man Who Lies is the last film I did in black and white. I thought that my imagination was in black and white, and I did not want to make films in color. But from 1970 forward, producers refused to make films in black and white. Only Woody Allen makes films in black and white. 1 In the 1970s, it was absolutely prohibited. No one in the profession wanted to take the risk of proposing a black and white film to the public because it was assumed that the public would not go to see it. I believed I would not make any more films. I am also a novelist and a painter, and I am not lacking for work.

Then I had the opportunity to take a trip to the south of Tunisia at the end of the summer, in a region that was completely dry, where in the late summer there was no more green.

Suddenly I understood that I detested the color green in Eastmancolor. (I insist on Eastmancolor, since the color you see on film is not at all the color of nature but the color of the film.) I would have refused to have shot The Man Who Lies in color; that green forest would have nauseated me. But here I was in a world where the sand was white, the earth red, the sea blue, the sky blue; the houses were white with blue doors and shutters.

On the island of Djerba at that time, the regime had prohibited anyone from using any other colors on houses but white and blue, which are the traditional colors of the country.

Then I thought about Mondrian, 2 who detests green, and decided that I would do a film in color. I would shoot it here, and this film would be inspired by pictorial concerns.

There exist many references to painting in Eden and After -- in particular a live reproduction of a famous painting by Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No 2.  3 At the beginning of the film there is a mobile set -- the set of the Eden Café -- made with essentially Mondrian paintings, exaggerated, of course. The main character, "the stranger," is called Duchemin, itself a deformation of Duchamp, and he is himself a painter. The entire film is under the influence of pictorial preoccupations.

Eden and After is the first of my films where most of the script was not written at all. I hired a certain number of actors who were not well known because I could not have asked established actors to work without a script. The actors I selected knew only that they were going to spend a month in Czechoslovakia and a month on Djerba. They had absolutely no idea of the role they would play in the film. The point was to produce narrative by using a system of relationships between scenes that seemed the most opposed to the notion of narrative. The narrative relationship between scenes is normally one of causality; that is, the scenes are related to each other in a chain of cause and effect. In Eden, on the other hand, the scenes succeed each other in the order of seriality; that is, the elements of the scenes were grouped according to series -- roughly in the sense that Schoenberg used in twelve-tone music.  4

I chose twelve recognizable themes: the theme of poison, the theme of fire, etc. Just as Schoenberg would use twelve chromatic tones in a series and then use the same twelve tones in a different order in subsequent series, I planned to use the twelve themes in a series and then the same twelve themes in a newly ordered series and so on. When tones are grouped together, no meaning is produced, but when the theme "to drink" is juxtaposed to the theme "poison," it produces "drink poison." The combination thus produces the theme of "death." I wrote only the first series. All the other series were produced by the work itself and the adventure of the shooting.

This adventure was a particularly happy one for me because a young woman, Catherine Jourdan, who was not foreseen as being the main actress, took hold of the film, and it became her story -something totally unanticipated. I like actors who want to play with their roles and make a game of them, not those who seek a profoundly felt reality, as the realistic cinema would have it. JeanPierre Léaud in Godard's films is an example of an
actor who played with his role and thereby established a distance. He was not a character but an actor in the process of playing a character in the film. From a certain point forward, the film is made for the actor. The flesh of the actor becomes the reality of the film.

Consequently, the actor has the right to furnish elements that were not foreseen, which are then used or abandoned at the time of montage. This was the case with Catherine Jourdan, and the film was very successful.

AF: In your films it seems that the viewer must imagine; that is, the viewer must be part of the creative process, otherwise the film is not complete. Is that true?

AR-G: Yes, that is true of all modern art. I am reminded of the famous statement of Marcel Duchamp, "It is the observers who make the painting," which applies here to the situation of the reader for the book, the viewer for the film, the observer for the painting, the hearer for the music. Unlike the art of the nineteenth century, modern art makes room for the public. Instead of presenting a closed system, modern art is open and reserves a place for the one who comes to the work. The work is received in an active rather than in a purely passive way.

AF: What should the participation of the viewer consist of?

AR-G: It is difficult to explain in a few words. This topic could be the subject of several large volumes, but in general, it is a creative participation in which the viewer must identify himself not with the characters but rather with the forms, as if he, himself, were the author of those forms.

AF: At the beginning of Eden and After, there is a voice that speaks of mirrors, cinema, reality, "my life." What is the relationship among these elements?

AR-G: Along with the credits of the film for Eden and After, there is what might be called a thematic set of credits. One hears a voice that presents the themes of the film accompanied by images. Thus the credits are both imagistic and vocal. In particular, there is a presentation of the twelve themes that organize the film, although I can assure you that they are not readily perceived in the finished work. Even I do not recognize them when I see the film now. One of the reasons I prefer not to introduce the film before its showing is because people look too much for the twelve themes and the ten series that served to generate the film. In fact, they cannot be identified, just as I cannot identify the Bergesian series in Lulu of Alban Berg. 5  The serial system was a generating system, and then it disappeared exactly as a scaffolding would when building a cathedral.

Let me give a specific example of the way the serial system functioned in a completely open world in which the scenario was not written. Among the twelve themes was the theme of the double -- a theme that has always interested me and that can be found in The Man Who Lies. I had not hired a single actress to play the role of Catherine Jourdan's double, since I did not even know that Catherine Jourdan would be the main actress. I only knew there would be a female character. We shot for a month in Czechoslovakia at a time when Soviet repression was increasing and the young Czechoslovakians had only one thing on their minds: to leave the country, which they did not have permission to do. The cinematographer, Igor Luther, who was Slovak, asked the producer to make up a false contract for his fiancée so that she could leave to go to Tunisia, as if she were an actress in the film, for it was his intention not to return to Czechoslovakia. Meanwhile, when Catherine Jourdan played the scene of pulling the dead body of the stranger out of the Danube, she had ruined her boots and her dress to such an extent that I thought they would not be usable. She played her scene with such energy that we thought she would drown. Well, she did not drown, but her minidress and boots were ruined. I was obviously in despair because this costume was essential and was supposed to last until the end. The film was a low budget one, and we did not have duplicates for the costumes. I asked the dressmakers at the studios in Bratislava to try to repair the boots and dress, while I sent an assistant to Paris to find similar boots and the same dress. Since it was August and vacation time for Parisians, I had little hope. When I arrived in Djerba, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they were able to reconstitute the dress and the boots and that they also had been able to find a dress that was the same or almost the same. At that
moment, Igor Luther and his fiancée arrived in Djerba -- I had never seen her. I was surprised to discover Catherine Jourdan's double -- a little more masculine, but still her double -- the same long legs, the same short blond hair, the same height. The dress fit and the boots fit. Hence this scene, which has nothing at all to do, as some would claim, with my sado-lesbian obsessions. (laughter) AF: There are many references, often visual ones, to other works -- the repeated use of the actor Trintignant, a falling glass, physical constraint. I saw in all this a certain playfulness.

AR-G: Modern art in general accepts the idea of playing with the materials of the work.

The modern artist plays with paint; in a similar fashion the novelist plays with the material of the novel, and the filmmaker plays with the material of the film. Obviously, this playfulness is part of the creative process, and it is also part of the contact with the public.

The work of art invites the audience to play with the film and, beyond that, to play with their own lives. This situation is similar to the one announced by Hegel as being the end of history, the moment he calls "the Sunday of Life," where the free man begins to play with the world. In this game not only will the material in a particular film be part of that film, but so will the material from cinema in general. In Eden and After numerous allusions to other filmmakers exist, as well as allusions to materials other than those of filmmaking, such as the novel, theater, and pictorial art, in particular to the painter Mondrian and other painters. Eden and After also contains relations and allusions to other forms of creation, such as literature, including Shakespeare. This situation is not at all new to our times.

Such intertextual relations have been practiced since the beginning of the century. In Joyce, for example, they are absolutely glaring in a book such as Ulysses, not to mention Finnegan's Wake. I believe that this "generalized intertextuality" is fundamental to modern art.

AF: Could you tell us more about the improvisation in this film?

AR-G: Not only was Eden and After not written in advance, of all my films, it is the one that was the least written. Improvised is not a word I like to use, as you know, so let us say it was created collectively, not only by myself, but also by two people who played a major role in the film. Along with Catherine Jourdan, whose participation I have already mentioned, Igor Luther, the cinematographer, collaborated extensively in the making of the film. Without a detailed script, each shot, each scene must be discussed with the cinematographer, and his creative power is completely integrated into the film. He has the right to invent. Igor Luther was still a young man, a student of the Prague School, but he became one of the most famous cinematographers in Germany who made all the recent German avant-garde films, those of Fassbinder, of Volker Schlöndorff. 6

AF: You have said that for this film you were influenced by the strong colors of Tunisia, especially blue and white. Blue and white and, of course, red are dominant colors in this film. Do you give symbolic intention to each of these colors or are they part of a general aesthetic scheme?

AR-G: You would have to ask the same question of Mondrian. I believe he would answer no. No symbolic value. It is an aesthetic choice above all. Now, obviously, white and blue appear in the French symbolic tradition as the symbol of purity. They are the colors of Joan of Arc. Red, on the contrary, is the color of blood. Obviously, symbolism emerges immediately, but it is for aesthetic teasons that blood is present. All my films shot in color involve blood. Those shot in black and white do not. So it is the color red that interests me.

AF: Was there not a kind of sexual energy related to the funeral pyre?

AR-G: Yes, very certainly. You saw that correctly.

AF: Are you saying that blood and violence are inevitable in a mechanized society?

AR-G: Why mechanized? What about Greek society then? Violence is inherent in the human being. I did not put it there, nor did industrial society. A certain violence was prevalent in all of the Middle Ages, for example. In all of the Renaissance there existed a
violence certainly equal to our own, only they lacked our technological means of destruction, such as the atomic bomb or concentration camps. But violence was clearly as strong, and the knife as violent as the revolver.

AF: Eden and After often generates hostility and criticism, especially among feminists.

Many people find it objectionable.

AR-G: I am not sure that you are right because the reaction of women to this film in particular is, in reality, extremely varied. At a basic, zero level objection, some people will say there are naked women but no naked men. Why? The answer is simple: because I am heterosexual. This question makes me think of another one, and I will let you judge the relevance of it. After seeing Marienbad, a black person asked me why there are only white people in the hotel. It is the same type of question. That kind of spectator seems to expect the film to show not a particular aspect of reality but the totality of reality that would take into account the various groups of that reality. When an artist, no matter what his medium

-- literature, painting, music, film -- works, he obviously does not have moral preoccupations of that kind. He considers he has the right to choose for himself the material that he is interested in working with.

Roch Smith: Another objection might be that you limit the role of women to their sexuality.

AR-G: Why do you say "women"? I did not tell the story of "women" but of a particular woman. Besides, the fate that befalls the intelligence of men in this film is not that remarkable. For example, the stranger who enters, rolling his shoulders like a superman, is rather grotesque. From that point of view, I could even explain to what extent my film is a feminist one. A young woman is caught up in a society that is visibly macho. As you know, those societies exist. They are not my invention. This young woman will then be tormented by macho myths: triumphant virility, woman as object, and so forth. At the beginning of the film she seems to respect this ideology, and the first time she comes upon the mass of sperm oozing from machinery in the factory, she touches it with fear and respect. The entire evolution of the film will be the story of her liberation, for at the end she gathers up the sperm again -- which is nothing more than white glue -- covers herself with it and laughs. She also violently slaps this man who represents macho qualities. The only real violence in the film is that slap. What could be better?

AF: I find it interesting that most of my students found the woman kissing her double to be a shocking homosexual scene, but they accepted the violence at the beginning of the film.

AR-G: I do not think the scene of the doubles in this film is a homosexual one. In an anecdote produced by the serial system, "A young woman goes through a series of ordeals." These ordeals resemble the ones found in novels of chivalry -- cruel dangers must be overcome by the young knight. He triumphs little by little over these ordeals until the moment when an enemy steals from him the portion of his clothing or of his armor that protects him from evil. Lost in the forest without this essential article that protects him, he is effectively destined to die until the moment when he meets his double who returns the missing article. In this film, the young knight is a young woman, and the ordeals have, as they always have in this kind of narrative, a violent and sexual character.

The protective object -- I intended it to be humorous -- is a miniskirt of the 1970s. Having lost this dress -- which was, in essence, her armor -- she is on the point of perishing until the moment when, in the forest, which has now become the desert, she encounters her double who returns the dress. If the kiss that they exchange is a lesbian kiss, then I am ready to become a monk! If someone really wants to see lesbian scenes that are much more daring, I heartily recommend The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure.

Back to the first scene, the one of the rape. The students in the film say -- the dialogue exists in the text -- that they are fascinated by the myths applied to them, in particular drugs and rape. At that time, the newspapers were full of similar stories. The students play at rape, but obviously, that rape is not realistic and certainly no more realistic than the scene of poisoning and burial that occurs later. Within the totality of Eden and After, it
would be an error to see the film as realistic. One could also say that in the film Tunisia is merely a Tunisia of postcards, and I would answer, "Yes, of course." The thematic totality of these series belongs to the material that we could call the stereotypes of our charming society: rape, drugs, Club Med, etc.

AF: 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. They find it impossible to discern events as nonreality.

AR-G: That is probably true.

AF: What is the function of images such as the mixture of sperm and blood and the raw egg that most people would find disgusting, yet regard with a certain fascination?

AR-G: You used the appropriate terms of opposition: for the egg, repugnance and sensuality; for the blood, attraction and revulsion. In each case, a pair of oppositions --
attraction and revulsion. That, in effect, is the subject of the film. In particular, viscous material and cutting material are constantly at once opposed and mixed in the film -- the broken glass mixed with the viscous red color. Bachelard wrote an entire book on that question.  7 From the perspective of the immediate meaning of the film, an evolution unfolds in the heroine with respect to this question of attraction and revulsion. At the beginning she experiences a fear of sperm, as I have said, and by the end of the film, she covers her whole body with white glue, as if she had really liberated herself from this oppression, exactly in the same way that the handsome virile man who appears at the beginning as an object of respect will in the end be dominated, since she slaps him.

AF: Therefore, in some ways a traditional narrative also exists beneath the other structure.

A person is moved to a point of self-expression and liberation.

AR-G: You cannot say "beneath," since I have said that, on the contrary, it is at the most visible level.

AF: You once said that you were influenced by the painter Paul Klee. Could you elaborate?

AR-G: No, because that is very personal. It has to do with the relationship of Klee with Tunisia. He shared with Mondrian and me the fact that he did not like the color green, and Tunisia represented for me, as I have said, a country without green. That seemed true for Klee as well since he also called attention to the absence of green in the countryside.

Moreover, the work of Klee is extremely important for everyone. There are probably three painters who have an important role in the film, the three whose names I have already mentioned: Marcel Duchamp, Piet Mondrian, and Paul Klee. A final pictorial reference, of interest to the current generation, is to American pop art, in particular to Rosenquist.

AF: As in The Man Who Lies, I associate ideas and images with Borges -- the labyrinth, circular structures, being caught in a dream. Did Borges influence you?

AR-G: Certainly, a great deal, since even in The Man Who Lies I thought about the short story by Borges called "Theme of the Traitor and Hero."

AF: The role of Mondrian and Schoenberg in Eden and After are clear, but could you further elaborate why Duchamp was included?

AR-G: It is indeed less clear. Among those intertextual references, some are clear, and some are not clear at all. The reference to Duchamp comes from the fact that this painter, this creator, who is called Duchemin or Dutchman in the film, does paintings that, in fact, are not really paintings. They are scenes from life, compositions in which he mixes human figures, pieces of metal, doors, and similar items. Here then is an evident reference to techniques that exist in painting today, ever since Duchamp. Marcel Duchamp was probably the first artist to think about these fragile objects that cannot last, but which can endure when made into compositions and which later led to pop art.

Rather than being a direct reference to Duchamp's work, mine is a reference to Marcel Duchamp, the artist, and to his legacy of pop art, particularly to Rosenquist, Rauschenberg, and Jasper Johns. Dutchman/Duchemin, the character, is Duchamp, as I have said, and yet there is a very strong reference to one Duchamp painting, his Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, in which a nude character is at the same time on all of the steps at once. References to that painting occur in the film during a sequence where the spectator sees a whole series attributed to this Dutchman, such as women opening doors and going through doorways. There is an actual nude descending a staircase, and in the same reference, after the heroine finds the Dutchman in Tunisia, the viewer sees the works of the painter in question incorporated into the rest of the anecdote.

One might also recognize allusions to Duchamp's ready-made sculpture The Large Glass found in the Philadelphia Museum of

Art. A remarkable work! It consists of a plate of glass and inside three things: The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even; Nine Malic Molds; and The Chocolate Grinder. Such a reference can be addressed to a specialist and not at all to the larger film audience. I once wrote to a friend who is a specialist on Duchamp telling him that Eden and After was my Large Glass.

AF: The styles of The Man Who Lies and Eden and After contrast sharply. What accounts for this divergence?

AR-G: From the beginning there were two fundamental differences between the films. For Eden and After I was doing a film in color, and color was to play a significant role. The other reason for the stylistic difference was that the only important character in The Man Who Lies was the male actor Trintignant. The other characters were, in fact, no more than shadows. On the contrary, I wanted Eden and After to be shot entirely around the female role. I like these two films very much, in particular because of the presence of Trintignant in The Man Who Lies and Catherine Jourdan in Eden and After. Catherine Jourdan's role in Eden and After is not a passive one. Those who saw her as passive, in my opinion, did not perceive it well. She has exactly the same active energy as the man in The Man Who Lies, and the public success of Eden and After due to this young woman was not one that took place in pornographic movie houses but in intellectual settings.

RS: In 1971 you released a film for French television called N Took the Dice that features the very same actors as Eden and After. What is the relationship between the two works?

AR-G: The title in French, N a pris les dés, is an anagram of L'Eden et après. I use considerable material from Eden in this film, but the beginning in particular differs from Eden and After. The second half of the film uses scenes from Eden because the producer did not want to underwrite further work. Yet the first part shows what the film might have been. It was an interesting experiment.

RS: What kind of experiment were you attempting in this film?

AR-G: While I made use of some of the same images as in Eden and After, I combined them differently and gave them a new sound. I also used the second takes -- which are different and are always variants for me -- plus the unused heads and tails of the Eden shots.

The idea was to tell a completely different story, since the first one in Eden is serial and the second is aleatory. Serial and aleatory musical structures were in fashion in that period

-- the 1960s and 1970s. Serial music has pretty much disappeared and, to a large extent, so has aleatory music. But at the time there were fairly surprising experiments with aleatory music. Musicians on the stage would throw dice in order to pick the score they would play. Seeing the musicians of a string quartet who in addition to their instruments also had a table with dice created a considerable comical effect. The audience ended up laughing a great deal, even though it was not supposed to be funny.

In N Took the Dice, Richard Leduc, who played Marc-Antoine in Eden and After, is now called N (as in narrator). He addresses the audience directly in a conventional fixed shot used for television commentators and throws the dice to find the next sequence of the film. The shots I used were taken in addition to those shot for Eden. Of course, nothing proves that I respected the game. (laughter) In fact, I did not always respect it. Obviously, all it takes is to make a cut between the moment he throws the dice and the moment one sees the outcome in a close-up of the dice on the table to change that outcome.

Since I knew from the outset that I would be making two films, the cinematographer was free to film whatever he wished. Tunisia, in particular, was exotic for a person who had never been out of Czechoslovakia, and he was delighted to be given the freedom to film all sorts of things.

RS: You had two films in mind from the beginning?

AR-G: Yes, it was important in obtaining financing for the project. There was a cinema film for which I had an advance from a distributor and also a film made for French television which had advanced me funds.

AF: Why did the producer not want to finance the shooting of N Took the Dice?

AR-G: It was not the shooting that needed to be financed but the montage. In fact, everything had been shot. But montage, in a case like that, was an extremely long and expensive operation. Expensive -I should not exaggerate. I certainly have no complaints about the producer [Samy Halfon] who worked with me on most of my films, but he was interested in making money. Once the television advance had been paid, he was not so concerned with the end result. Since he believed Robbe-Grillet's experiments would be largely over their heads anyway, he could not see why I was spending so much money for such things as restructuring the sound track for television.

For example, to have a character alter what he said originally requires a number of operations. It cannot be improvised. It requires not only the editing room itself, which is not very expensive, but also well-equipped sound studios, which are costly. That is why, after a time, the producer thought it was taking too long, and he accused me, more or less, of drawing out the work for the mere pleasure of it, because of my love affair with Catherine Jourdan, which distressed him. He made it clear that I had to finish, so I agreed to let it end. As a result, almost the entire second part of the film was completed by Bob Wade. In any case, Bob is good at doing Robbe-Grillet; I could practically entrust a whole film to him. But obviously, Bob did not have money to spend, which meant that he included large segments from Eden and After, something he should not have done. It would have been necessary to cut It into small segments first.

RS: If I may return to the question in order to be sure I understood correctly, the only shots in addition to those made for Eden and After were those of Richard Leduc?

AR-G: They were the only shots that were made after the original shooting. They were shot while the montage was in progress.

AF: Could you comment further on Bob Wade's role with sound?

AR-G: Bob took Fano's score and recut it.

RS: Everything went through Bob?

AR-G: Yes, that was one of the things that bothered the producer. He did not see why he should have to pay Fano twice. As I did with the images, Fano left to Bob the job of cutting the music in a different way.

AF: Does the effect of the sound depend on the viewer being familiar with Eden and After?

AR-G: I can answer in this way: Bob, who is also an editor of more traditional films for other directors, is much more concerned than Fano about the physical effect on the viewer. Fano's structures are always very subtle and not easily perceptible to the average viewer. A sound reel made by Bob is always more impressive for the viewer who is not a specialist, whereas Fano's reels are much more impressive for viewers who are also connoisseurs. While I do not exactly recall, I think that it is entirely possible that a certain characteristic might have been extracted from Fano by using him in a more efficient way, if you will -- efficient in the commercial sense, in that it would produce an effect.

RS: It is probably not something that you, yourself, would have done if you had continued to control the project directly?

AR-G: Actually it is entirely possible that I would have because I often reproach Fano for the excessive subtlety of his sound compositions.

AF: You have spoken about several elements that would be alluring to the person interested in your films, but is there something that you personally find especially beguiling in N Took the Dice?

AR-G: I would say that the entire beginning is splendid. It is a new story. For example, in Eden and After there are two locales, Bratislava and Djerba; in the second film, the Technical University of Bratislava is right next to the sea, by means of a perfectly believable effect of montage. Something particularly successful from the beginning of the film is the seagull from The Voyeur making figure eights in the sky. On looking at what Igor Luther had shot, I discovered that there was a seagull which repeatedly made figures eights, exactly as described in The Voyeur!

AF: The film opens with shots of the two young women wearing the same minidress, which underscores the theme of the double. Could you comment on the theme of the double in this film? That is, what dimension of the theme of doubling interested you in N Took the Dice that you did not treat in Eden and After? Or was it a further elaboration of the same basic concept?

AR-G: No, it takes on a very different dimension since N Took the Dice is itself a double of Eden and After, and the characters are, after all, doubles of the other film.

RS: Toward the end of the film, N, the dice thrower and apparent source of an apparently aleatory narration, explains: "But chance has its laws as well, they say" (" Mais le hasard a ses lois lui-aussi, dit-on").

AR-G: Here I am alluding to the theory of chance in mathematical statistics.

RS: There is, indeed, a cut to the mathematics class at the university.

AR-G: Yes, the formula that is on the board is one of nonconvergent series, if I recall. It is not a statistical formula but one of serial calculus.

RS: Thus it is a formula that lends itself better to the first film rather than to the second.

AR-G: Yes.

AF: To continue with the idea of chance: It is evident that games play an essential role in this film. Can you elaborate on the different levels and interrelationships of games in N

Took the Dice? For example, the direction of the narrative is ostensibly dictated by a game of chance. There is the game of leading the audience down many paths while humorously suggesting that they are on the right path. There is also the suggestion that N Took the Dice is like a game show where one can win a washing machine when the narrative is unraveled.

AR-G: (laughter) It is a brainwashing machine. It is implicit in the text. In this film made for television, it fits with the narrator's ironic comments at the beginning about television narratives explaining everything down to the last detail.

RS: Yet there is a paradoxical sense in which even N Took the Dice imitates such television narrative, for it is impossible for the film's own narrative to be really aleatory since you control it.

AR-G: Yes, it is impossible. Oh, it might perhaps have been possible, but that is not the way it was done in this film. I insist on control. I do not really want true aleatory narration.

RS: I was struck by what I took to be an intertextual reference to Cocteau's Orpheus when the narrator repeats a series of numbers and words, as if they were a secret code. For example, one hears "Four-one-five, stone stop, message." Similar codes come over the car radio in Orpheus.

AR-G: Ah! Indeed! I remember that now. I do not think I did it on purpose. I am pleased.

Perhaps I thought about it unconsciously.

RS: That apparent allusion fits with the relation between N and Elle, which is one of Orpheus and Euridice.

AR-G: Yes, but that is pretty much the relationship of all my main male and female characters. In any case, I have a great admiration for Cocteau and for Cocteau's cinema in particular. It is unjustifiably unknown.

RS: You are something of a voyeuristic Cartesian in this film where the narrator says, " Je regarde, donc je dérobe" ["I look, therefore I conceal," or "I look, therefore I rob"].

AR-G: (laughter) There was a pun using the homophone of " dérobe": des robes (dresses) -

- also, as I have often said about my other works, a pun on dé-robe [un-dress], which explains why there are so many naked young women, and on dé-Robbe [dis-Robbe], or removing Robbe-Grillet.

6

The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure

Anthony Fragola: The title of The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure (Glissements progressifs du plaisir) is intriguing on several levels. First the word progressive -- one can think of it as being in relation to the continuum of your work. Secondly, slidings has an erotic connotation, especially when you add the word pleasure. Pleasure has always been, it would seem, at the center of your work.

Alain Robbe-Grillet: Yes.

AF: So, in what sense is this film a progression or a change from your preceding work?

AR-G: The title that had initially been foreseen was The Progressive Displacements of Pleasure (Déplacements progressifs du plasir). The word displacement was borrowed from the vocabulary of Freud. Because I found that the word displacement had too many connotations as a psycho-Freudian abstraction, I preferred the word glissement [sliding or slipping], which has more zest. But the word is not necessarily erotic. One can slip on the sidewalk. Moreover, the progressive displacement in question is a displacement of meaning: the young woman constantly makes meaning slip in order to keep it from becoming fixed. The prosecutor can fix meaning; she keeps it from becoming fixed by displacing it continuously. Thus one possible title could have been The Progressive Displacements of Meaning. But I preferred to make the title slide towards eros as well, and in that case, slidings instead of displacements, and pleasure instead of meaning. The perverse young girl introduces her body into the meaning, or rather against meaning.

Roch Smith: Therefore the title conveys implications that are both diegetic and structural?

AR-G: Yes, exactly. I must also add that for The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, the Italian distributor brought out extravagant erotic posters. I have kept those posters; they are astonishing. Yet he was surprised that there were complaints. The film was condemned in Italy, as you know.

AF: What was the origin of The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure?

AR-G: I can answer in various ways. There exists a material origin. I was dining with a wealthy man who had produced fairly expensive films and had lost money on them. He knew that I made films that were not very expensive, and he asked if I could make a film for 500,000 francs. I said I could, so we reached an agreement.

The project I had in mind was inspired by Michelet's The Sorceress, as interpreted by Roland Barthes in his Michelet par luimême 1  That gave me the idea of making the character of the sorceress a young woman who upsets masculine discourse. The sufferings that the masculine order subject her to are described in Michelet's text with a certain delight. The Sorceress is an ambiguous book. On the one hand, the sorceress is the spirit of revolution, while on the other, she also serves as a sexual object. Those conflictual drives can be discerned in Michelet's style. I took up that conception in The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, with the fundamental departure from Michelet that she upsets the masculine order not only with her body but also through her reasoning by which she undercuts the logic of a police investigation.

The third origin of The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure is a structural one: to make a film in which the narration is intercut with punctuation shots that serve to separate the scenes.

Little by little, "slippages" occur from the punctuation shots towards the narration, from the narration towards the punctuation shots, and from one scene to another through the intermediary of punctuation. Punctuation shots, whose origins are "tailpieces" in typography and "fades" in film, are gradually integrated into the narration. There is a structural slippage from punctuation shots towards the diegesis. The structural idea was, in short, this concept of slippage.

RS: In Slidings, a struggle evidently ensues between the forces of order (the church, the judiciary) that wish to control the narration and Alice, who seeks to liberate it. Alice is also a sorceress whom you associate with nature.

AR-G: Yes, that association comes from Michelet.

RS: I wonder to what extent you have adopted Michelet's point of view and whether we should conclude that the narrative liberty for which Alice struggles is a natural phenomenon.

AR-G: (laughter) That is obviously a trick question! It is evident that a narration is structure and not nature. But, on the other hand, if I think about the objections of traditional criticism to the structures of the New Novel, I notice that those objections were often to elements that were relatively more natural than the structures of Balzac.

Disruptions of chronology, for instance, are far more natural than respect for chronology.

Similarly, the critics objected that Claude Simon did not use any commas, and yet, statistically, back in the days when people wrote letters, many uneducated people wrote letters without ever putting in commas. Therefore the supposed natural structure of Balzac, which we New Novelists were accused of destroying, was at least as artificial as ours, and in many cases, even more so. In my theoretical writings at that time, I contrasted the structures of the subconscious, as brought to light by psychoanalysts and other specialists of the psyche, to the supposed naturalness of rational discourse.

Essentially, realistic naturalness has nothing natural about it.

AF: On the question of structure, it seems that Slidings really is slippery. There are frequent slippages. It seems that you avoid establishing a single narrative thread, but try rather to convey the possibilities of narrative.

AR-G: Narrative possibilities. Yes. Have you read the published excerpts from the Warren Commission on the assassination of Kennedy? It is amazing. At every moment in the depositions, in the statements from witnesses, in the evidence that is collected, there appear narrative possibilities that have no relationship whatsoever to the official version and which continue to haunt us, since even today we are still questioning the official explanation of the events.

RS: "Regressive slidings" perhaps?

AR-G: Yes. The separate pieces of evidence that make up a trial are more interesting than the trial itself. Since the judge always wants to simplify matters, the trial simplifies. He wants to tell a coherent story. The pieces are not coherent; moreover, some people lie or do not remember, while others contradict previous testimony. The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure is simply a question of an extreme case where the accused person undermines the telling of the story, the roles, and, of course, meaning in general.

RS: In a sense, the scene in the film where the nun and the priest present objects as evidence summarizes this.

AR-G: Yes, and she pronounces certain words. The magistrate looks up words in his dictionary and in other books, and he tries out words as well by giving them different intonations to see if their meanings will change. Yes, I like The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure very much, and I believe it is successful in an uneven way.

Initially, when first released, Slidings was successful as an erotic film. Good middle-class people do not dare see an erotic film, but if, on the other hand, they have a cultural alibi by saying, "Oh, it's an Alain Robbe-Grillet film," they go, but for unspoken reasons. A few years ago, the Boston Museum of Modern Art held a retrospective of my films and the Consul General of France in Boston organized a gala evening for the closing. He insisted that Slidings be shown that evening. Of course, he was protected because this film was included in the videocassettes distributed by the Ministry of External Relations, so he risked nothing. On the other hand, he knew perfectly well what would occur. While this large auditorium was never completely filled for other showings, in this case three times
too many people appeared. The audience was not there to glimpse the French consul but to see The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure. The people stayed until the end of the film and then protested on their way out.

RS: But you have had problems with the local authorities regarding issues of obscenity.

AR-G: I have had those kinds of difficulties and encounters with the authorities for erotic provocation on two occasions. The most important was in Italy where I was found guilty of violating morals, and Progressive Slidings of Pleasure was to be burned in a public place. It was condemned to be burned at the stake, so to speak -- a humorous turn of events because the film is the story of a witch, and the stake was already in the film!

The other instance was in France with Playing With Fire at a time when French censorship had been reinforced. Unfortunately for the government, an imprudent minister had just persuaded me to accept the Legion of Honor. Artists rarely accept the Legion of Honor, but in order to please the Minister of Culture, I accepted it on his promise that they would not publicize it. Two months later, I received a letter from the censorship board -- from the same ministry-telling me that I would have to cut some scenes from my film because they were accused of being pornographic. I immediately wrote to the minister and told him,

"This time we are going to talk about my Legion of Honor decoration because I am going to hand it in. Obviously, if I am a pornographer, I do not deserve the Legion of Honor.

Moreover, when I hand it in, I am going to do it publicly so that it will get into the newspapers." I did not hear anything for a week, and then I received another letter from the censorship board telling me that their earlier letter had been sent in error.

AF: You explain in Angélique 2 that the judge in Palermo, Sicily, ruled that Slidings was pornographic because of nonnarrativity. After viewing the film, he saw no justification for the erotic images because he had not understood the plot. Since it is Alice's function to deconstruct the narrative, including her own, but especially those of the magistrate, was not the Italian judge, in a sense, correct?

AR-G: Well, he was correct, of course, since he is a defender of order. The judge was right from the point of view of a judge, and the sorceress was right from the point of view of freedom. But the judge who depends on established order can only, in effect, judge from that perspective. Now, my lawyer's answer in the court of appeals, which I find amusing, angered the court: He said that the judge did not have a right to pronounce a judgement on this affair since it was, in fact, his own fantasies that he had put into the film. One of the articles of the law maintains that one cannot be at the same time a judge and an interested party. Well, he is an interested party, and so, in fact, he cannot judge. The court was beside itself. (laughter)

AF: Does Alice not recall --

AR-G: -- you call her Alice, and it always seems funny to me because she is not called Alice in the film. Never is the word Alice heard. You derived the name from the ciné-novel.

Originally I had written "Anicée," since the film had been written for Anicée Alvina. But she did not want her surname to remain because that would identify her too much. (In fact, she was wrong, because it is the best work she has done in her entire career.) So I used

"Alice" instead because it sounded a little like "Anicée." But in reality, for me, her name is not Alice.

AF: Nevertheless, she does recall Alice in Wonderland.

AR-G: Yes, of course.

RS: To return to the question of punctuation in Slidings brought about by these found objects or apparently found objects, like the shoe, the bottle, etc. . . .

AR-G: Yes, "apparently found," for there are some that are obviously pieces of evidence that were found, while others appear as objects of punctuation, even though they have not yet been found anywhere -- the pickaxe, for example, which is used to dig a hole.

RS: Or the kneeler.

AR-G: The kneeler, which had not appeared at that moment. At the beginning, there are only certain objects like the shoe and so forth, but soon others are added.

RS: Chateau and Jost define punctuations as "closeups or a series of closeups of objects that rapidly dissolve and do not assume any apparent diegetic role."  3 Would it be possible for you to explain the function of these punctuations? Are they generating objects?

AR-G: Yes, they are generating objects, but they are, in part, borrowed from the arsenal of the pieces of evidence, which changes matters slightly. They are not a series of objects taken artificially as generators at the beginning, like the generators of Eden and After.

Later, they will serve as generators.

RS: You present them as aleatory objects?

AR-G: Some are aleatory objects, but others, on the contrary, are related: for example, when the female character says the broken bottle could be a murder weapon. But I am really not that interested in defining their function. It is up to you, the critics, to do so. For me, that is what it was. There was a story and there were objects, and the objects in the story were related at certain moments, and at other moments they were not.

RS: I have the impression that while you clearly made a conscious effort at punctuation in this case, there has always been an element of punctuation in your films, particularly in the intertextual references to your prior works, both filmic and fictional.

AR-G: Yes, but they are less openly used as punctuation. Frequently they are inserts included in the sequence at the moment of editing, and they break the narrative continuity.

RS: In commercial films, such inserts would be recuperated in the end by the narration.

AR-G: Completely.

RS: Anicée responds to the nun's admonishment about her body painting with the question

"Perhaps, sister, you don't like modern art?" What is the relationship of Anicée's character to art? She seems both to imitate and challenge modern art. She appears to imitate the Anthropométries of Klein, for example, but it is always the color red rather than "Klein blue" that she uses.

AR-G: Because red is the color of blood in the film, and blue is the color of the sky. Klein is obsessed by the sky in his first paintings. But that young girl certainly does not know Klein. She has fun with the paint, and you must not forget that her interlocutor is a nun, and the question of imprints is an important one in religion. She ends up by giving her a red cloth, saying, "Here is Veronica's veil."

For me, it was simply a nod at Klein. All I did was to think that since she looks so comfortable with her body, she could go ahead and do it, and, indeed, she carried it out the very first time. There was only one take of that scene. To make a film for 500,000
francs, one cannot have two takes of any shot.

RS: Might there not have been two takes sometimes?

AR-G: Maybe, but even then I used both of them in the montage most of the time.

Because in that sort of scene, if I want to have two takes, she needs to wash herself
completely, and she must be made up again. The wall has to be repainted white, and I must start all over. We took a six o'clock train that very evening. Since we were shooting the next morning on the beach in Granville, everything had to be wrapped up. She had to leave the image of her body on the wall, and we had to film it. To have only one take, it is indispensable to shoot with sound added later rather than sync sound, since a take usually must be redone because of the sound.

RS: Consequently, you never make a double? You make another version?

AR-G: Yes, slightly modified, but not a double. Except, of course, if the actor completely mixes up his lines or something of that sort. But that is extremely rare since there are few words. Occasionally, even if the actor has changed a word -- something I will not tolerate -

- I will ask Bob Wade what he thinks, and his usual reply is that it can be fixed at the time sound is added.

AF: Then you rely heavily on your technical people?

AR-G: Absolutely. I keep an eye on the scene, but someone always is looking through a lens or paying attention to the edges of the frame and so forth. Besides the questions of sound, I also avoid multiple takes by considering camera movement. A pan is very likely to be successful; a traveling shot on rails is very likely to fail.

RS: Was The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure filmed in Paris?

AR-G: It was filmed in an inexpensive little studio in Paris. We shot quickly, and then we all rushed to the railroad station.

RS: As in Trans-Europ-Express!

AR-G: (laughter)

AF: That is remarkable.

AR-G: Yes, it is remarkable as a technical prowess. And it worked because I had an excellent rapport with that young girl. She was quite willing to do virtually anything that was demanded of her. When she was painting her body before pressing it against the wall, she would listen to me, and I would tell her, "Okay, a little lower on your belly." She carried it out, and one does not have the impression upon seeing the film that she is listening to instructions. Yet she certainly was not a professional actress. She simply handled her body with naturalness.

RS: How did you succeed in discovering someone like her? Did you know her ahead of time?

AR-G: No. Catherine had seen her in a film called Les Remparts des béguines (The Nun's Ramparts), where a fifteen-year-old Anicée had a bit part in which she really was not too bad. We were driving through Cognac when Catherine saw a sign announcing the showing of Les Remparts des béguines. She said, "That is the girl you are looking for. You should go see that film." I went to see it that evening. When we returned to Paris a few days later, I contacted Anicée. Catherine had perceived that she could act without any of the problems that actresses generally have with nudity.

AF: But it seems to me that there is another dimension, not just the rapport with her, to be able to shoot the film on a ratio of one to one, or occasionally two to one. You must have had ultimate confidence in the cinematographer. You have spoken of the problems you had with the cinematographer in L'Immortelle. What was your relationship with the cinematographer in Slidings?

AR-G: The lighting was not difficult, and I described it with precision for the cinematographer, who was a director of photography for commercials. Commercial directors of photography are accustomed to extremely bright and glossy images. It worked well. We used very little equipment. Slidings was always shot with a minimum of means against white backgrounds. The main requirement was to manipulate white, which is a fairly difficult color in film, because diffusion and excessive brightness must be avoided.

I got along so well with Anicée because she had fun. She had a great time during the entire shooting, and that is very important. Since she was a minor, the contract was with her mother, and her mother had us agree that at all times her daughter would be the sole judge of what might go against her sense of modesty. At first, I was cautious. I would say to her, "Do you think that we might, perhaps . . ." And she would reply, "Oh, yes, that would be great fun!" I never understood where her modesty was, for she never refused to do anything at all! She always said, "Oh, yes, it will be great fun!"

RS: In a scene in Slidings, which seems to me to be particularly successful, the spectator sees the magistrate who is looking through a peephole into a room from which cries of sexual violence seem to originate. The spectator is completely caught by this trap when he discovers that the sounds were coming from a record player on Anicée's bed. She, always unconcerned, explains that she was listening to music.

You are surely playing here on the possibilities of counterpoint suggested by Eisenstein between the soundtrack and the image. But might there not also be an "opening" effect with respect to the received ideas on music, even modern music, which would correspond to the opening of the narration by means of the image? This scene in particular seems to recall that it is not only the image that is open, but very often the sound.

AR-G: Certainly. Perhaps one can even be more surprised by sound. Unfortunately, the viewer, except in that particular case because he was entrapped, is not sensitive to sound.

It is often said that the viewer sees little but that he hears almost nothing.

RS: But you make them hear more and more.

AR-G: Unfortunately not. I see to what degree they hear very little. Fano also thinks that the image keeps them from hearing. He would like the screen to be dark so that they could hear! In Slidings, there are numerous sounds that are barely perceived. The viewer is so accustomed to sound being redundant and in the background that if there are surprises in the sound, the viewer ignores them. In Slidings, the lawyer and the girl are talking in the cell, with the girl mocking the world and saying, "Well, they don't behead little girls."

During this scene, the sound of workers constructing a guillotine comes through the window. Lelouch had recorded that sound for one of his films.

RS: And you used Lelouch's recording?

AR-G: Yes, from a commercial sound library. I myself know it is the sound of a guillotine under construction, so it is a private joke for me but not for many others, because they cannot discern the nature of the sound. But the sound of one of the workers whistling while working can be heard distinctly. No one was whistling in Lelouch's recording, but I added that worker. He whistles something quite remarkable, which is the opening of Tristan and Isolde. He whistles so loudly that at certain moments the sounds of the work and whistling keep the viewer from hearing clearly the dialogue of the lawyer and the girl.

I have often asked viewers after the film if they heard the allusions to Wagner. These are accompanied by other references to Wagner in Slidings, including the theme of the philtre.

(When the girl transforms the lawyer into Nora, she makes her drink a potion that is Tristan's philtre.) But the whistling is absolutely obvious because it is a perfectly recognizable air. At least a Wagnerian should recognize it. But no one does.

One time, at the old Lausanne Cinémathèque, a lady approached me after the showing to tell me that the conditions for projection in the hall were really deplorable, which was true, of course. Then she added, "During the central scene, the projectionist was whistling."

Since it was a noise that did not seem to have any relationship to the plot, either it was ignored completely, or it was taken as an extraneous noise, or as a disturbance on the soundtrack. No one can conceive that it is in the message, that one is supposed to listen to it, and that it is not a mere noise but the message itself.

AF: Was there something you were trying to convey with that particular admixture of sounds?

AR-G: No. For me, the soundtrack is crucial, part of the complexity, part even of the diegesis. One of the important diegetic themes in the film is the fact of drinking a magic liquid. That magic liquid can be blood. Now, why that particular theme? Because it is essential in Michelet's Sorceress. There is even the famous sentence that I have reproduced in Topology of a Phantom City: "Pale-lipped, she drinks the dark, blood-colored wine."  4 That theme is important because it is the magic liquid that will transform meaning. Obviously, good Wagnerian that I am, there are two references that immediately come to mind: Tristan's philtre, on the one hand, and on the other, the Grail. Both allusions in Slidings are to Tristan -the one I have just related -- and to Percival in a more subtle form.

In the latter case, it is not even a question of the viewer's becoming aware of it.

What differentiates a musical sound from a noise is the width of the sound spectrum.

Numerous sounds in nature are also notes, but the spectrum is so wide that one cannot identify them with a note. Nevertheless, one can filter out, especially with a synthesizer, a certain number of frequencies from that wide spectrum in order to transform that noise into a more or less musical sound.

There is a famous early experiment with the French flag. The noise of the flag flapping in the wind -- a noise with a wide spectrum -- was recorded. The noise was then introduced into the synthesizer. While the noise was fed through, the Marseillaise was played on the keyboard of the synthesizer. When the result was played back, one had the strange sensation of hearing the flag "playing" the French national anthem as it flapped. In Slidings, in the scene where the first bottle breaks and the pieces of glass vibrate on the floor, we recorded the real vibration of those pieces of glass, but we ran the sound through a synthesizer and produced the theme of the Grail. Those are extremely interesting sound effects, but they are effects that the viewer does not perceive.

AF: We expect sound to originate from the film or to parallel the film. Are you also creating a soundtrack that can be independent, which usually intersects or parallels, but not always? In short, does the soundtrack have a life of its own, just as the narrative has a life of its own, which cannot be predetermined?

AR-G: No, the soundtrack almost always relates to an aspect of the narrative. The story of the Grail or of Tristan is brought about by the narrative itself, from the drinking of a red liquid found in Michelet's original text that can be discovered again in the image of the film. Frequently, this type of experiment in the film passes in the eyes of the public as a sort of unbridled self-indulgence. Instead, it is exactly the opposite, a superdetermination.

But this overdetermination is not redundant. In a traditional film, the soundtrack is redundant, for it adds nothing to the meaning, nor does it even reinforce meaning; it is the same meaning. Whereas here, on the contrary, sound is itself a meaning, one related to the image, but that is never redundant. For example, the broken glass, when it first appears, does not have any red on it yet. It will have red later.

RS: The soundtrack is polysemic.

AR-G: Yes, but in a contrapuntal rather than an independent role.

AF: This idea of religion and the Grail is an interesting one. In Slidings there exists a strong religious motif. The prison can be thought to be a convent where sexual repression leads to tortures of the Inquisition --

AR-G: -- in imaginary cellars. It is she who furnished those particular images to the priest, who is quite fond of them. She says so herself. Besides, she starts saying improbable things about the prison when one considers that it is a brightly lit setting.

AF: And the priest accuses Alice of being the devil.

AR-G: Yes, a sorceress.

AF: There also seem to be strong parallels between the young girl and Joan of Arc.

AR-G: Yes, she is that type, after all. The envoy of God who is taken for the devil. Jesus for the Jews.

AF: Are there other religious motifs in Slidings?

AR-G: Yes, in the scene with the eggs, since that scene is more or less a reference to Georges Bataille, 5 one sees clearly the small gold cross that Nora is wearing. In addition, the grave that is being dug in a cemetery right next to a church while one hears Gregorian chants provides a religious motif.

As long as we are talking about Bataille, my relationship to the Catholic church is completely different from his. Georges Bataille was obsessed by the Catholic church. He had been a seminarian, whereas I did not have the slightest religious education. I escaped all of that completely, and I have absolutely no hatred towards that religion. I do not like religions in general when they are extremist, be they Jewish, Moslem, or Catholic, but I have no animus toward the Catholic church. The church is simply part of the panorama of cultural stereotypes of our civilization. By taking Michelet's Sorceress, where it is the very theme of the work, it would be difficult for those allusions not to appear more clearly than in others of my films.

AF: Slidings seems to operate on a series of reversals of the norm. For example, the shoe

-- associated with death, lesbianism, and prostitution -- is held up as an object of veneration, as the chalice or container of the host during Mass.

AR-G: Another religious allusion. It is Claudel's Satin Slipper. 6  The woman's shoe is traditionally associated with sin, even in popular tradition. One says, for example, about a woman who sinned that she committed a faux pas. One hears it even in the slang expression prendre son pied [to come]. Hence, Bufiuel's use of the woman's shoe is a normal association. But in The Satin Slipper, the young woman who is afraid of sinning takes off her shoe and puts it on the altar to the Virgin and leaves it there. In the film, the shoe under a glass globe is the one from The Satin Slipper.

AF: Alice, the accused murderess, the seductress, the deconstructor of the narrative and of the repressive norms of society against the spirit, actually has an innocent, childlike quality to her. Are there other reversals of the norm functioning in Slidings that are structural rather than diegetic?

AR-G: Yes, in that case it is the entire structure of the film that is "not acceptable." Hence, the reaction of the Sicilian judge, since, in fact, the narration is completely disturbed by numerous effects at various moments. The punctuations are particularly disturbing. Also, from the beginning of the film one sees the inspector, played by Trintignant, making a rapid inspection of the house. What he does is incredible. He goes through the same doors several times; he opens doors in the ceiling. He follows a path that might be the path of an inspector in a normal film, but then he returns through the same places as if the structure of the house were a fluctuating one. At a certain moment, a door will open onto a room, and at another, the same door will open onto a different room. A similar effect is created with the soundtrack when he opens the trap door in the ceiling, and one hears water dripping in the cisterns of Constantine, a sound used in L'Immortelle. We then hear that dripping water in the imaginary cellar of the house.

RS: This was shot in Vincennes?

AR-G: Yes, it was even shot in the same cell where Sade was kept -- to please him!

Although it was not entirely in Vincennes. We used Sade's cell in Vincennes, but we also used cellars on the Rue du Temple.

AF: There seems to be a strong affinity between your themes and portrayals of sadomasochistic eroticism as a form of rebellion and those of the Marquis de Sade. Do your views on sadomasochism concur with those of Sade or are there significant differences?

AR-G: There are essential differences because Sade is strongly influenced by the philosophies of his time, in particular the philosophies of nature. Sade has a Rousseau-like side. He constantly preaches that he seeks to be natural. Since nature is cruel, one must be cruel. I consider that stupid. On the other hand, there is a fundamental resemblance as well: surely he had "sadistic" impulses, and surely I do, too.

I think that another major difference is that Sade's use of the philosophy of nature is his message. In my case, sadomasochism merely constitutes material to be used. In our societies, sadomasochism is an erotic stereotype. For example, entire magazines in the sex shops of New York are devoted to women in bondage. This is their specialty. For me that is part of society's discourse, which I assume as raw material. Sade proposes sadomasochism in the name of nature against the word of society, whereas I take up the sadomasochistic images within the latent discourse of society, the astonishing cultural stereotypes of society.

These cultural stereotypes, for example, can be found in popular illustrated editions sold in railroad stations in certain countries such as Italy or Mexico. The images used are amazing. I saw an edition of Simone de Beauvoir's The Woman Destroyed in 00AD co. 7 On
the cover a pretty woman was bound in chains! Sade lived in a society where it was practiced but not shown, and we live in a society where it is shown at every moment; it is proclaimed, in effect. I am virtually the opposite of Sade in that regard.

AF: What is the homage to Orson Welles' adaptation of The Trial in Slidings?

AR-G: The magistrate on his bed overflowing with books is more or less an allusion to the magistrate played by Orson Welles, who is in his bed in one of the scenes of The Trial. The scene in Slidings is a shabby parody because in The Trial, he is on the bed like a throne surrounded by draperies and sumptuous decor. We used the same type of lens on the camera, and we used other technical devices as a nod to Orson Welles. Probably not a very recognizable one, except perhaps for someone knowledgeable about Orson Welles and who has that particular image in mind. The shot is taken from the same angle and framed in the same way.

7

Playing With Fire

Anthony Fragola: What structures Playing With Fire?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: The three sound domains: Il Trovatore, Carolina, and Erika.

AF: Do these three pieces, either in your mind or by listening to them, in part govern the structure of the actual montage of the film?

AR-G: No, not really. In Playing With Fire more than in other films, they tell a story, which is the story of Patricia Hearst: that is, the daughter of a banker who is kidnapped but who then realizes that she is on the side of those who have kidnapped her and who knowingly extorts a ransom from her father.

Roch Smith: Is it the story of Patricia Hearst by chance, or did you do it on purpose? Was that story your point of departure?

AR-G: My point of departure, no. But it interested me considerably before doing the film.

The idea of falseness also appealed to me. In order to receive a ransom, one does not have to kidnap a person. It is sufficient to have someone believe that the person was kidnapped. The idea of reversal also played a role. The father, wishing to protect his daughter, happens to put her in the very place where she will be sequestered. These ideas all concern the falsifiability of the world. There is, in addition, the central theme of incest, for the relationship between this father and this daughter is, after all, bizarre.

RS: André Gardies indicates that the title originally foreseen for Playing With Fire was Opera Incestuosa. 1

AR-G: No.

RS: He was mistaken?

AR-G: Yes, the original title was Playing With Fire [Le Jeu Avec Le Feu]. My contract required that if I changed the title, it had to be in agreement with my producer. When the film was almost finished, because of the orientation it was taking, I thought that the title Opera Incestuosa would be much more beautiful. The producer did not agree. The film had a reasonable public success, and it is likely that for audiences the harmless title of Opera Incestuosa would have been preferable. It is, after all, well related to the film, although perhaps too broad.

RS: Opera suggests music and also spectacle. Could you comment further on the role of music in the film?

AR-G: The fundamental idea of the film is to transform the Paris Opera into a bordello.

Opera is thus a place. Obviously, in Opera Incestuosa, the Latin title means "incestuous works," the word work in Latin being always more or less associated with fornication. That was also true of French in centuries past. "Incestuous works" is a humorous title that happened to include the word opera, or the place itself.

It is not the Palais Garnier but the Salle Favart. 2 I always say it is the Opera because it is simpler and because the Salle Favart no longer serves as an opera house. This former opera house, while roughly of the same type, does not have the grandiose side of the Palais Garnier, with its large staircase and so forth. We selected the Salle Favart solely because of the availability of space, for I had started by discussing the use of the Palais Garnier with the director of the Opera. The Palais Garnier offered more spectacular possibilities that probably would have been infinitely more costly. The larger a space, the more the lighting costs, obviously. Ultimately, the Palais Garnier was not available because
of rehearsals, and that decided the issue. Since the Salle Favart was less in demand, we chose a time when there was no performance at all, neither rehearsals nor evening performances, so we could leave our equipment set up.

RS: From your point of view, is opera more the place than the musical aspect?

AR-G: It is both. You have noticed that we make an allusion to the idea of an enormous belly in the Salle Favart. That could have been just as possible in the Palais Garnier. The setting suggests the interior of a belly.

RS: As if it were a question of penetrating?

AR-G: Exactly, she penetrates into different rooms. In reality she is opening doors to theater boxes. There are false continuities, and she penetrates into rooms that are not at all in the Salle Favart but are in one of the hôtels des maréchaux at the Place de L'Etoile. 3

RS: Not all your interior scenes were filmed in the Salle Favart?

AR-G: Not all of them. Some of them were filmed in one of the hôtels des maréchaux, which was in a deteriorated state at that time and which we could therefore transform as we wished. The building is located on the corner of the Champs-Elysée and the Place de L'Etoile. When you see the Eiffel Tower through the window, that is actually what one saw at that point from the interior.

The exterior of the building and certain interior scenes were shot in a more unexpected place in the sixteenth arrondissement -the Thiers Foundation -- a school for extremely advanced students who have completed the Ecole Normale Supérieure, who then specialize in Sanskrit and other esoteric fields.

The layout of the Opera was interesting from a mechanical point of view. It is easy to create a continuity without the spectator being aware of it, between regular hallways and circular ones that go around the theater boxes. Anicée Alvina opens doors onto a new room each time, but once she suddenly opens a door onto the opera hall, and that produces an effect that is fairly successful in the film. The building became increasingly larger as the film progressed given the fact that, when she enters, it is the Thiers Foundation villa. This topographical character of the Opera was important for me in the shooting. In addition probably, the Opera was one of my childhood fantasies, part of my childhood masturbatory imagination. My family was not rich; we never went to the theater, but we did go to the Opera occasionally since the Opera in Paris had some very low-priced seats. And so was born my childhood idea of transforming the Opera into a sadist house of pleasure.

RS: Which you finally brought into reality?

AR-G: (laughter) Yes, which I finally brought into reality. Of course, the use of the Opera was linked to the inclusion on the soundtrack of Il Trovatore, which is a story about incest, and Erika, the German Wehrmacht song linked to the Nazi regime. It is not a Nazi song but one whose origins are much earlier than the Nazis. Yet people took it for a Nazi air. It is, in fact, a Boy Scout song and a wellknown military song of the German army that talks about simple blue flowers. Erica in Latin means "heath." The French heard it so much during the occupation that they thought it was a Nazi song. Since Erika now has the connotation of a Nazi air in France, it refers to all the Germanic myths brought back by the Nationalist Socialist period, in particular incest, one of the great themes of German mythology.

The story of Siegfried is astonishing. In Angélique I point out to what degree the love relationship between Siegfried and Brünhilde is incestuous. 4  They are incestuous in a number of ways since Siegfried is the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, who are brother and sister and who are both children of Wotan. Now, Brünhilde is also a child of Wotan, though not of the same mother. The relationships between Siegfried and Brünhilde are remarkably close blood relationships. All these ideas were linked, in particular, by the opera Il

Trovatore, which is also a story of fire. It gives the film an architecture, at once auditory, diegetic, and topological.

RS: It is interesting to see to what degree, behind initial appearances, the whole construct is Wagnerian after all. Il Trovatore would not seem to lead to Wagner.

AR-G: They both belong to the same musical period, and frequently, the fans of Wagner and of Verdi are the same.

RS: But you are rather more a fan of Wagner than of Verdi?

AR-G: No, Wagner is simply a more important musician in the history of music. But I am just as much a fan of Verdi. Wagner is a more important musician because of the musical richness of his invention. Verdi is an important and inspired musician but contributes less to the evolution of a dying tonal system.

AF: You have explained why you chose Erika and why you chose Verdi, but what about the Brazilian air Carolina?

AR-G: I wanted a third musical pole, something that would be dissimilar. What could be more different than a Brazilian song and a German army song? The really important factor was the way we were able, with Fano, to make some transformations. Fano's combination of the three at the synthesizer are often fascinating, though little perceived by the public.

RS: I have the impression, nevertheless, that it is increasingly possible to perceive Fano's contributions precisely because they are associated with films. That is, if he were trying these experiments in another medium . . .

AR-G: On the one hand, the ideas are generally my own. It is he who carries them out. He wanted to create the cinematic title of "direc tor of sound," just as there is a director of photography or cinematographer. The title of director of sound does not exist because sound is often disdained in film. But he merits that title. Upon my indications, he carries out work that allows him to express himself.

He had completely stopped writing music since his falling out with Boulez some years ago.

Having since completely reconciled with the composer, Fano had problems not so much with Boulez but with Susanne Tezenas, the composer's protectress, who had supported Boulez's work in the early days. It was Susanne Tezenas who persuaded Jean-Louis Barrault to take on a then totally unknown Boulez as music director of Barrault's theater troupe. 5

Fano wrote a sonata for two pianos that is heard, in fact, in Trans-Europ-Express and which had been written during the period when he was still writing music. Then he met me, and it was while working with me that he thought he could write music again to accompany the images, starting with those that are already in existence -- images, rhythm, thematics, a certain number of elements of that type. He says that he needs images.

AF: The way you use music for Playing With Fire is different from the normal procedure whereby you start with the shooting and then editing.

AR-G: Yes, but Playing With Fire is the only one of my films for which I structured the project to start from music.

AF: If I may return to an earlier question, to what extent did the musical motifs produce the images and drive the form of the structure?

AR-G: To a varying degree and probably increasingly less so in the course of the work. As always with a project of this type, it initially serves as a motor, but later it is not respected
as a norm, as an obligation, as a law. At a particular moment, it had an influence, and then it disappeared.

The theme of Carolina is, more often than not, related to the kidnappings -- notice I said

"more often than not" -- and the theme of Erika is related more often than not to what may be incest -- the suspicious relationship of this father to his daughter, related to what may be the guilt of a banker connected with his conduct during the occupation. Since Playing With Fire is an open film, other events intervened during the shooting. A particularly successful example occurs when Anicée Alvina dresses as a German soldier with a helmet. It had not been foreseen, but when she saw the men dressing up in German uniforms from the last war, she said, "Oh, I want to do that, too." Her playfulness intervened, and it worked out nicely.

She is framed in that shot by two German soldiers, one of whom is Bob Wade, the editor of the film, and the other, one of the assistants. Bob Wade is often seen in my films. In The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, where I am seen with my umbrella, Bob is one of the clients who speaks to the prostitute. And during the credits of The Man Who Lies, when you see "montage, Bob Wade," the background picture shows a German soldier firing a machine gun, and that is Bob. In Slidings, he digs the grave as well.

AF: Of the three musical themes, did one ultimately dominate either during the shooting itself or, later, during the editing?

AR-G: Il Trovatore necessarily dominated because it is linked to the site of the Opera. It is, after all, more present.

AF: You talked about entering rooms and so forth. In general, doors are given oneiric significance in psychology. What would be the oneiric significance of the doors in Playing With Fire?

AR-G: I am not much for meanings and symbols. I do not know. The doors in Playing With Fire are, perhaps, linked to Roland Barthes' idea that the hallway with doors -- a known oneiric theme -- is a Sadian theme, that all the sites imagined by the Marquis de Sade were hallways with doors, and that each door opens onto a new victim. I think that Barthes is right. The hallway with doors is a Sadian theme. Surely that is true in Playing With Fire.

AF: Just to clarify. The score was not mixed or predetermined before the montage? It did not determine the montage?

AR-G: No, the auditory idea predetermined the film, but the soundtrack was adapted later onto the montage with, as always, some rectifications of the image taking into account the music.

AF: Generally in your films, in going from one scene to another, the shooting is disjointed and fragmented. There are cuts and so forth. In this film, there is a temporal continuity from one scene to the next, which, for me, lowered the energy during the transitions from one room to the next. Was it intentional, since it was a strong departure from your other films?

AR-G: Yes, it was intentional. The hallway, in each instance, creates a lowering of intensity. Its counterpart is that, in each instance, the viewer finds a new spectacle, which will culminate in the large room of the Opera. It is important that there be this kind of repose.

RS: As in music?

AR-G: Yes, a restful spatiotemporal continuity that allows for a considerable leeway in spatiotemporal possibilities, akin to the role of the hallway with doors in Sade, a type of reassuring horizon upon which subversions will open.

AF: Are you manipulating time and space under the guise of realism?

AR-G: Often it is amusing to reconstruct a completely impossible realism. I can understand that it is not amusing for the viewer, but it is very amusing for me since I recognize the different decors that belong to a given continuity. In particular, the continuity where she ends up entering into a real theater box is quite amusing because that is the only real continuity.

AF: The role of the father is evident and strong in Playing With Fire, and there is the authority figure of the husband in Last Year at Marienbad. Is this return of an authority figure intentional?

AR-G: No doubt. The Oedipal theme is widespread. It is evident that this theme is most prevalent in Playing With Fire.

To return to the three musical themes: originally they were to correspond to other groups of three. There were, for example, three animals, three domestic animals, which have not disappeared completely: the dog, which was associated with Trintignant; the horse, linked to the father; the cat, related to the young woman. Traces of that remain in the film. She gets a small burn on her thigh from the fire in the father's fireplace and says that it looks like a cat's paw. In fact, it was a cat's paw that was drawn as a burn. The horse and the father are linked to order; the cat and the young woman are related to disorder; and the dog and Trintignant are associated with a certain extravagance. Trintignant's role is played much more extravagantly than the others. At the beginning when he arrives with his suitcase, he hands it over three times, and the horse will appear in the only frankly incestuous scene, when the father is washing the young girl in the bathroom.

It was Bob Wade's idea to put the horse at that particular place, and it worked out well.

The idea was linked to a French joke. 6  When we had found a horse for the shooting, it was without any preconceived idea about exactly where we would put it. The theme of the dog was sacrificed to a small degree later because Anicée was too afraid of dogs. She refused to be in the same shots. We had to use editing to make it seem as if the dog were chasing her. The aggressions and the undressing, the licking -- all of that was transferred to another actress, a blonde named Nathalie Zeiger. In this kind of film where the scenario is fairly flexible, if an actor cannot perform a scene, the theme is displaced to another actor.

On the theme of the father, there is a scene I particularly like. I am not sure it would be as striking to an English speaker who might be startled that the text of Othello is not Shakespeare's but the French translation. I am not sure it would even be recognizable to an English speaker, although he does call her Desdemona at that point. The relationship of Othello and Desdemona also suggests a father-daughter relationship because of the age difference.

AF: Let us go back to the usual attack on this kind of film. This is another of those films that disturbs people because of its depiction of women. In The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, the young girl represents the spirit of liberty.

AR-G: And here too.

AF: In what way?

AR-G: She destroys the banker. To destroy a banker is the spirit of revolution itself. It is rebellion against the father, against money, against established order.

AF: In this film, structurally, that theme seems subordinate. It does not appear to be as consistently developed as in Slidings or Eden and After.

AR-G: Why?

AF: Perhaps because in the other films, for example in Slidings, you see her actually controlling the narrative.

AR-G: Well, in Playing With Fire, there is the moment of reversal. During the entire beginning of the film, although she has a role that is fairly suspicious, the viewer has the impression that, nevertheless, she is not fully aware of the true nature of events. When Trintignant first comes into the house, she seems to be worried about what they might do with her. Then, the first time she succeeds in escaping from the so-called bordello, she rushes to a phone and says, "Hello, everything is going well and is proceeding as planned."

It is a reversal. At that moment, she participates in organizing subversion. When she gets into the car, she then says, "You've got the money?" And he replies, "Yeah, it's in the trunk."

AF: But that theme does not seem to be as interwoven. It appears and then disappears, then reemerges at the end. Whereas in Slidings and Eden and After, one sees a constant struggle of the woman rebelling against the narratives. Here it does not seem to be as organically inherent in the structure.

AR-G: Listen, if you prefer Slidings, that is fine. It does not shock me in the least. You are right. It is not the same. But I do not have to do the same film each time. I have found it more amusing that instead of dominating the totality of the diegesis, the theme of rebellion was less perceptible at the beginning and then suddenly appeared.

AF: In the trial for pornography of The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, the judge said that images of women and minors, etc., were permissible when they fit into a plot. Because the narrative is not as apparent in Playing With Fire, I think it leaves the film much more open to attacks and to criticism for being pornographic.

AR-G: I am simply not concerned about that. But in the final analysis, it turned out to be less exposed to such criticism, except for the scene with the dog, which did disturb the censors. It is true that Playing With Fire is the only film that had temporary troubles with the French censors, but in general it turns out to be much less vulnerable to attacks because -- I find this curious, but true -- it is a more expensive film with expensive and famous actors. Therefore, according to the logic of capitalism, it cannot be a pornographic film. (laughter)

RS: Yet Sylvia Crystel, who appears in Playing With Fire, gained notoriety for her lead role in Emmanuelle, a "soft" pornographic film.

AR-G: Sylvia Crystel had a role in Playing With Fire before she played Emmanuelle. The producer was paying Trintignant and Noiret exceptionally well because they were stars.

Therefore, he was counting on displaying their names prominently on the posters. But he thought that I was paying Sylvia Crystel too much for an unknown. In the interval, Emmanuelle was released while another film with Noiret and Trintignant flubbed completely. Consequently, only Sylvia Crystel now appears on the posters. The film was sold to an American distributor, probably because of Sylvia Crystel, but it was never released because I refused to do another montage where Sylvia Crystel -- who had only a small role -- would appear in the very first reel.

RS: Was this your most expensive film?

AR-G: Unquestionably. It was shot in Cinemascope, which is very expensive because one must light a much larger area. Everything takes longer. Everything is more expensive.

AF: You were working with a wider field. Did that cause you new kinds of problems by comparison, for example, to Slidings where the framing was more restricted?

AR-G: When I decided to shoot a film in Cinemascope, it was because I wanted wide images. It was important to see the hallways of the Opera in a wide perspective. It is
obvious that there were constraints, but as long as I had much more time, as long as the producer wanted to make an expensive film, I did not encounter undue problems.

The producer of Slidings wanted to make an inexpensive film and that guided my choice of subject. The producer of Playing With Fire wanted to make an expensive film because he had no money. Producers who have money make inexpensive films. Producers who have no money make expensive films. That way, they can cull a percentage of the return.

Playing With Fire was done by producers who had absolutely no money, so the film had to be as expensive as possible. For example, I thought at the beginning that the father would be played by Lonsdale, and the producer asked if a more expensive actor might be available who would be just as good. I said, "Yes, there is Noiret." You see the logic.

Besides, Noiret is very good, even though he detests this film. I find it all the better that the film did not suit him, as if he were an actor who entered into the wrong film, who fell by chance into a world of madmen. As for Cinemascope, there are the usual problems related to that format. Whatever you do, there are going to be problems.

AF: In Playing With Fire, there is an illusion, not of narrative continuity but of spatial continuity at times. Did Cinemascope influence that?

AR-G: I insist on the fact that continuity disappears. It is remarkably discontinuous and remarkably impossible. Not only is it a discontinuity, it is not masked by realism as in traditional cinema. On the contrary: at each moment the distortions of space are completely glaring. Now, what is interesting is precisely this impression of continuity with a paradoxical space. A bit as in dreams. The scenes of a dream are linked, but the space of a dream is paradoxical. In a dream, an interior frequently becomes an exterior, and that phenomenon is always linked with an appearance of continuity. The dreamer does not perceive a montage by shots; he perceives a type of continuity. But it is the space that changes, and that is one of the successes of Playing With Fire, I think.

RS: And of Topology of a Phantom City.

AR-G: And of Topology. It is of the same period. One thing that is consistent with what you are saying is that Cinemascope would not lend itself to a structure of punctuation, as in Slidings.

RS: Your idea about space and dreams reminds me of Bachelard in The Poetics of Space, when he talks about the exchange of large and small space and of interior and exterior space.

AR-G: Yes, that is it exactly. The exterior of the building is minuscule, and suddenly, its interior is transformed into the great hall of the Opera. It is a space that seems continuous but that is modified at every moment. That is, it is a topological space.

AF: But I wonder why Cinemascope does not lend itself to punctuation? Could it be that there is so much in the frame that the objects do not take on the same import?

AR-G: That is probably one of the reasons. In Slidings, each shot has a very limited number of signs that appear. In a Cinemascope shot, it is much more difficult to limit the number of signs, and if you limit them too much, Cinemascope no longer has any interest.

AF: Were there any particular changes in working with the actors in Playing With Fire as compared to your previous films? For example, did Anicée Alvina work with you as easily in this film as she did while shooting Slidings?

AR-G: Anicée Alvina is different in this film. In Slidings, she did everything we asked of her, and she was having fun at it. Since Slidings was a great success for an art film, she became a star. As a result, she asked for twenty times more money. She was difficult, perhaps because she saw these two well-known actors, Trintignant and Noiret, who, after all, had a certain stature. But there is no question that her performance in Playing With Fire is far less successful than in The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure.

RS: She had lost her innocence?

AR-G: She had lost her spontaneity completely. In Playing With Fire, the actor with whom I really collaborate is Trintignant, as in The Man Who Lies. That makes for a considerable difference. Also Noiret was very unhappy during the shooting of this film. Trintignant persuaded him that he should do a Robbe-Grillet film because one has fun doing it. He accepted, but it did not work well. Noiret, who is an excellent actor, only likes simpleminded cinema. That continuity you found in the film, Noiret did not perceive at all.

He had the impression from the very beginning that he had signed up for some terrible adventure, a film with neither head nor tail that he continues to find without head or tail because he refuses to see it. He especially did not like the idea of seeing those young naked women walking around. In short, the film shocked him.

But I must insist that Noiret did everything required of him. He lent himself to all of my directions, even though it may have been with a certain hostility. The hostility that he shows is simply a reserve in the face of his own character, and so it works out well in the film. He claims he suffered nervous depression as a result of the film, but he had it beforehand. It was certainly not the film that gave it to him. Finally, and contrary to what he has said, he was fully paid. The film did not owe him a penny.

He is an unhappy individual. We brought his horse to the shooting to please him. In the country I had asked him what we might do to make him less unhappy, and he answered that he wanted his horse. I said, "Fine, that will be the third animal. The father's horse.

Marvelous." We brought the horse in a van at great expense, and when the horse arrived, it scraped its knee a bit. Noiret cried over his horse's knee. He cried all the time. It is the only time an actor was not pleased with me, but I insist that it is only important that I be pleased. And I am, in fact.

AF: Catherine Jourdan was highly influential in Eden and After, and in The Man Who Lies Trintignant added some Shakespearean elements. Did actors contribute any unexpected aspect to this film?

AR-G: Yes, Trintignant's playacting: his gestures with the suitcase and the raincoat, when he hands over his belongings to the valet upon arrival.

Delphine Seyrig (A) in Last Year at Marienbad. Courtesy of Editions de Minuit.

Sacha Pitoeff (M) and Delphine Seyrig in Last Year at Marienbad. Courtesy of Editions de Minuit.

Françoise Brion (L, Lâle, Leyla, etc.) in L'Immortelle. Courtesy of Editions de Minuit.

Françoise Brion and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (N) in L'Immortelle. Courtesy of Editions de Minuit.

Catherine RobbeGrillet (Lucette) and Alain RobbeGrillet (Jean) in Trans-EuropExpress.

Courtesy of Alain RobbeGrillet.

Jean-Louis Trintignant (Elias, himself) in adolescent's room in Trans-Europ-Express.

Courtesy of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Game of blind man's bluff with Silvie Bréal (Marie, the maid) and Suzana Kocurikova (Laura, the wife) seen through the castle window in The Man Who Lies. Courtesy of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Jean-Louis Trintignant (Boris Varissa) before a firing squad in the castle cellars in The Man Who Lies. Courtesy of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

The rape scene with Lorraine Rainer (Marie-Eve) at the Eden Café in Eden and After.

Courtesy of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Catherine Jourdan (Violette) discovers the dead Pierre Zimmer (Duchemin, Dutchman, etc.) in the Danube in Eden and After. Courtesy of Alain RobbeGrillet.

Anicée Alvina (Alice) painting her body in The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure. Courtesy of Editions de Minuit.

Anicée Alvina (Alice) seducing Michel Lonsdale (the magistrate) in The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure. Courtesy of Editions de Minuit.

Anicée Alvina (Caroline de Saxe) in the bordello in Playing With Fire. Courtesy of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Philippe Noiret (Georges de Saxe) and Christine Boisson (Christina) playing Othello in Playing With Fire. Courtesy of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

Cyrielle Claire (Sara Zeitgeist) in La Belle Captive. Production Argos Films (Paris).

Daniel Mesguich (Walter) and Gabrielle Lazure (Marie-Ange, the vampire) in La Belle Captive. Production Argos Films (Paris).

Gabrielle Lazure (Marie-Ange) on the road as discovered by Walter in La Belle Captive.

Production Argos Films (Paris).

Gabrielle Lazure (Marie-Ange) and her henchmen in La Belle Captive. Production Argos Films (Paris).

First page of the initial draft of Un Bruit qui rend fou (A Maddening Noise). Courtesy of Alain Robbe-Grillet.

8 La Belle Captive

Roch Smith: As in Eden and After, there seem to be many pictorial allusions in La Belle Captive that are fundamental to the narrative. Could you elaborate upon them?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: You will have noticed that there is in this film a strong allusion to Magritte and an allusion that is less pervasive but nevertheless consistent to Edouard Manet. Edouard Manet caused a scandal in his time, and the painting that you see several times in La Belle Captive, The Execution of Maximillian, absolutely shocked the art critics of the time, who found it cold and unfeeling; it seemed that the surfaces were flat, and the mannerisms were theatrical, particularly that of the emperor. Today we find Manet's painting moving. Obviously, something happened in the interval: sensibilities evolved, and it was probably Manet who caused that evolution. Artists do not follow sensibilities; they carry them forward. Manet is one of the ancestors of contemporary painting.

The allusion to Magritte is of a different order. What interests me in Magritte is the presence on his canvases of several worlds, often of two worlds, that ought not to communicate but that connect through an opening. One sees a world that seems real, and in this world, there is an opening. Through this opening, one sees another world.

Magritte's presentation of two worlds that ought to be separate but are connected seems to me to have a relationship to the story of the Greek legend of "The Bride of Corinth" in which a young man falls in love with a woman who, unbeknownst to him, is dead, is a ghost. My interest in Magritte brought forth a whole series of scenes of going through --
going through a barrier, going through a painting, and so forth; and this relationship obviously recalls the sexual act. These allusions to Magritte suggest more scenes of this nature, such as the windows showing a false sky or the head of a Greek statue with a red stain on the temple, which you may have noticed in the basement after the storm and which is called Memory. To answer your question, painting served more as a generator of the film than as an object of reflection.

RS: Is there any other reason why you chose the Greek legend of "The Bride of Corinth"?

AR-G: It is a legend that has been taken up by many writers, in particular by Goethe and Michelet. I have the impression that legends like this are important because they traverse our entire civilization. In the film, in particular, the myth of the young woman is shown in its two aspects, one aspect being the captive, the girl who is simply the object of male desire. When the young man finds her, she has her hands chained behind her back, and he takes her to a room that resembles a cell. But in the room, she suddenly is no longer chained, and it is she who possesses the man.

Anthony Fragola: In La Belle Captive, by using the paintings of Magritte and Manet as generators, you have been able to make the distinction clearer for the spectator between the world of normal, everyday reality and the more intense world of superreality. Were you consciously trying to create a complex structure that was more accessible?

AR-G: No, not at all. In any case, if the public finds that particular film more accessible, it is their affair, not mine. Moreover, it was much less successful in France than the preceding films, which had been judged less accessible.

RS: Did Magritte's paintings serve as original generators, or were they incorporated later?

AR-G: For almost a year, as the film was being planned, there was no Magritte. The film was not called La Belle Captive but The Bride of Corinth, after the Greek legend. In that first version of the script, the bite would set off the passage to the ruins of Corinth in Greece -- an expensive proposition from a cinematographic point of view. I have a public, but it is not the public of Rambo. Consequently, I cannot use the same budget. A few months before shooting, I concluded that it was really idiotic to go to Greece for this when one could use Magritte for these displacements. At that point, I asked Magritte's widow for the authorization to make a false Magritte for the film. A charming lady, she initially resisted the idea. Then the Belgian press revealed that all his life Magritte had made false
paintings -- false Picassos, false Max Ernsts -- and even false bank notes. At that point, she said, "All right, let's not prolong this question of counterfeits. Do as you wish." She did point out that in the original painting entitled La Belle Captive there was a ball where I had said there was to be a shoe. She said, " René would not have put in a shoe." When I asked her why, she answered, "Because in reality there are shoes on the beach." That seemed to me to be a strange idea since I always thought the ball to have been a beachball!

Magritte's paintings are remarkably flat. Even when Magritte paints something that is supposed to have depth to it, the painting looks amazingly flat. Now, from the point of view of the image, if you compare La Belle Captive Eden and After, for example, the image in Eden has a certain effect of flatness, while the image in La Belle Captive has, on the contrary, an effect of depth.

AF: I noticed in studying La Belle Captive and in particular the scene with Magritte's painting The Month of the Wine Harvest --

AR-G: -- (laughter) No one knows why it is called The Month of the Wine Harvest --

AF: -- I noticed that there is a subversion of narrative temporality. For example, we find Marie-Ange in the living tableau, and in the same sequence, we suddenly find her also on the beach -- after which you cut back to Walter. I sensed at least three temporalities at play.

AR-G: What would those three temporalities be?

AF: Walter would represent conventional time; Marie-Ange on the beach would represent atemporal time, a form of dream time; and the portrait would represent an intermediate time between the two, an idealization.

AR-G: Yes, that may well be, in fact. I do not recall the film with enough precision. In any case, you are right. If you want to analyze this type of film, you have to make classifications, categories, which in reality are transcended by the film. It is possible that La Belle Captive could be a good subject of study because there are sequences that are then subverted by nonsequential elements.

AF: You have spoken of the opposition of different worlds. Do you sometimes try through montage either to link these different worlds or to resolve them? Or do you try to create, in the way Eisenstein suggested, a synthesis of them?

AR-G: I want neither synthesis nor resolution. I have often protested against the translators of Hegel who use the word synthesis to resolve the contradiction. They say in French, intending to translate Hegel, "thesis, antithesis, synthesis." Now that is dramatically anti-Hegelian because synthesis, if only in the manner in which the word is constructed -- syn-thesis -- gives the impression that we are going to reconcile thesis and antithesis. For Hegel, thesis and antithesis are decidedly irreconcilable, and the word that is used for the third point is not at all synthesis but Aufhebung, which conveys the idea of going beyond. There is contradiction, and at another level, one supersedes it. Aufhebung is to raise ( hebung) to a higher level. Derrida had proposed the translation of relève 1

[replacement, literally "re-raising"] in French in order not to betray Hegel. One ends up using the word Aufhebung, which is now fairly well known. The surrealists -- Breton was a reader of Hegel, of course -- had immediately perceived this difficulty. One of the definitions that Breton gave of surrealism -- and he gave many of them -- was that

"surrealism is the point where insoluble contradictions such as objective and subjective, true and false, dream and reality, no longer are perceived as being contradictory." What you have here is an application of Aufhebung. You pass into another domain of the mind where the contradiction will not be resolved; it will be surpassed.

For example, in La Belle Captive, as in the story of "The Bride of Corinth," two incompatible worlds coexist: the world of the living and the world of the dead. Between the two, as I have indicated, a connection is suddenly established, since this young woman comes from the world of the dead and arrives in the world of the living. This is a simple case of two worlds that we can define. Between the two are what might be called "locks,"

as in a canal. When you open the locks, a sudden flow invades completely by the simple fact that an object from another world has entered into this world. It is as if a sudden and enormous flow changed everything. I can only give metaphors, but these are passages of the kind one finds, in fact, in Magritte's paintings.

RS: The essential element, if one can say so, in La Belle Captive is the opening of the locks?

AR-G: Exactly. To "go through" is the subject of the film: You go through a painting; you go through a curtain; you go through a window; and so forth. This notion of going through will be generalized, for example, in the bite and also coitus probably.

RS: Why probably?

AR-G: Because I do not think there is any obvious coitus in the film. Had it been a surrealistic film, it would have been possible, but in this instance, the censors would have prohibited the replacement of the bite by a close-up of coitus.

AF: There is another penetration, which is the penetration of MarieAnge's world as represented by her henchmen, who actually enter into Walter's world in order to bring him forcibly back into her world.

AR-G: Yes, of course.

RS: The motorcycle is also an engine of penetration.

AR-G: A very sexual engine.

RS: In La Belle Captive, Sara is dressed in leather, on a motorcycle -both symbols of masculine sexuality -- and Marie-Ange**, whose femininity is emphasized, is the dominant sexual partner. Do these leading women represent an answer to feminist attacks on your films?

AR-G: Yes. Moreover, one of the things that displeased Mesguich, who is very macho, was that he had a role that was really quite feminized, whereas Cyrielle Claire, who played Sara Zeitgeist, had a role that was masculinized. He even once said something that was both naive and tender but not meant as a joke, when he asked during the shooting, "What am I going to look like in front of my children." After he saw the film, he became enthusiastic. But he was hostile to the film during the entire shoot.

AF: The cinematography in La Bellen Captive seems much more refined than in your previous films. What was the nature of your collaboration with the cinematographer?

AR-G: The cinematographer, Henri Alekan, is well known. He is in his eighties, but he is really youthful in spirit. During the entire film, he was very effective and extremely cooperative. In particular, he accepted some concepts that another director of photography, whom I had approached earlier, had not wanted to accept: namely, that everything should take place in the same house. Everything is shot in a villa in St. Cloud, the exterior of which one sees at the beginning of the film. The different decors are successive transformations of the same rooms in that villa. For example, there was a nightclub painted in black and then a clinic in white. It is the same room, which was painted white during the night. Since the coherence of the film originates from the mind of a single person, it was particularly important to me intellectually that everything be shot in the same location. The car does not actually move, nor does the motorcycle; they are also inside the villa, immobile in a room. It is merely the play of light and the illusion of the camera that suggest motion. Alekan invented many types of machinery for this effect that allow the actors to be lit as though in a studio with a play of lights that would be impossible if shot in a real setting.

Obviously, one scene is exterior -- the beach. For me the beach scene was very important, for as you noticed, the bite of the vampire sets off the other story, another world, which is the world of the beach. That scene on the beach, incidentally, posed severe difficulties.

One can imagine what it was like to try to set up red curtains by the sea with the wind blowing. But for that specific instance, I wanted to be at the edge of the water, even though it would have been much easier inside the villa.

I have something in common with Henri Alekan: I detest realism, that is to say, the realist illusion. Reality is not realism. Reality is worrisome; realism is reassuring. I would like to tell you an anecdote that shows Alekan's hatred of realism. When we went to the beach for the first time the evening of our arrival from Paris, the young Canadian actress, Gabrielle Lazure, who played the role of the fiancée, was ecstatic over the colors of the evening sky, with its astonishing gradations of colors. She said to Alekan, "Look how beautiful, how magnificent that sky is." Alekan took out his eyepiece, examined the sky, and said, "Their range of colors is bungled!"

AF: Do you consider reality to be external or internal?

AR-G: I know that I am alive here and now. Yet I also am aware that a great part of this life, perhaps its greatest part, is memory. I am concerned with man's internal state. I believe that the more an adventure is impassioned, the more it involves the imaginary.

You noticed the allusion to Marcel Proust in the film, who in fact remarked that when a man loves a woman she is an imaginary woman.

AF: The actors seemed to talk in an unnatural way. Is that something you asked your actors to do?

AR-G: Yes, that was a willed effect. The idea of speaking naturally belongs to realistic ideology. It seems to me that in the world of La Belle Captive, the spoken word also should be somewhat strange. The actor brings it out when he awakens (or the viewer thinks he awakens) in the morning. He says to his wife that the people in his dream spoke in strange ways and that he did not recognize the sound of his own voice. That impression conforms to what happens at times in real life, not realistic life but real life.

AF: Certain objects, such as the suitcase and the motorcycle, occur so regularly that they remind me of Bufiuel's objects of multiple uses.

AR-G: You will have noticed the strange decor of compressed cardboard boxes when she wakes up. And there is a suitcase. It is the same suitcase that was on the back of the bicycle, the same suitcase that the doctor had when he came to declare Corinth dead, the same suitcase that was in the clinic. These suitcases reappear throughout the film, all of which casts a certain shadow on realism. It is Magritte's suitcase as well, from one of his paintings. When Sara is on a motorcycle, it is always the same one, a Harley-Davidson -- a motorcycle charged with sexual symbolism. In her room, there are large Japanese motorcycles.

RS: Is Sara on her motorcycle also an allusion to the "angel of death" in Cocteau's Orpheus?

AR-G: Yes, there are allusions here to Jean Cocteau and to his film Orpheus, in which the angel of death rides a motorcycle. It is all the more interesting because Alekan was also the cinematographer for Cocteau.

AF: It seems that even the drink that Walter orders, a Bloody Mary, is related to death.

AR-G: He asks for a tomato juice and vodka rather than a Bloody Mary. In French the drink is commonly identified by its English name, yet the barman gives it a literal French translation: " Une Marie sanglante [a Mary who is bloody]." He insists, thereby, on the color of blood. In subtitles, one does not always get the entire dialogue, and this particular remark of the barman was omitted. Of course, that is an important detail because this is
the first time the theme of blood appears. When "pale-lipped, she drinks the dark blood-colored liquid,"  2 she asks, "What is this terrible thing?" Later when you see her in her role as a vampire, on the other hand, she drinks this red liquid with obvious delight. In the Greek legend of "The Bride of Corinth," the woman drinks the blood of the young men in order to try to take their life force and to live herself. Thus it is hard to know whether she is doing this to draw them into death or to bring herself into life.

RS: Sometimes Walter's bite wound is visible. At other times it has disappeared completely. Could you explain?

AR-G: Sometimes the wound leaves no mark for a while then reappears when the young woman bites again, or when Walter thinks about it. But even in those instances when he no longer has a visible wound, he still puts his hand to his neck. You noticed that when he is in the presence of the dead Count of Corinth, Corinth has those two marks on his neck as well. Walter bends over the body and puts his hand to his own neck. A detail you may not have noticed: the Count lying on the floor and Walter bending over him are played by the same actor. But, because the figure on the floor is laid out with his feet away from the camera, his face is not recognizable from the reverse angle.

RS: The music is very striking in La Belle Captive. Could you comment on how you incorporated it into the film?

AR-G: When I use recorded music as massively as La Traviata in TransEurop-Express or a Schubert quartet in La Belle Captive, I have at the beginning an idea that it will work out.

But when the scenes are acted out, there is no music. If it is a question of a dance, there might be music, but where you hear La Traviata or, in La Belle Captive, Schubert's quartet in some major scenes, it is during the editing that we try to see if it might work.

Sometimes we are surprised. For example, when I shot La Belle Captive, I thought from the beginning that I would use Schubert's Fourteenth Quartet, Death and the Maiden, because of the title and because I like the quartet very much. When, during the editing, I tried it out, it was impossible; it did not work at all. So I had a real problem. Catherine suggested that I try the Fifteenth Quartet, which I did not know. She provided me with an excellent recording, that of Alban Berg, and it worked remarkably well.

In La Belle Captive, one hears about two minutes of a famous American tune, The Mooch.

We had to pay a fortune to the heirs of Duke Ellington and Sidney Bechet, for it is Sidney Bechet and not the Duke who is playing. In commercial cinema, where they spend enormous amounts of money, that is not a problem, but for a small budget film like this one, it is immediately a major difficulty to use recorded music.

But what really amuses me is that Gabrielle Lazure did not dance to that music. She danced to jazz, but not that particular tune. She danced to a rather insignificant piece that was not especially interesting, and during the montage Bob Wade thought about trying to edit the shots to fit The Mooch. When I heard the first music on the shooting soundtrack, although I am not much of a connoisseur of jazz, I thought it was remarkably bad and suggested to Bob that he might find an alternative. Since there are numerous pieces of music with the same rhythm, it was possible to edit another piece to accompany that sequence.

AF: La Belle Captive seems more lavish than your other films. Where did you obtain the financing, and did the film make money?

AR-G: The film addressed itself to a relatively restricted public because the story is too mobile, too changing for a public that likes to be reassured. But it has a sufficiently large audience because the film, in fact, cost so little, only three million French francs, approximately $500,000 or about ten times less than a normal film.

AF: La Belle Captive was enthusiastically received at its American premiere in Greensboro.

Why was it not shown in the United States before then?

AR-G: La Belle Captive could have been delayed ten more years if Roch had not ordered a copy. In principle, the premiere of a film in a country immediately precedes its general distribution. That, theoretically, is what constitutes a premiere. I am afraid that this premiere did not serve that function because the American commercial system is not very interested in my films. Of course, if it does interest a distributor, it could be sold to him right away.

To launch a film on the American market means producing five hundred copies. Five hundred copies would represent twice the cost of this film. A great deal more money must be invested in order to distribute La Belle Captive in the United States than to make it.

When a film like La Belle Captive is released in France or Germany, they will produce ten or a maximum of twenty copies. The same principle of mass production holds true for any item distributed on the American market. If one wants to distribute a product like cheese, for example, one would probably have to distribute to 50,000 supermarkets. Obviously, it poses a significant problem for the diffusion of a work of art. After all, cheese can, if necessary, be standardized (although French cheeses, thank God, are not!). But when films begin to become standardized, the problem becomes much more serious. The American distributors make the following argument to themselves: Films must be made for those who go to the movies. Who goes to the movies? Twelveyear-old children. Therefore, films must be made for them.

AF: How successful was La Belle Captive in Europe?

AR-G: It was less successful than Eden and After but, nevertheless, surely successful enough to make money. For example, this film was shown on French television. I wonder if it could be shown on an American network?

AF: If it were shown on network television, the film would have to be edited.

AR-G: That is absolutely prohibited in France where filmmakers are protected by law. Their work cannot be touched. It can be shown as it is, but one does not have the right to alter it in any way. That is true to such a degree that if a movie theater were to cut out part of a picture for some reason, the filmmaker would have the right to require that the film be stopped.

9

Projects and Previews

Anthony Fragola: In 1976, you had published notes for a film project entitled Fur Trap.

What happened to that project?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: I could not foresee and control all the possible combinations of reels.

Although there were only six reels, the number of possible combinations of those reels is, nevertheless, considerable. That left me with some concern. But there are numerous fragments of Fur Trap to be found in La Belle Captive -- the young woman on the road, for instance.

AF: When you did L'Immortelle, it was in part as a result of Belgian money that had been blocked in Turkey and that had been made available to you. In 1987, you were approached again to collaborate with a Belgian filmmaker and producer. You have, I believe, a certain reluctance about participating on a film and working with a script that would have been prepared by someone else.

AR-G: Actually, I rewrote the entire script. When the filmmaker, Raoul Servais, approached me, he had completed a screenplay and even a storyboard. When the project was ready to shoot, the producer, Pierre Droust, said that it would not be a full-length film because Servais had never made anything but six- to seven-minute films. At that point, I was asked to rewrite the screenplay while conserving the same story, to which I nevertheless added many elements, including a shooting script. Servais prepared a storyboard. I personally never do a storyboard, but he needs one because this film is, in part, animated.

AF: Who is directing the film?

AR-G: Servais. It is his film. I will be a coauthor, or something like that.

AF: Is this film in production?

AR-G: I think it is in production since they paid me. It is called Taxandria.

AF: Does this agreement not represent a radical departure from your usual method of collaboration? Why did you agree to do it?

AR-G: Since I had just finished Angélique, I was readily available, and I do not normally rush into another book. Moreover, the work of this filmmaker was fascinating because of the processes that he had invented for transforming regular film into animation. This is not the first time that I agreed to help out colleagues. I have occasionally been a technical advisor for beginners, or I have agreed to review a text for a novel that was not yet in focus. For me, those are tasks of a technical nature. Taxandria is also a story of fantasy where they allowed me to change anything I wanted and to intervene a great deal, which I did. I changed a fundamental aspect, as a matter of fact, since there was not a single female character in the film.

Roch Smith: Now there are many?

AR-G: Yes, but only one woman is important, although the role of women, in general, is considerable. From the beginning, the subject matter regarding sexual thematics is very Robbe-Grilletian, especially after I transformed the screenplay. It is now the story of a civilization that has been wiped out (I am not going to get into the details of the catastrophe) because the women, especially the queen, were too preoccupied with their own image. In the area of present-day Limburg, Belgium -- called Taxandria at the time of the Romans -- several people have survived on the ruins of this civilization. The survivors decided to guarantee themselves against the danger that had brought the earlier
civilization to ruin. Only men are left in the city, which allows me to take up large pieces of the first work, but the women exist. They are locked up in temples that are, in reality, bordellos of a sort: temples of love. One escapes, etc. Obviously, there is a return to a certain number of themes traditional to this genre. For example, it is a fascistic society, highly organized, and a young man was badly conditioned, as in Brave New World.

In its current state, the script I wrote will be very expensive to produce; it will cost about ten times as much as La Belle Captive in part because it is an animated film. As is always the case when a film is expensive, it is read before it is shot and then cut back little by little.

RS: Are you afraid that they will cut it back too much?

AR-G: I am not afraid; I merely pointed out to them that the more they listen to the advice of the studios and the technicians of narration, the weaker the film will be.

Ultimately, I might simply remove my name altogether from the film. Two examples will illustrate the problem. The first is a moral one: the young man and the young woman realize towards the end that they are brother and sister while they are also lovers. The producer, the author, and the filmmaker found all of that wonderful, but suddenly they told me that all their friends said it was too much to convey. So I said, "Take it out then." The second case involved censorship of a narrative order. In a number of scenes, the introductions were abrupt, and no one understood how they related to each other. Yet it was interesting precisely because it made possible a kind of poetic effect of the world of the temples, which, unlike the ordinary world, was the only place where fire was still allowed. The technicians intervened, and in each instance, reestablished continuity to explain a passage from one scene to the other so that everyone would "understand perfectly well." I pointed out that if there was nothing left of me in the film, it would be immoral for me to leave my name on it, but that, on the other hand, I would keep the money that I received because the work was done. The next step is for Servais to convert it to animation.

RS: Previously you discussed the degree of premeditation in your films. Can you tell us if the work of your next film, which you tentatively entitled The Return of Frank, is already rigorously formalized?

AR-G: That is a special case. Several years ago, I wrote a complete shooting script (also entitled The Return of Frank) for an American producer, which was translated into English.

The film was to be shot in Brazil, and I do not even remember exactly who was to be involved in this project.

RS: But you conserved it?

AR-G: Oh, yes. I conserved it. I have all that boxed away, but it no longer even interests me. It is an old story. Then in December 1989, when Anatole Dauman, the producer of La Belle Captive, invited Catherine and me to accompany him to the Seychelles Islands to see about possibly making a film, I quickly wrote a three-page project which I called The Return of Frank. Now the Seychelles Islands were wonderful, and we enjoyed traveling from island to island, but we concluded that the locations really would not do for this film because they were too much of a paradise. I was looking for something more worn.

RS: You wrote me that you were looking for a location that had the spirit of a colonial port, which you did not find in the Seychelles.

AR-G: Yes. At that point, one of my film students from New York University, Dimitri DeClercq, introduced me to his father, who is a banker in Hong Kong. Dimitri is a student who has already done, as Tony has, interesting, that is to say, avant-garde, short films.

Perhaps his father did not want to finance Dimitri's film because he found the venture risky, but Dimitri persuaded him to finance my film. Dimitri would serve as codirector or in some other creative role to be determined later. I immediately agreed, and then the father told me that he had money available from Chinese sources to shoot a film in the Far East.

He cited a certain number of countries where he could possibly shoot a film with the Chinese funds he had at his disposal.

Subsequently, Catherine, DeClercq senior, Dimitri DeClercq, and I went to Hong Kong and Macao to scout out a location. For a while, I thought Macao might do, but I finally decided that it would not. We went to Kuala Lumpur, but it is not a port, and besides, the Malaysian ports are not convenient for shipping equipment. We ended up in Vietnam where I thought that, indeed, I might find what I was looking for, which is to say, a country in ruins, a completely archaic country where contemporary civilization has not penetrated. Thanks to Vietnam's recent history -- the wars but especially the communist regime, which is not favorable to development -- I said, "That's it. We need to shoot in Saigon."

Through the intermediary of my dentist, who is a good friend of a Vietnamese official married to a Frenchman, I came into contact with a government-sanctioned Vietnamese filmmaker, who immediately became interested in the project. The story is, in effect, being written for what I have found in Saigon and in the Mekong Delta: a countryside and villages that look vaguely similar to what I was hoping to find in Brazil for the first Return of Frank. The story has completely changed but the setting of tropical decay has remained.

The trip was extensive. Then I began to write a film based on the interesting discoveries we made in those locations that sets into opposition the off-camera voices of the characters in the film who try to take charge of the narrative structure of the story.

RS: As in Slidings?

AR-G: Yes, as in Slidings; only in this film it occurs with voices. Two characters oppose each other. One voice claims to be a novelist but is very likely an assassin whose pseudonovels are constructed expressly to create an alibi for himself. In short, he writes the stoties that happen to him but in a different way in order to hide the fact that he is an assassin. That role will be played either by Fernando Rey or by Michel Piccoli.

A Vietnamese police commissioner dictates a report about the affair in question, which contradicts the pseudonovel of the first narrator. Several other characters and complicated stories coexist. I may rename the film A Maddening Noise [ Un Bruit qui rend fou] -- a reference to the noise of the tiles of the mah-jongg game over which the opening credits are shown, as you saw in the photocopy of the initial draft of the script I gave you. What I am explaining now are the motivators: on the one hand, the accidental events that resulted in my working over there and, on the other hand, structural elements that are always, in my case, elements of contradictory narratives.

For each film since The Man Who Lies, I try to have an assistant of some genius who could collaborate in the film in a creative way such that, were it necessary, I could abandon certain parts of it to him. It is exhausting to shoot a film. Therefore, I agreed to this arrangement with Dimitri DeClercq. Already, since we did the exploratory trip together, DeClercq regularly faxes me commentaries on what I am doing on paper. For the moment, it seems to work.

AF: Could you elaborate on your method of collaboration with Dimitri DeClercq? Were you responsible for the entire script? Is he a second unit director who will take, perhaps, certain locations, or is he going to be an active collaborator where scenes are going to be shot by him and you and then cut together? Is there an equal participation in the directing of the film? And what about the nature of the collaboration?

AR-G: It is one film written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, as usual. But in any case, in films written and directed by Alain RobbeGrillet, many people have made contributions that I have accepted: Bob Wade, or the cinematographer, or the actor. Then I assim ilate it and make it mine. I have always thought that the first assistant could also have a role of creative collaboration. Since I have obtained such collaboration from actors, from the editor, from the cinematographer, and even from other people in the film, why have I never been able to obtain it from the first assistant director? Because, probably, the first assistant directors that I worked with were not particularly inclined towards my kind of
cinema. They were good professionals who assisted me solely for the technical operations that I had defined for them with precision.

This time Dimitri will not be able to be a first assistant director because he does not have the first assistant director's card required for French films. In order to be a first assistant director, one must have been a second assistant director on three films, and to be a second assistant director, one must have been an apprentice on three films. Which means that you cannot be a first assistant director until you have worked on six feature-length films. What I foresee in the credits is a film written and directed by Alain RobbeGrillet "with the creative collaboration of Dimitri DeClercq" or "codirector, Dimitri DeClercq," for example.

Let me give you some precise examples about what goes on at the level of the writing. We made the exploratory trips together, and we talked about different possibilities, so we have already begun to build a kind of collaboration. Then, most especially, as I write I send him what I have written, and he sends me his comments about possible changes in one scene or another, and it may happen that I will use his suggestions. A case in point: In Vietnam there exists an unusual phenomenon of public barbers who operate in the street. Generally they set up against a wall, sometimes several of them. It seems very strange to us. They hang a small mirror on the wall. Dimitri asked if we could not imagine a scene between two of the protagonists at one of these barber's stands. I wrote back saying that, yes, that was an amusing idea. During the shooting, one can conceive of the possibility that we shoot the scene as I imagined it, and just as Bob or the actor might make a suggestion, Dimitri might say, "Could we not shoot this or the other?"

At that point, we do one of those second takes that really is not a double. Later, during the editing, I am free to use either his or mine or both of them. One can even go further. At the end of several days, since it is tiring to shoot a film, I can, some afternoon, feel like having a siesta. If I have observed during the first days of the shooting that I like his approach, I can let him direct. I would not even be there. I would go to bed in the hotel, and he would handle it.

Now that has two inconveniences for the shooting. On the one hand, since we will be in Saigon, we will not be able to see the rushes. Either we will not see them at all, or we will see them a week later. That can be troublesome. If the results are imaginative, that is fine. If it is well done, that is also acceptable. But if something troubles me, I would like, without destroying the set-up that he made, to try to incorporate it into the film. That would be difficult if we only see the rushes ten days later, and we are shooting for only thirty or thirty-five days. The second inconvenience concerns the actors. I can well imagine how awkward it would be if Piccoli or Fernando Rey, having accepted to work on this film because I am the director, suddenly realize that it is being directed by a "kid." None of this would pose any problems in the American studio cinema. When Hitchcock did not go to the shooting of a film, the actors knew that the work would still proceed apace.

RS: Will Bob Wade do the montage and Fano the sound?

AR-G: Yes. Fano had no reason to be in La Belle Captive because I really wanted to use to a great extent Schubert's quartet. And since Fano was not free, it did not bother me that he would not work on that film. This time, on the contrary, the script implies that Fano will be involved.

AF: Who is this Frank in the original title? There is a Frank in TransEurop-Express and in Jealousy.

AR-G: Yes, there are Franks everywhere. Well, we will see when the film is released. We have seen plenty of Franks or Frantzs. The waiter in Eden and After is named Frantz, and there is a Frantz in The Man Who Lies. Frantz is the German surname, and Frank, of course, is the American surname. At its origin, it means "French." All of my films and my books have onomastic material that is significantly reduced. In Marienbad, they say,

"Frank was playing in the hall last year." But we do not know who Frank is.

AF: We have discussed certain organizational principles, such as music, seriality, or painting. What would the organizational principle be for The Return of Frank or A Maddening Noise?

AR-G: I will tell you after the film. Although it does not bother me to explain to you how it was born and even to give you a photocopy of the script, I do not particularly want to make extensive comments on a film that does not exist.  1

Part 2

On Making Films

10

Technique

Anthony Fragola: In an interview, Alain Resnais said that there was a certain similarity to psychic automatism in Marienbad. The film's script was written rapidly?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: Yes, it was a shooting script written rapidly.

AF: Would you say that in writing the script you employed a form of psychic automatism?

AR-G: That is one of Breton's concepts that is easily criticized -- a pure psychic automatism, as Breton defines it. I strongly believe in work, after all. Simply put, there are moments when suddenly something happens -- I do not know if I would use the word inspiration -- and work is effective and other moments when it is not. That is why I wrote quickly. I wrote all the more quickly because it was not a text for me but merely a pre-text or fore-text. In addition, I was not actually shooting the film so I could see a film running in my mind. Now that could be called a psychic automatism, but I would not use Breton's third word, "pure," for it was a painstaking psychic automatism, one that requires work.

AF: For Breton, it is a complete freedom from all rational control.

AR-G: Yes, that belief is exactly what led him to the concept of automatic writing, as if there were a divinity that dictated to the writer. He might close his eyes and write next to the paper, for it no longer mattered. Then, among his followers, some thought that drugs would be a factor for psychic automatism. Whereas I can only write or shoot a film in a state of the greatest critical spirit.

Roch Smith: You are, in the final analysis, a classical writer.

AR-G: From that point of view, yes. In relation to Artaud and people like him, yes. 1 The
critical consciousness of the creator remains constantly on the alert in me, whereas Breton dreamt only of dissolving it.

AF: Although you did not write using Breton's method, Marienbad was completed with amazing swiftness.

AR-G: In less than a month. Perhaps three weeks.

AF: You went from Marienbad, where you wrote for another filmmaker, to L'Immortelle, where the scenario was written out ahead of time, to Eden and After, where the actors were allowed to orient the scenario --

AR-G: -- yes, I had a sketch --

AF: -- to La Belle Captive, where I have the impression that the work was done in a more precise and predetermined way.

AR-G: There is a reason for that: one cannot shoot quickly if one has not written at all. For Eden and After, considerable money was involved -- Czechoslovakian money, Tunisian money, and French money. I shot the film in two months. For La Belle Captive, I shot for three weeks. I must devote more time to preproduction when I know that I have little time
to shoot. Therefore, much of La Belle Captive was written ahead of time. One can consult the manuscripts in France. I have all the material -- although it has not been organized.

Perhaps Rybalka has in his possession the state of the writing at the moment of shooting. 2

AF: I would like to study the difference between the shooting script and the actual finished, edited script.

AR-G: Even the writing of La Belle Captive does not reveal the ultimate montage. The final cuts were made at the editing bench, unlike L'Immortelle where all the cuts were foreseen.

AF: You can shoot a film more quickly once it is tightly scripted, but what are some of the other benefits and weaknesses of working with a tight script or with greater freedom?

AR-G: I will surely never again shoot a film using a tight script. Now, I want to take into account what the actors feel like doing and the cinematographer's suggestions. Even for La Belle Captive, which was extensively written out, there was not, strictly speaking, any detailed shooting script of the scenes. The scenes were described but not, generally, the succession of shots. I will no longer write the sequence of shots because it is too restrictive of creation. It also hampers efficiency, because once I have committed myself to shooting in eighteen days, for instance, I know exactly what I have to complete each day.

Consequently, if the shooting of a scene during the morning takes too long, I have to simplify the shooting of the scene that I am doing in the afternoon. Simplifying the shooting almost always means changing the montage completely by reducing the number of shots. The more shots, the more it costs. With each new shot, one must redo the lighting and so forth.

On the other extreme, not to write anything at all and to shoot during a very long period of time -- for example, six months or a whole year -- has great inconveniences. That approach undermines creative coherence, because, contrary to the novel which progresses bit by bit, page by page, the totality of the film must be kept in mind for numerous reasons. For example, an actor may become sick or die, or the weather may change. It is also possible that I could let the film completely fall apart during montage. Yet I do not mind spending a long time at montage because the material is already there and it only requires architectural work.

AF: Is there not also a liberation of creative energy from your collaborators when you follow the path that is less controlled, for example with The Man Who Lies?

AR-G: Yes, or Eden and After. Remember, these films were shot in two months. If one shoots for two months, one can have more opportunity for input from the actors, such as Trintignant or Catherine Jourdan, or from the cinematographer. Such collaboration may take the form of psychological development between an actress and myself, or Trintignant and an actress. It is certainly true, although not over too long a period, that additional shooting time is an advantage. In La Belle Captive, however, Alekan asked that the film be shot quickly. He thought himself too old to spend a great deal of time at it, but that did not prevent him from having great creative energy during the shooting.

AF: Your films display relatively little camera movement.

AR-G: Yes, they are generally movements of scenes.

AF: Exactly. Is that for economic reasons or is it rather to call less attention to the technical aspects of the film, such as camera movements, etc.?

AR-G: There are three reasons for that. First, I like fixed shots. Second, movement costs money, especially lateral movements. Pans are inexpensive; lateral movements or traveling shots are costly. Third, I can better control the work of the technician on a fixed shot because I have regulated the framing at the beginning, and he does not have the right to alter it during the take. Whereas if I explain the movement that he is to make, he may or may not follow my directives well.

I cannot possibly be behind the camera since I have to oversee what the actors are doing and everything else that is occurring. It is the cameraman, not I, who must be at the viewfinder. Therefore, I risk being gravely disappointed when I see the rushes, and given the budget I have, there can be no question of redoing the shot. In L'Immortelle, I experienced very serious disappointments of this kind, as you know. Undoubtedly, one of the reasons I have used fewer and fewer shots with the camera in motion is because I do not have total control over the final result. I know from experience that the technician will normalize the movement of the camera in relationship to the actor.

But even for fixed shots I have to be wary because there is this phenomenon known as refraining. When something moves in the shot, the cameraman reframes a bit. I might explain at the beginning that there is a fixed shot, and there are three characters who are sitting down, talking. One character gets up in the middle of the scene. Foreseeing the framing that I seek, I want the camera to remain in a fixed shot. We shoot the scene, and the cameraman, who is conditioned to leave space above the seated characters, will more or less unconsciously move the camera to reframe the shot. I insist on a fixed shot where the rigor of that fixity is without question. I realize that film technicians call any shot which might be full of small reframings a fixed shot. For me, a fixed shot is really locked down.

AF: I once interviewed a French director who said his most important function as a director was to frame the shot. Some filmmakers are very deliberate in the way they frame the shots. John Cassavettes would avoid the highly structured, perfect shots at all costs. What do you look for when framing a shot, and do you agree with that concept at all?

AR-G: I do not really agree with it. Framing is one function, an important one, but not necessarily the most important. It is the one that disappears most quickly from the film since, even when the film is projected, framing is not respected. Yet it must be said that framing is the first element that must be defined.

AF: What are you looking for? What intrigues you when you are framing a shot?

AR-G: A number of preoccupations that can be different from one shot to the next. For instance, I might be concerned that a framing reveal a detail. But that is just one example among many. Another factor is collaboration with the cinematographer, who can bring interesting ideas on framing to the director. As I recall, the beautiful overhead shot of the bar in La Belle Captive was Alekan's idea. Many preoccupations are, for the most part, aesthetic ones. A smaller proportion of them are diegetic. Others are preoccupations of convenience.

AF: What enables you to employ highly skilled craftsmen on such low budgets? Do they accept a lower salary for a percentage of the profits?

AR-G: No, they are paid at the going rate. What is costly is a cinematographer, for instance. But if he is kept only two weeks, it is no longer expensive. Since everyone is paid on the basis of time -actors and technicians are paid by the day, and others are paid by the hour -- it is a question of using them for a short period. What is expensive and stupid is to pay a cinematographer for forty weeks. That can be ruinous. With The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, for example, I did not pay myself a salary, while in general the filmmaker pays himself well from the outset. I did everything quickly, and I received a large portion of the returns. Since the film did well, my earnings from Slidings were considerable. The only expensive actor was Trintignant, and he played for free. He is like a well-known painter who cannot afford to sell his paintings for a lower price to a friend, so he performed without charge. That is why his name does not appear on the credits. One sees "With the participation of," and there is no name, only a shot of a smiling Trintignant.

AF: Who chooses the technicians, you or the producer?

AR-G: I do.

AF: Do you agree that for you and for Eisenstein the essence of filmmaking lies in montage?

AR-G: You must not forget that against Eisenstein and the declaration that the meaning of cinema is in montage, the Cahiers du Cinéma promoted Bazin's absurd and anticinematographic idea -- pointed out in Angélique -- that the best film would be a film without montage, since in nature there is no montage. For the New Wave, nature and life were important. Life! The great idea of the New Wave was that we have to return to life.

AF: Then for you, unlike the Cahiers group, filmmaking to a great extent lies in the manipulation of the images after shooting, in the careful and elaborate process of montage.

AR-G: Yes, I shoot very fast; I do the montage very slowly. The big American films are shot in six months and edited in one month, whereas I shoot in three weeks and complete the montage in six months or a year.

AF: Montage depends on the juxtaposition of contradictory elements or, as the surrealists say, on elements that seem contradictory. But since montage is a procedure that is detailed and that requires utmost attention, what do you look for when you do the montage?

AR-G: In my first film, L'Immortelle, it was decided right from the beginning. The idea at the origin of that montage, as I have explained previously, was to adopt the shot rather than the sequence as the narrative unity. Montage is not foreseen before shooting, but it is carried out later on the editing bench where there is a visual reel and several sound reels.

What is looked for is the effect that touches the senses, what Eisenstein called a shock, not abstractly constructed on paper but an effect on the senses, an energetic one. It is difficult to describe these shocks conceptually in a discussion of cinema because the effect is created on the table. Perhaps later a theoretician can, upon studying these films, develop a theory of montage. Chateau and Jost have developed a theory of montage in their book, Nouveau Cinéma, nouvelle sémiologie, where they try to conceptualize the montages of my films. They were, of course, oriented towards linguistics, but you can take other bases for theorizing or conceptualizing.

As for me, one of the things that seems clear from its inception -- and particularly brought to light in L'Immortelle but especially in The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure, because it was put together on the editing bench and not at all on paper -- is precisely this threat to sequence. A sequence is a completely rationalized unit of space and time. The destruction of the notion of sequence comes, on the one hand, from false continuity in a given spaciotemporal domain and, on the other, from the introduction of shots from other sequences in the middle of the given sequence. That destruction of the unity of sequences is, I believe, characteristic in my films.

I should add that Nouveau Cinéma, nouvelle sémiologie opposes the semiology of cinema by Christian Metz. Metz attempted to construct a semiology of cinema, which he called the great syntagmatics [ grande syntagmatique], and which was the precise determination of a certain number of cinematographic syntagmas. The underlying criticism that one can make of Metz is that he based his syntagmatics on the novel. Therefore, he is constrained ultimately to return to the novel. Chateau and Jost, in opposition to the idea of syntax, which was the grand concept of Bazin and later of Christian Metz, developed the idea of parataxis -- that is, the simple juxtaposition of two shots that have no syntactical link. The idea of syntax -- one of the great motors of regression in film -- immediately made cinema derivative of literature. 3

AF: I am more and more fascinated by your skillful construction of films through montage.

For Eisenstein, to whom you have often referred, montage was the absolute elimination of the nonessential and the juxtaposition of shots to create new meanings to move the film forward.

AR-G: A shock between the shots, in fact, said Eisenstein. A juxtaposition that would provoke a shock --

AF: -- that will provoke a shock to move the film forward like an internal combustion engine. The classical Hollywood spirit was based on an invisible montage.

AR-G: And without energy.

AF: My question is, what are the principles of montage that you follow? And do they change dramatically from one film to the next?

AR-G: They surely change, but I do not have a principle. I work on the editing bench. The work of montage is done on the concreteness of the shots as they exist: what can be done with them, how they might best be used -- exactly as when I write, and the concreteness of the words of the French language plays an important role in my writing. That approach, as you know, is the opposite of what happened with L'Immortelle, where the montage had been preestablished, which really constrained me. I now insist upon the montage being done not according to what the shots were supposed to be but what they really are. At that moment of discovery the counterpoints, dialectics, and shocks appear that had not been foreseen. I experiment. Experimentation is important in film. If it does not work, then I try something else. I find it essential to insist upon the concreteness of working with film.

The same holds true for sounds. With sounds, a scene can change completely during the mixing according to whether we use one tape or another.

RS: It is enormously complex.

AR-G: It is considerably so by comparison to the simplicity of writing.

RS: A relative simplicity because writing is interiorized?

AR-G: On the one hand, it is interiorized, and no one else is present when you are writing.

On the other hand, the material that is constituted by language is rich in connotations and, in the final analysis, with a limited range compared to all the sounds that can exist on just four reels.

11

The World of Film

Anthony Fragola: Could you elaborate on the importance of Eisenstein for you, and would you tell us what filmmakers you are most interested in, or which ones have had the most influence on you?

Alain Robbe-Grillet: The one filmmaker who has surely influenced me is Eisenstein. The montage of my films is much closer to Eisenstein's theory of montage than to the traditional montage of realist cinema. Moreover, I believe that Eisenstein's concepts are extremely important, in particular his views on the catastrophic effect for cinema of the invention of sound films. In his "Statement on the Future of Sound Film," 1 also signed by Pudovkin and Alexandrov, Eisenstein says that in the United States they have invented a machine that will allow actors to talk on the screen. Not only will it be possible to see them, but at the same time we will hear them. Eisenstein thinks that sound represents the end of film as art. For as soon as the realist illusion of the image is reinforced, film follows the easiest path and leaves behind all effects of shock, which were its future. He emphasizes the shocks of montage, and he says, in that same text, that we could nevertheless imagine a sound film that would have even more shock than silent film. There would be shocks between the sound and image, where one would see one thing and hear another. Eisenstein despairs that the use of contrapuntal sound will ever occur.

Unfortunately, Eisenstein's predictions were accurate since, beginning when he himself made talking films, the Soviet bureaucracy required him to use realistic montage and to abandon his splendid, carefully constructed theory of montage. Elsenstein is a filmmaker with whom I feel very close.

Obviously there are other, more recent, directors who have interested me. In France, Godard is a great inventor of cinematographic forms, and Godard's importance, I believe, is considerable. In the American cinema, Orson Welles was a great filmmaker in most of his works. In the American commercial cinema, there are from time to time very interesting films, which, unfortunately, are not financially successful. Coppola's The Conversation, for example, is an extraordinary film because it is completely problematic. A sound technician is charged with recording a conversation between a man and a woman.

He does not understand at all why, but he records it, and he says to himself, "Well, there's nothing there at all, but, that's what I'm paid for, etc." Then, little by little, he understands that this conversation is a trap and that someone is going to die. At the end of the film he suddenly has the impression that this trap is meant for him, that he himself is the victim.

The viewer has no idea where the truth may be found. But events unfold solely through cinematic means, through images and sounds. The film received a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but it never had an audience, neither in America nor in France nor anywhere, while a number of other Coppola films, which were far less interesting, attracted enormous audiences.

It is one of the drawbacks of the American system. If an American director starts becoming successful, he gets interested in success and no longer wants to make unsuccessful films. He no longer dares to do what he felt like doing for himself before.

Coppola is surely a person who could have made films that are just as extraordinary as those of Fellini or Godard. It is tragic that the system of film distribution in the United States is geared for Raiders of the Lost Ark and other rubbish of that type and not at all for The Conversation or for The Lady of Shanghai.

In France, it is less tragic than in the United States. There are, after all, commercial circuits for noncommercial films in France. My films, or Godard's films, are shown in commercial circuits, not with a large audience, but if one can be satisfied with a modest budget, the films can be distributed successfully. In Paris, theaters have shown retrospectives of my films. Occasionally, a theater may show the films of Marguerite Duras. They are very difficult films, even more enigmatic than my own, yet one will find a theater that will show all the films of Marguerite Duras for several months. This limited but commercial market allows artistic films to be made. On the contrary, in America my films, the films of Duras, or the films of Godard are shown in universities. The rest of the public
here thinks that Truffaut is an avant-garde filmmaker, when, in fact, he is exactly the opposite. Truffaut's cinema is the most commercial cinema imaginable.

AF: I would like to know what you think about René Clair's films? René Clair really did try to introduce and utilize counterpoint --

AR-G: -- I think that René Clair is an important filmmaker. He suffered and was completely drained by the Cahiers A Cinéma. He said so himself. He was attacked by the Cahiers du Cinéma and therefore by the group of the New Wave in a way that was criminal. René Clair may well have made some commercial films, but at every moment he had innovative ideas

-- certainly much more than Truffaut.

AF: One of the achievements of René Clair's use of counterpoint is a terrific sense of liberated energy.

AR-G: Yes, surely. He is an important filmmaker, and he must be rehabilitated.

AF: There are other filmmakers like René Clair who deserve to be rehabilitated.

AR-G: Yes, I talked about that idea extensively in Angélique. The Cahiers A Cinéma group was a movement that was considerably regressive because Godard was the only important inventor among them -- not so much in the area of audio counterpoint but certainly in the area of montage -- and Godard found himself drowned by the realistic theories of Bazin.

The totality of the movement collaborated entirely in the regression by praising to the sky American filmmakers who were completely subject to the ideology of realism in montage.

Currently, one can witness in Paris the triumph of Chabrol, who is one of the worst. He just finished a film with Isabelle Huppert. Toscan Duplantier, who was the head of the Gaumont Company for a long time, came with Isabelle Huppert to New York, and they are in the process of launching the new Chabrol in the United States. 2 A cinema of that type is perhaps well done, very moving, and all the rest, but it is really a cinema that has absolutely no interest from the cinematographic point of view. Toscan Duplantier is an extremely important figure in French film. Not only was he the leader of the Gaumont Company, but it is thanks to him that the Fellini film was made -- And the Ship Sails On --
an admirable film but a financial catastrophe. Only thirty thousand tickets were sold in Rome. For a filmmaker of Fellini's importance, there should have been three hundred thousand. In my opinion, it is a fantastic film. It is funny, sumptuous. The launching of World War I with the Yugoslav ship is extravagant, completely. There is a preposterous surrealistic object in the hold of the ship: a rhinoceros. Nobody knows why!

AF: You speak about Eisenstein's theory of montage, but it seems to me that there is a similarity between your manipulation of time and the lack of logical cohesiveness of the surrealists. What do you think of surrealist experimental cinema, and what are your views on the surrealists' influence on you?

AR-G: Eisenstein was, after all, guided by an idea of meaning while the surrealists wanted, on the contrary, to break up conventional meaning. In the great silent films of the surrealist period, in particular the films of Buñuel -- L'Age d'or and An Andalusian Dog -one realizes that the meaning of the world is called into question more strongly than in the films of Elsenstein, where, after all, there is a heavy socialist message, which is surpassed by the image. Elsenstein used surrealist techniques to express the sense of history. When in October, for example, Kerensky climbs the stairs five times in a row, the technique immediately calls to mind a surrealist film made in Nice in the 1920s, where an old lady climbs a stairway, gets to the top, makes a gesture, and immediately falls back down to the bottom of the stairs, starts climbing again, gets to the top, makes another gesture, and falls down again, and so forth. As Eisenstein explains his idea, Kerensky climbs the stairway five times because Kerensky, who is being condemned, had held the five great positions of power. He had been head of the Party, head of the government, head of the military, head of the Chamber of Deputies, and head of the judiciary. The surrealists called meaning into question much more powerfully. In fact, I think that the influence of surrealistic cinema was strong for me, as well as the influence of surrealistic painting, like that of René Magritte. I believe Buñuel remained a great filmmaker, even though he
became a commercial filmmaker, precisely because he never forgot his past as a surrealist. It would be difficult for me to say in a precise way what elements in my films might be considered surrealistic. I feel strongly that I am a descendant of surrealism.

AF: In addition to filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola in The Conversation, Buñuel, Godard, and Clair, are there any contemporary directors whom you admire, whom you find interesting, who perhaps are leading the public toward new sensibilities?

AR-G: I hesitate to praise specific directors -- although I certainly admire several --
because there may be names that occur to me later. Elements of Crime, made by a Dane, Lars Von Treer, is a remarkable film, very Borgesian. That type of film can be seen in Paris, but outside of Paris, either in the French provinces or in the world at large, these films, which are often foreign, are rarely seen. Even in France, even in Paris, there is a considerable regression on the part of the public -- the potential public -- for those kinds of films, which causes Peter Greenaway to say that the cinema is finished as an art form.

AF: Although there may be individual directors who have either a single film or a few films that you admire, if we take the definition of the auteur to be someone with a significant body of work, then we no longer have a group of strong auteurs, such as we did in the 1950s and 1960s.

AR-G: That is so. Precisely because of the increasing rarity of film as art. Though it should be noted that Peter Greenaway has already made five films, thanks to London's Channel Four, which decided to produce him. Such films are not paid for by the viewers but by the English taxpayers. Roch Smith: When I saw Greenaway's film, The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, some people left at the opening scene where an individual is covered with dubious material that might be excrement, and others left when the scene of cannibalism began.

AR-G: I did not see the film. Catherine went; she liked it a great deal, and told me about it. I felt that it was not the kind of film that I would like to see. In short, I have an aversion to this orientation that Greenaway is taking, this obsession with decay and dirt.

The scenes that, let us say, involve sticky materials in my films are always very "clean."

When the eggs are broken on the woman's body, the viewer can see that there is an obvious attempt to make the details clean and neat.

RS: One would almost think that it is artificial.

AR-G: Yes.

AF: Especially the way the shots are framed and color and scenery are used.

AR-G: Yes, there is a kind of rigor that is clean.

AF: There is a formality to the image.

AR-G: Exactly, it is formal. Greenaway, who started with formal preoc cupations, is more inclined towards a type of squalor, which does not attract me personally.

AF: What you are saying is interesting because much of Greenaway's film is murky. It is dark; it is in a dark place with many shadows. There is precision with light, but there is an overall absence of clarity.

AR-G: Yes, that is true. On the other hand, I find in Godard preoccupations that seem to be on the same order as my own.

Frequently a filmmaker who began by making interesting films is obliged to make films that are more and more in conformity with cinematographic narration in order to continue to make films at all, especially if he makes expensive ones. I am thinking, for example, of

Wim Wenders. The first films of Wim Wenders are quite astonishing and largely incomprehensible. These include The American Friend and another called Hammett, which is more or less the story of Dashiell Hammett. They were costly and sumptuous and totally mad. Later, he did Paris, Texas, which is an interesting film yet much more in conformity with what the public expects.

AF: Do you regard Ingmar Bergman as a realist in the psychological tradition?

AR-G: Do you like Bergman very much?

AF: Yes.

AR-G: Well, I do too.

AF: Elements of Bergman, anyway. In a film like Persona, which is really manipulating film and --

AR-G: -- or Bergman's Silence. The beginning is quite beautiful. But the psychological films he makes for television now are totally absurd and weak.

AF: Such as Scenes from a Marriage?

AR-G: Yes.

AF: What do you think of someone like Bernardo Bertolucci, whose style is one that I think of as being choreographed, like dance movement?

AR-G: I would hestitate to speak about Bertolucci's style, who is capable of doing just about anything. Here, too, is an example of a great film -- The Spider's Stratagem (which besides is reminiscent of The Man Who Lies and was shot just after it). But The Last Emperor is typical Hollywood cinema. I personally do not see the slightest style in it.

Perhaps I am mistaken. Do you think there is the same style in The Spider's Stratagem and The Last Emperor?

AF: No, they are very different.

AR-G: Yet The Spider's Stratagem had no success while The Last Emperor was a worldwide success. In The Last Emperor, everybody speaks American English, including the child emperor who looks so much like a young American child. Yet, with all of that, there is a great concern for realism in the construction of the sets, in the costumes, and with the Japanese, who speak Japanese to show that they are foreigners. It is not so much that the other characters speak English because, of course, that would be the convention, but it is so evident that they are all Americans physically. Even if they are Chinese, they are Chinese-Americans. One can see it in the gestures, in the expressions -- all in an American English that is easily understood. It is perfectly ridiculous. Yet it does not upset the conventions of realism. There was the same phenomenon for an absolutely grotesque film called The Holocaust. You probably saw it on television. It has "poor Jews" and "dirty Germans," and they are all Americans. The Polish Jews, the SS: they are all thoroughly American. They have the same way of speaking, the same gestures.

AF: In Angélique, you make a reference to Bufiuel's The Criminal Life of Archibaldo, de la Cruz, in which the woman lies in a certain position after she has been killed.

AR-G: Stretched out: she has a blood stain on her leg. It is found throughout many of my films but particularly in La Belle Captive.

AF: It seems that there are many similarities between The Criminal Life of Archibaldo, de la Cruz and The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure. One is the idea of the young person-in Slidings it is a girl; in Archibaldo, it is a boy -- willfully causing death. That union of death
and eroticism within the individual is associated with the church, in an unholy trinity. In Arhbibaldo de la Cruz, he also takes a mannequin representing the girl and burns it in his kiln -- a most arresting image which parallels your images of immolation and the image of the girl seen through fire.

AR-G: The idea or image of the young person causing death I did not take from Archibaldo de la Cruz. I was aware of a relationship once again with a Carl Dreyer film: Dies Ire.

There are often references to Dreyer in my films and novels. I have, for example, frequently pointed out that the opening of The Voyeur where the boat is approaching the shoreline is the beginning of a film that Dreyer made to teach safe driving on Danish roads.

AF: And there is also the association with Archibaldo, with respect to religion.

AR-G: Yes. As for religion, Buñuel is, of course, much more marked by his upbringing, by Spain. I escaped religion completely. Religion can be found in Slidings, but I do not think its role is as significant as for Buñuel.

AF: When asked what advice he would give to aspiring filmmakers, Luis Buñuel responded,

"Be true to your own vision." Despite enormous obstacles, he remained true to that vision.

What advice would you give to aspiring filmmakers, such as some of the students you have had?

AR-G: The first piece of advice I would give is to make films that are not expensive. This practice is technically possible and accepted in Europe. Unfortunately in America, producers do not like films that are inexpensive. It may seem strange, but if a director claims he wants to make a film for only a million dollars, producers will insist it cannot be done. They have the impression that the film will not be serious. But one can easily make a film with a million dollars -- very easily.

Experience proves that the more you spend, the more you are a victim of the system.

There are very few people who escape it. There are some examples, like Fellini who spent fortunes for films that are completely outside the system and which ruined the Gaumont Company. But as a general rule, a filmmaker who spends more and more, like Resnais or Wenders, is a filmmaker who is foundering. As soon as they spend money, they are controlled by money.

AF: Would you suggest that American filmmakers attempt to make films in Europe?

AR-G: The French system allows any foreigner to make films in France. All the laws that protect the cinema and that furnish money for shooting films -- advances and so forth --
are not at all reserved for the French. There are plenty of Italians, English, Germans, Poles, etc., who have made films. Why not Americans? The only requirements are that the dialogue be in French, that the technicians be French, and that the majority of the actors be French. Under those circumstances, the director might be an American, but the film would be French. This film could represent France in an international festival even if the director were not French. In general, the foreign directors who take advantage of the system and who work in Paris are of two types. Either they are foreigners who have been living in Paris for a long time and who, consequently, are familiar with the Parisian film scene; or they are directors who have a worldwide reputation, not necessarily extremely well known, but who have a name internationally and who, therefore, will be more easily accepted.

For a beginner the procedure is as follows: You must submit a film proposal to the Centre National du Cinéma. This proposal must include a well-developed script of about one hundred pages -- with fourteen copies -- and a precise budget. The proposal must be written in French, of course. A committee comprised of filmmakers and other people in the profession meets every month. If they find your proposal interesting and decide to support it, they give you an advance against receipts. If your film makes money, you must return the advance that was given to you. If your film makes no money, if there are no receipts, you owe nothing. It is not at all like borrowing from a bank, which must be paid back even
if the film does not generate a profit. Once this advance is obtained, a producer must be found, for this advance will be given only if a French producer agrees to undertake your project. The advance does not cover the totality of the budget. It rarely covers more than a third of it, but it is an important third because it is the first third; it is money that can be used immediately whereas the rest might come from lab credits, bank loans, and so forth.

One might approach the producer and say, "I have a proposal and I have obtained an advance of (shall we say) two million francs. Are you interested in taking up this project?"

Whether you are American or French will have no bearing at all on the decision of the producer.

It would be advantageous for a rich country like the United States to devise a system of production of the type I just described. A new generation of film students could try to help transform the structures of production-a difficult proposition assuredly because of the laissez-faire economic system. As an example, for La Belle Captive I received an advance against receipts. That represented about one third of the three million francs the film cost.

The money they gave me came from successful films. Each ticket for Ramho sold in France helps to make a Belle Captive, for it is money that is taken from box office receipts and then reinvested to help finance demanding films. I am not certain whether American law would allow the possibility of withholding money from the receipts for Rambo to make La Belle Captive.

AF: Would you ever consider making a film for Hollywood?

AR-G: The question has come up. I have received such offers. The negoti ations immediately broke down because I insisted on the authority to make final cuts. When I was shown the contract I said no. French law states that it is the filmmaker who decides on the final cuts. I was told, "Well, French law, yes, but not American law." I said, "If I'm going to make a film, it must be my film." I was told they would have to consult my lawyer, and I answered that I did not have a lawyer. They were surprised that I made films and did not have a lawyer. But no, I do not have a lawyer. You do not need a lawyer to make a film; you need an electrician! I was told that in the United States it is impossible to make a film without a lawyer. It is a terrible situation, terrible, especially since a large part of the cost of making American films is due to lawyers. Of course, some French auteurs agree to sign this clause. Louis Malle did. When Agnès Varda also wanted to make a film in Hollywood, negotiations became strained because of the same clause. Only she made an extremely funny film called Lion's Love, which takes place in Hollywood and which she based exclusively on the discussions she had with the producer. The star of the film is Viva, from the wonderful years of Andy Warhol. 3

AF: For an American filmmaker who has to work in a system that is radically different from the one that you have in France, and who does not have the same distribution channels, what are the possibilities for experimental films?

AR-G: Work in France!

RS: That would be the filmmaker's only outlet?

AR-G: Probably, because the universities that readily subsidize art do not want to spend enough to make a film. I saw this firsthand with Canadian and American universities that had proposed I make a film with a class. The little money that I spent was already too much for the universities, so there probably is no other alternative. Orson Welles struggled against the system, but he was beaten down. People like Coppola, who have abundant ideas for real films, eventually see that there is nothing to be done. They surrender to commercial cinema.

American cinema, which, after all, has its origins in the big studios of Hollywood, submits to money. In France and in Europe in general, films are much more works of experimentation and of an auteur. Money comes later, whereas one has the impression that in America money is there from the beginning. Consequently, people who may have been potentially great filmmakers become nothing more than competent technicians at the service of a prefabricated narration.

RS: There is no requirement that this person speak French?

AR-G: No, but the powers-that-be in film resist the tendency in France to shoot films in English. Therefore, an American filmmaker who might want to become integrated into the French system would find it advantageous to make films in French, even if he does not know French.

It offends Americans to learn that filmgoers should pay for films like this since they will not go to the movie theaters to see them. They do not like films that challenge the American ethic. For moral reasons, America believes that as long as people like stupidities no one has the right to take their money to subsidize anything but stupidities. And in France, it offends people that one should take tax money from workers at the Renault factory to make avantgarde films.

RS: Some people in the United States are disturbed in similar ways when money from American taxpayers is used to subsidize art, for example.

AR-G: But that does not cost the same amount of money, after all. One can readily accept that certain artistic experiments must be subsidized because they cannot make money.

But film can make money so it seems scandalous to subsidize it. They fail to understand that the film that cannot make money is precisely the one to be subsidized.

RS: André Malraux ended his essay on the psychology of film with the observation that film is also an industry. 4

AR-G: Yes, that is true.

AF: Do you not think there is a resistance on the part of certain American intellectuals to understanding your films?

AR-G: Yes, but this resistance arises from their unwillingness to accept that this kind of cinema can exist, which in turn occurs because they have never been shown any.

RS: A lack of experience?

AR-G: A lack of experience. It is a vicious circle. One must also consider that France is a country where film is rarely disdained, while intellectuals in a country like the United States have a certain disdain for the movies, precisely because they have been a commercial product.

12

The Art of Film

Roch Smith: You are often asked questions about the relationship between your novels and your films, but you have also indicated that you have been a painter from a rather young age. I would like to begin by asking you about the relationship between your paintings and your films, since there is a question of images in both.

Alain Robbe-Grillet: Yes, it is true that ever since I have been making films in color, I have pictorial preoccupations, which was not as true when I was shooting films in black and white. These pictorial preoccupations have been translated, on the one hand, by a concern for color in the composition of images and, on the other hand, by numerous pictorial references.

RS: Some of your paintings are reproduced in a special issue of Obliques edited by François Jost. 1 They look like newspaper texts with red stains on them.

AR-G: Some are red and some are green. It was a varied period and, in general, all the works that I did during that time use as their materials relatively impermeable rag paper, as well as pieces of newspaper -- always Le Monde, without exception -- drowned in floor varnish. Since the paper is soaked in varnish, the works are not, strictly speaking, a collage. I also used extremely thick and varnish-like automobile lacquers -- red, green, orange -- in short, extremely bright colors.

RS: What is fascinating for me is precisely this juxtaposition of text and color.

AR-G: As for the text, because the newspaper is soaked in varnish, which covers both the top and bottom of the newspaper, one can see at the same time what is printed on both sides. For example, one of them, and I do not remember if it is in Obliques or not, shows the face of Sylvia Crystel. She appears as a shadow, a phantom, from beneath the printed text. On the contrary, sometimes two images appear, one from beneath and one from the top.

RS: I am surprised that you used the color green in your paintings. That happens to be the very color banished from Eden and After.

AR-G: Yes, but it is a very special green. If you see those paintings, you will see that it is an extremely yellowish green.

RS: Yet the color that strikes me most often in those works is red.

AR-G: Perhaps red is more prevalent in the paintings of that period. But I remember a painting of my hand, for instance, that is not red but orange over green.

RS: But to return to the color red: it is a color you seem to associate with women and with sado-erotic scenes that actually begin in your black and white films with L'Immortelle but not as much with Marienbad.

AR-G: Although I wrote Marienbad for Resnais, the only scene that he refused to shoot was sado-erotic. He shot exactly what I had written except for one shot of an exaggerated rape scene in the middle of the film, one that was sufficiently extravagant for any spectator accustomed to realism to wonder if this might not be a fantasy.

RS: Are you yourself aware of the function that these sado-erotic scenes serve? Are they forms that you manipulate for a certain effect? Why do these scenes reoccur in your films?

AR-G: I do not know. Broken glass appears in all my films.

RS: Perhaps if we are to be guided by what you write in Angélique, these scenes signify a return to your childhood.

AR-G: Broken glass, women, and pretty, naked girls must surely belong to my personal history. What is strange is that there are so few of them in my films! I look at American television, and I see family series devoid of those kinds of scenes. How "clean" it all is.

RS: You explain in Angélique that the young girl in The Voyeur actually existed and was called Angélique.

AR-G: But, as always, some people refuse to believe that.

RS: As there are people who do not believe in the existence of the Count of Corinth? Do we not find, in fact, in each of your films since L'Immortelle -- and perhaps even in Marienbad -- all the way to La Belle Captive this Angélique in one sense or another?

AR-G: There is no young girl in La Belle Captive.

RS: Perhaps not a young girl, but a young woman.

AR-G: Yes, it is the fantasy of Michelet's sorceress.

RS: You make the association of Angélique with the sorceress and with Marie-Ange in La Belle Captive?

AR-G: Yes, of course.

RS: I do not know if you intended this, but as I think of Sara Zeitgeist on her motorcycle, the words ange, Marie-Ange, and Angélique suggest something like the Hell's Angels, the name of a wellknown motorcycle gang from Los Angeles.

AR-G: And they are called?

RS: Literally, the angels of hell. Is this coincidental?

AR-G: I do not know them, but in any case, these are sociocultural stereotypes.

RS: In a sense, to take two of your titles, it seems that the "belle captive," this angel, this sorceress, is a kind of immortal woman for you. She is found, it seems, throughout your work.

AR-G: Yes, she is immortal. But as in L'Immortelle, she is probably dead. For that reason, she is immortal. She cannot die. That is also true, obviously, of Marienbad.

RS: I seem to recall your having written that you use sado-erotic scenes to exorcise the monsters that haunt you.

AR-G: I surely use that word in Ghosts in the Mirror. Moreover, I have spoken of sado-erotic scenes involving young women in a preface to Project for a Revolution in New York, which was inserted in the first printings.  2 In that preface, I establish a relationship between three types of crime: political, or regicide; sexual, or the rape and murder of a young woman; and textual, or the New Novel. I establish a parallel between the social body, the woman's body, and the body of the narrative.

RS: In Angélique, you speak of the representation in Greek theater of certain crimes of passion. Would one be correct in concluding that you see a certain educational benefit in these sado-erotic scenes in your films?

AR-G: It could be. It should, in fact, have that effect in the films since the phenomenon of distanciation prevents adherence.

RS: What relationship do you see between eroticism and experimental film?

AR-G: I do not see an obligatory relationship. While many of my films take eroticism into account, I do not find it to be a requirement. Nevertheless, erotic material serves as a nod to one of the origina tors of cinema, who, when asked what the cinema was, responded that it consists of doing pretty things to pretty women. Surely that is not an exhaustive definition.

RS: You have spoken of the allusions to painters in Eden and After. There are allusions to Shakespeare in this and several of your films. In La Belle Captive, allusions abound as well

-- Magritte and Manet, of course, but also Cocteau; the detective film; a Greek legend transmitted by Goethe and Michelet. You have pointed out many more intertextual connections in the course of these interviews. Do you find this conscious intertextuality necessary in order to bring your imagination and that of the spectator into play?

AR-G: No, all kinds of inferences can run through the mind of an auteur who wants to make a film. Those happened to be mine. Nevertheless, it is a common notion these days that works of art have a past and that this past includes all the art that came before within a given civilization. Malraux went so far as to say that it was impossible to become an artist without having been inspired by an earlier artist. Given this theory, it would not occur to someone who had never seen a painting to begin to paint. Without going quite that far, we can say that a person who is enthusiastic about film is a person who has a cinematographic past, who has seen films and has become fascinated by films.

Consequently, it is perfectly normal that this fascination, which has now become part of him, should find its way into the film he is making. That is true also for painting, literature, music, and practically all forms of art, since film is the art form that synthesizes all other artistic activities.

RS: In general, what explains the choice of texts to which you make allusions?

AR-G: Nothing, because, in general, the choice is not premeditated. If you leave out the general and talk about the particular, there is always basis for discussion. But then you would have to explain it theme by theme. In reference to La Belle Captive, I have explained the manner I incorporated works by René Magritte and Edouard Manet into my own. For any other intertextual reference, the same principle holds true. I am guided by individual circumstances, not a general idea. In The Man Who Lies, I incorporated references to Shakespeare because Trintignant had played Shakespeare in the theater or rather had wanted to play him without ever having had great performances in this area.

Shakespeare's texts -- in French, of course -- were part of his memory, and it was normal that he should return to these lines since he was playing the role of an actor, designated as such, in the film.

Anthony Fragola: In making the transition from literature to film, were there any particular difficulties in learning to manipulate the new medium?

AR-G: I did not make a transition from the novel to film. I am not by nature a novelist nor even by profession, since I am an agricultural engineer specializing in diseases afflicting banana trees. I felt like writing novels so I wrote novels; when I felt like making films, I did not approach the process as a novelist. Moreover, I have never thought of adapting my novels to the screen. I made films because of images I conceived. In a similar fashion, I felt like writing novels because I was interested in words and sentences. The incentive is not the same. Of course, it may be possible to find common ground between the thematics of my films and those of my novels, but there was never a question for me of transposing novelistic structures into filmic structures.

AF: You have on several occasions indicated that the critics who see a relationship between your films and your novels are mistaken.

AR-G: The only relationship is in me -- my fantasies, etc.

RS: It is the only relationship? Is there not a relationship of expression?

AR-G: I do not see that. There can be, as we have discussed, allusions to film in my books and allusions to literature in my films.

RS: Otherwise, it is only a question of the relationship of fantasies?

AR-G: Yes, but both the preferences and aversions of my life can be found in various ways in my novels and in my films -- for example, pretty young women. I like them in life; they are present in my books and in my films. Dogs: I detest them. There is not even a shadow of them in my life. As soon as I see one on the street, I cross to the other side. But dogs can be found in my books and in my films. Conversely, in my life I encounter nature: I like nature -the sea, the forest, etc. These are present in my films but, with some exceptions such as The Voyeur, usually not in my books where you find the big city. Each material --
be it filmic or literary -- summons its own thematics. Therefore, the same themes are not necessarily transferred from one to the other.

AF: What is it that film can accomplish that the written work cannot? There must be something intrinsic to film that draws you to it.

What is there in film that allows you to express what you want to express?

AR-G: There is nothing I want to express. I have nothing to express. I feel like manipulating forms. I paint because plastic forms interest me. I write literature because the structures of sentences and words interest me, and I make films because the image and the sound interest me. But for me, there is no relationship among these different activities. Well, yes, there is a relationship -- myself; that is all. But I am not at all like Marguerite Duras who can make a film with a novel or a novel with a film. For me that would absolutely never come to mind. For me that is a completely different kind of activity.

RS: What pleases you in the manipulation of cinematographic forms? The manipulation of images, or --

AR-G: -- images and sounds. The fact that there are sounds as well as images. I have nothing at all to express that precedes expression. Artistic materials, whatever they may be, are, probably, the possibility of creating forms that express something that the author is totally unaware of. If he could specify those things outside of his materials, he would not need to create those forms. Why exactly do we manipulate forms? Because certain things escape conceptualization. Thus I cannot say that I have something to express because it would be a concept. If concepts were adequate to such expression, it would be totally useless, and even stupid, to manipulate materials. These are notions that people accept readily in other forms of creative expression -- in music, for example. Nevertheless, when Stravinsky said that music expressed nothing, it caused a scandal. Since music is not a form of narrative, people readily accept the notion that sound structures are merely expressions. Of what? We do not know since they are expressions of themselves. When it comes to film or novel, one speaks, of course, of narrative.

Since I am interested in the narrative, cinema is for me a way of practicing narrative without making use of words. I use relatively few words in my films. American cinema, for example, talks on and on. Nothing but dialogue, dialogue, dialogue. It is astonishing to see to what degree even detective films are filled with dialogue. It is less surprising, however, when you know that three-fourths of them were formerly plays or literature. I am primarily interested in images and sounds. Dialogue is not useless, but it is only one spe cific element. On the other hand, I have heard an American director say that his function as a filmmaker was only to serve the dialogue well. For me, it is really a question of the structures of images, structures of montage, and structures of sound. With words also, but they function only as one, nonprivileged element -not at all privileged, as a matter of fact.

When Freud became interested in the human mind, he immediately transformed everything into written narrative. It is very strange. Patients had dreams, and Freud had them recount those dreams. Then he wrote them down. Subsequently, he worked exclusively on the precise text that he wrote according to the spoken narrative of the dream. But everybody knows a dream cannot be recounted. There is something peculiar here. Has Freud not completely missed the unconscious? Ever since Freud, all of psychoanalysis has based its work on the idea that the narrative of the dream was dependable. Lacan, who realized the difficulty, said that the unconscious is structured like language, or else psychoanalysis is impossible.  3 In a society where images were more easily manipulated, an analyst would not ask the patient to describe a dream, but would say, "Draw, show, show!" I think that in my unconscious there exists language, but also many other elements -in particular, images without words. Consequently, silent film, in the final analysis, is more interesting for me, since sound film has been taken over by dialogue.

AF: When you are handling films, when working with the form, with the material, what do you discover?

AR-G: I do not know! I can, nevertheless, give some examples, if not of what I discover, at least of areas of interest within which I am able to operate, such as doubling. If I carry out doubling effects in literature, they will easily stand out. I will be forced to specify details in a somewhat uncomfortable way. In film, all it takes is a simple anomalous effect of montage, that of joining two shots one after the other in false continuity to create doubling. I employed that procedure when I shot L'Immortelle, which can be summarized as follows: false continuity, immobile character, and the character who seems to be in search of himself. In film, this technique of doubling derives its interest from the notion that the mechanisms of continuity should not be underscored.

Another point I make, in Angélique I believe, is the possibility of adding sound to an image, or to have sounds heard which will be at the limit of perception. For example, a main object in the image will be focused upon, but another object in the frame assumes secondary importance. If I write this combination, I will be forced to say, "It is there,"

thereby giving it undue emphasis; whereas in the case of film, it can be "there" without my indicating it. That possibility of the unstated coexistence of images probably allows other discoveries, but I do not know which ones . . .

AF: This brings to mind, for example, the scene in Eden and After, where Violette goes to the factory to meet Duchemin.

AR-G: When she is among the storage tanks, she is constantly in false continuity.

AF: My interpretation of the scene is that, at this point, she is in search of herself, perhaps pursuing herself.

AR-G: I do not know. Maybe. But the doubling is what interests me.

RS: In Angélique, you say that there exists no photographic code that would allow us to say that a particular scene is in the past. But what can be said, for example, about the use of a black and white film within a film in color?

AR-G: Those are crude processes that do not interest me precisely because they emphasize; they emphasize time changes through a change in color, focus, or dissolve from one image to another. It is exactly as if they missed the conceptual processes of writing and were trying to find a means to replace them in an all too obvious manner. I prefer to present the same image.

What interests me are the possibilities, on the contrary, of putting on the same level the past, the present, the future, the imaginary, etc. Any other process that tries to reestablish temporality is a process that reveals a nostalgia for literature, since literature possesses the entire range of grammatical tenses. Each material interests me for its specific possibilities. What is embarrassing in film is when the filmmaker leaves the
impression that he is simply a failed writer. Truffaut is an example. He is someone who wanted to write novels.

AF: Therefore, the present tense of film negates the concepts of linear time or offers an alternative to it.

AR-G: Yes, and in that respect, it is closer to the time of dream as well.

AF: Exactly. Because a dream is really outside temporal time.

AR-G: Yes, and in an even more general way, it is outside the rational. When it is a question of space, it is an irrational space; when it is a question of time, it is an irrational time. Film interests me because of its possibility of exploring the irrational. All the cinematographic codes that have been invented ever since sound was added to film seem to want to reestablish the omnipotence of the rational.

AF: Because of this insistence on dialogue which returns films to the rational?

AR-G: Not just dialogue. It is the rationalization of space -- the attempt to re-create rational space while, in fact, the effects of montage have a considerable possibility of creating irrational spaces. A typical example of the rationalization of space is the standard dialogue set up when the camera positions are completely codified to make clear that it is a question of two characters, one in front of the other. By escaping from those codes, a practice Eisenstein always employed, one can create notably new impressions concerning space.

RS: Because of your interest in manipulating materials and forms, would you say that cinema, as opposed to literature, allows you more directly, more easily, and more naturally to become a "surrealist"?

AR-G: It allows certain manipulations in a more privileged way; but for others, on the contrary, it is literature that will allow it.

RS: What other things?

AR-G: Well, for example, words that can have several meanings.

RS: In both instances, it is therefore a case of poetic effects. You are a poet.

AR-G: Poetic, yes. Cocteau used to say that all his work was only poetry and that he classified it as poetry of film, poetry of painting, poetry of literature . . .

RS: Could we say the same thing about Robbe-Grillet?

AR-G: Surely, it is exactly a question of poetry in the sense of creation, in the etymological sense, of poiesis.

AF: Jean Cocteau is an important writer who has the stature of an auteur-director. Do you know of any others?

AR-G: I am not certain about the United States, but in Europe critics expect specialization.

Someone who works in several fields is suspect, and Cocteau himself has always been extremely suspect because he worked in painting, poetry, novel, film, etc. That kind of diversity is not often practiced, and in that regard, I felt that when I started to make films I was considered a writer who happened to be making films. Any artist who refuses to be limited to one field of specialization is branded an amateur. In fact, I have often recounted that it was on the occasion of being recognized as a filmmaker that I was acknowledged to be a great writer since until then people said I was an engineer who wrote novels.

Suddenly, I was making films, and they would point out that I was a writer who was making films. The case is rare when an important writer is also an auteur-director.

Other writers have made films, but I am not certain they have the importance of Cocteau.

Cocteau, for me, is a great inventor of forms, of cinematographic forms in particular. In Italy, Pasolini has that status if not that stature, but he is not well known in France.

Personally, I do not know Pasolini's written work, and, as for being a filmmaker, I am not sure that he is a great filmmaker. From the point of view of social recognition perhaps.

AF: Critics have examined your novels more than your films. What aspects of your films would you like them to explore? Do you feel as though there are any critical gaps in the study of your films?

AR-G: Film critics never speak of film. The gap is immense; it is absolute.

AF: It seems that some critics analyze films with preconceived critical theories. They do not begin with the film and work their way out. It is as though they are coming from outside and working their way towards the film so that they never closely study the elements of the film itself -- montage, for example.

AR-G: That happens for what can be called a material reason. A literary critic, no matter how ill-read he may be, nevertheless has the book before his eyes, and he can far more easily refer to it. A film critic sees the film once and talks about it in the newspaper. If he is a magazine critic, he may have seen it two or three times, but it is extremely rare, not to say unheard of, for a critic to have an editing system. What can he possibly say about montage?

In this area of film criticism a methodology is beginning to evolve in the universities, especially in American universities, and that is an approach to film utilizing editing systems. This process is being developed -- not so much in film departments, where they think mainly of constructing television dramas, but in departments of communication or film history -- where the film is really studied for itself, thus for its montage.

RS: Why not use a videocassette to study montage? You find them everywhere now.

AR-G: This greater possibility of studying the sequences of shots has as its counterpart a total destruction of the image's substance because it is on magnetic tape. Effects of depth, for example, are completely different. Images that were calculated for the photographic image are thoroughly destroyed by the magnetic image. I detest video. It does not interest me in the least. If the future of film is in video, let the public stay in front of their television sets. It will suit them much better. Do you remember the Buñuel copies that we saw in your course? They were awful. The public with its dulled senses does not see any difference. They see films in video format, and they think it is the same. The large screen was beautiful, after all.

AF: Does the moviola also not have some limitations for the study of film? The small image size must also present a problem.

AR-G: Yes, the screen is too small. Because of the reduction the quality of the image is not that good. But you can see the montage very well, since you can run it image by image.

You can see each photograph, one after the other.

AF: What you are saying is that the only true way to study film is actually to examine the film itself on a moviola, shot by shot.

AR-G: It would be even better if it were the full screen, shot by shot, as is possible on an extraordinarily expensive machine that now exists for this purpose. But it must be borne in mind that by comparison to the original all the rest are reproductions. You would not give credence to an art critic who has spent his entire career on Rembrandt but who has seen only photos of the paintings. In reality, the ideal is to study on the moviola, on the one
hand, and on the other, to see the film from time to time as it is shown on the large screen. That is quite possible. One does it during the montage. After cutting and pasting for three days to a week in a little room with the moviola, one goes to the projection room and views it, as is. But it must be viewed and for a number of reasons: the rapidity or the slowness of a movement is not the same, depending on the size of the screen. The duration of a shot, its value, differs with the size of the screen.

AF: Your films are troubling to general audiences because you destroy traditional narrative structures. At the end of the film, nothing has happened. Why do you approach narrative in that way?

AR-G: Because art exists to trouble. Commercial film, traditional commercial film, is made to give the public what it expects, which is not necessarily a work of art. A work of art can only furnish what the public does not expect. Films such as those of Godard, Orson Welles, my own, and many others obviously upset the public. But the same holds true of music, painting, and the other arts. One must understand that when one listens to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony today, one does not hear exactly what was heard in the days when it was originally composed. Initially, Beethoven's Ninth clearly upset people, and music criticism protested that it went counter to the tonal system.

AF: It is evident that in order to understand your films, one must understand their structures. Yet because of their narrative form -which is not a traditional one, but one that you have called dysnarrative -- it is very difficult, if not impossible, to decipher the code of that narration.

AR-G: But there is absolutely no need to decipher the code. The public realizes that a structure exists precisely because it is not the same as the customary one. Since the public does not recognize this structure to be one of traditional narrative, it perceives an alternative structure. There is no need to deconstruct it. I, for example, adore the work of Alban Berg; I adore the music in Wozzeck or Lulu, but I am incapable of deconstructing it.

This is true even for Wagner's music.

RS: And it does not stop you from enjoying it?

AR-G: It does not prevent me at all from enjoying it. The decoding of the structure is a supplementary pleasure for someone who is capable of doing it, but no more than that.

RS: What do you mean by dysnarrative?

AR-G: Precisely that there is narration but that it does not function according to the laws of the genre.

AF: During your career as a filmmaker, you have experimented with a variety of cinematic forms. For example, Eden and After is based on a series of themes; Slidings on a number of sources, such as Michelet's Sorceress, and a series of objects that you use for punctuation; and La Belle Captive on a series of paintings by Magritte and other artists.

What other types of experimentation with forms would you be interested in pursuing?

AR-G: Sometimes, as in Eden and After, the seriality of the themes was imagined from the beginning. But very often, these formal experiments are encountered in the course of the work either in writing or while shooting. They are not as prefabricated as you seem to imagine. I attach a great importance to that method of working. In literature, that is what immediately distanced me from authors like Ricardou, for example, who are too premeditated.  4 For me, it is much less premeditated. It is very often meditated; it is sometimes postmeditated (laughter) and sometimes, but rarely, premeditated.

Therefore, I find it difficult to answer your question because there are many factors to be considered. Sometimes premeditation disappears even during the work. For example, I said with respect to Playing With Fire that there was a strong premeditation to begin with the soundtrack and not the image track. That premeditation turned out to be largely
subverted and overturned during the work. There remains, in short, one possible constant: when a structure is premeditated, in general it will be subverted or even overturned during the work. The same principle holds true as well for seriality in Eden and After. Often, on the contrary, an element that was not exactly premeditated at the beginning will end up being meditated at the moment of fabrication or construction, that is, during the shooting and editing.

RS: You have said elsewhere that the comments on your works were really coming from your "ideological double."

AR-G: (laughter) Yes, he is the one speaking now! In an interview, it is the ideological double who speaks.

RS: That reminds me of Paul Valéry who wrote that he felt like a shadow upon attending a lecture by Gustave Cohen at the Sorbonne on " The Graveyard by the Sea." Valéry claimed that once his poem is published, the comments of a critic like Cohen on that work may be just as valid as those of the author himself. 5  Do you think, in fact, that things are as relative as all that?

AR-G: I think the comments of the critic are just as valid on one condition: that he know the work as well as the author.

RS: Is that possible?

AR-G: It is possible. When, for example, an auteur speaks of a film that he made twenty years earlier, and he is dealing with a critic who has just seen it thirty times on an editing machine or recently in a movie theater, the critic will know it better than the filmmaker.

Obviously, the knowledge that the filmmaker has of the film, at least for a certain period of time after its completion, is considerable, given the number of times he has seen each image, not just each shot, but each image. Clearly, very few critics would have that knowledge. In any case, it often happens that I will adopt an idea furnished a posteriori by a critic if I find that it is pertinent, interesting, or corresponds well to the work. I adopt it, and I use it in my courses or in my talks exactly as if it were my own idea. It does not disturb me in the least. But it is not I who invented it; it is someone else who saw it before I did. I may have included it without premeditation and even occasionally without having noticed it.

RS: The work is public, but it really belongs more to you after all?

AR-G: It belongs to me, but nevertheless for film, few critics know the works in any depth.

For literature, there are many such critics. It is considerably easier for literature. It is much easier to know Jealousy in depth than Playing With Fire, if only because of material considerations.

AF: To return to your frequently stated position that you have nothing to express, it seems to me, in fact, that you suggest a great deal in your films -- for example, about women or about male-dominated society.

AR-G: Yes, but those are all stereotypes. They do not interest me. It is the same as in literature. The emotion of Jealousy does not interest me in the least. I am not jealous. But as Sartre points out in his article on Husserl, emotions become a means for a being to apprehend the world.  6 That seems striking to me for a book like Jealousy where the emotion itself does not interest me. I use it as a means of investigating the world.

RS: But to speak of your films, perhaps you use it as well as a means of structuring?

AR-G: Yes, of course, because when I say means of apprehending the world, it necessarily goes through a structure. There is no unstructured apprehension of the world.

RS: Might it be said, following Roland Barthes' idea, that the stereotypes you use belong to a system of signs borrowed from the speech of society? In short, you use "signifieds" that you transform into "signifiers."

AR-G: Exactly. Barthes has noticed -- not about me but about others -that a constant changing of level operates within a system of meaning, where suddenly one separates fragments of meaning to make them regress to the state of signifiers in a second and later system where a new speech will be produced from that language.

RS: And your own works could become the language of someone else?

AR-G: Yes, perhaps. In fact, they should if everything goes well.

RS: Do you work with a certain concern for the real nevertheless?

AR-G: For the real, undoubtedly. I have always maintained that position. The real is more real than realism. Of course, my films do not set out to represent man. Nevertheless, they contain effects of representation linked to a reality of man. My films resemble dreams far more than those of Truffaut.

RS: Although your concern is not to be consciously representational, do you not end up doing just that?

AR-G: It turns out that way, and for you who are familiar with surrealism, it has already been one of the quarrels of that period. "Surrealism is psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express -- verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner -- the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern." 7

Surrealism is considered to be an aesthetic, but nevertheless in the definition Breton gives, it is a question of finding the actual thought beyond any aesthetic preoccupation.

Therefore, it is a contradiction, is it not? One that is in Breton, in myself, and, in fact, in any creative artist.

RS: In Angélique, you define the real that art might imitate -- if it must -- as "the universe that our unconscious confronts and secretes at the same time . . . and not the false world of the everyday" (p. 182  ). Does that mean, therefore, that there can be no access to the real without imagination?

AR-G: Surely, without any doubt. In the conception of the real of contemporary philosophy and, in my opinion, of contemporary thought in general, the notion of the real is a human notion. It does not concern an animal, for example. The real is a phenomenon of consciousness, in keeping with the ideas of Husserl's phenomenology and in keeping also with all the experiments on the imaginary, of which surrealism is a particularly good example.

Speaking of Husserl, I recently found an extremely interesting text that I did not know, quoted by the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung, 8 where Husserl specifies that one cannot say that one has confronted the real as long as one cannot join to the realistic experience of the world all the possibilities that have not been in the world; a phenomenon, says Husserl, is complete only if one has added to what it has been, everything it has not been, what it could be, even what it could not be. He calls this idea "free variation" -- a notion, it seems to me, that applies particularly well to works like my own. In essence, the imaginary must be at the very basis of the constitution of the real.

RS: That, in a sense, can seem rather surprising to those who have a notion of realism from the nineteenth century.

AR-G: Completely. It has not been perceived well enough that phenomenology and everything that flows from it, from Sartre to me, is a completely different conception, both of consciousness and of reality. This conception is, on the one hand, more exciting and, on
the other, more in conformity with the notions of contemporary sci ence. The nineteenth-century view of the real is no longer possible given what constitutes fundamental science today. It is not at all a question of abstract speculations by philosophers or poets; it is really the relationship to the world that has changed. It is disconcerting that the media are still rooted in the nineteenth century, not only in literary and film criticism, but in everything else as well.

We have spoken of philosophy and of phenomenology. We must now speak of art and surrealism. Surrealism has had, from my point of view, a fundamental importance in the conception of relationships to the world. Now it has been assimilated by society under a purely decorative form.

RS: Except for people like you.

AR-G: Yes, but society has corrupted the premise of surrealism by incorporating it in posters, advertisement, and the like. Yet surrealism included a whole new conception of the world, of human consciousness, and of the relationship of consciousness to the world that we are in the process of emptying. Surrealism has become akin to an object for antique dealers or for advertising people.

RS: The recovery of art by the bourgeoisie.

AR-G: Yes, but by removing from it all that is surprising.

RS: And inventive?

AR-G: And inventive, yes.

RS: The notion of realism as it was developed in the nineteenth century was, itself, in conformity with the science of the period.

AR-G: Completely. Absolutely in conformity.

RS: While ours, the one that you are talking about, is in conformity, as you have said, to our science. If I have understood you correctly, you are speaking of basic physics, for example.

AR-G: Absolutely. Or else theories on science, on the refutability of science, for instance.

These ideas derived from Einstein but popularized by Karl Popper 9 maintain that for a theory to be scientific, it is necessary that on at least one point it be possible to show that it is false. That is astonishing when one considers that the criterion of verifiability in the nineteenth century was absolute. Popper called this new principle "falsifiability."

I would like to add a comment concerning film. At present, there is a kind of popular fashion for what is called "fantasy film" on television. I find it extraordinary that films labeled fantasy can be rationalist. They begin with the inexplicable and at the end everything is recovered in the name of the rational, including spe cial effects and beings that come from other planets. It astounds me because the film is completely emptied of all fantasy. Fantasy is communication with a universe that we do not understand. While on television one understands everything at the end. I had discussions with Resnais about a film in which I played a very small role, entitled Je t' aime, je t' aime, where there is a fantasy machine. I do not know exactly what it was. During the shooting, Resnais was obsessed with the question of whether everyone would understand clearly. I said, "But in the final analysis, people should not understand." If this film is a partial failure, it is precisely because there was this concern to rationalize fantasy, which, from my point of view, destroys everything.

RS: If I may return for a moment to the question of the surprising relationship between science and art in the twentieth century: Who would have thought that the voice of reason (that of science in the nineteenth century), as it develops in our own time with Einstein
and others, and the voice of unreason, expressed by Nietzsche and then through the surrealists, would converge in such an evident way? That would have been completely unforeseeable.

AR-G: Yes, but it must be recognized that the very nature of science has changed. It no longer claims to be true. The word true has lost its meaning in science.

RS: So is it the word verifiable?

AR-G: No, the word verifiable, like the word true, no longer has any meaning. Science knows that it invents. It claims only to be efficacious.

RS: The touchstone is effectiveness?

AR-G: It is effectiveness. One goes to the moon, thanks to equations whose truth is no longer an issue. Simply, they allow one to go to the moon. Consider the frequently cited example of light. For a long time it was debated whether light consisted of waves or particles. Each is absolutely incompatible with the other. It cannot be one and the other at the same time. Scientists quickly said that it no longer mattered. There are certain fields of work where it is useful to think that light consists of particles and other fields where it is useful to think that it consists of waves. The question of light having to be one or the other, the impossibility of its being both, is no longer an important issue. That unresolved contradiction which no longer perturbs scientists would have been inconceivable in the nineteenth century. The principle of noncontradiction was at the very basis of rationalism.

RS: But it would be Heisenberg rather than Einstein, would it not, who pushed in that direction?

AR-G: Yes, but it was Einstein who began, and of course, Heisenberg continued in this vein.

RS: But Einstein towards the end of his life would have liked to have found a way of explaining the universe.

AR-G: Yes, that is an important point you mention. We have not abandoned the idea of finding a unifying principle that would be able to explain everything. It is thought that such a principle will never be found, but the hope of finding it represents a force, an energy, in the domain of science.

RS: Thus, science has become the domain of hope and faith?

AR-G: (laughter) It has become the domain of creative energy, and this creative energy needs a motor. The great motors of energy are phenomena of contradiction. One cannot create cold without a heat source, for example. In fact, energy is created only if there is contradiction. That had already been true for Hegel, but the nineteenth century did not pay much attention to that concept. Contradiction is the motor of all energy. That is what makes even the motor of history go forward, Marx said. Each time one believes in energy, one knows that contradictions serve as its base. The principle of noncontradiction was absolute at the beginning of the nineteenth century. If a contradiction was discovered, they stopped. They simply could not go forward. While now, on the other hand, we look for contradictions. Therefore, the possibility of contradictions in a particular conception of light is not considered a flaw to be put in parentheses but, on the contrary, the motor of future discovery. There would always be contradictions, Einstein maintained, because without them, energy would stop.

RS: It seems to me that this perspective on science is rather technological in that it requires science to be "effective."

AR-G: In a sense, yes. But the effectiveness which preoccupies scientists is, in a way, abstract. It is true that science later becomes technology, and at that point, technology
forgets the contradictions in order to use only the effectiveness. This slipping from science to technology is probably one of the weaknesses of Heidegger's thought because he is constantly condemning science while in reality it is technology or technique he attacks. It is impossible to separate one from the other. Going to the moon is a technology. It is a practical science or an applied science. Even at a level where it would seem that the imaginary predominates (going to the moon was a dream of the nineteenth century), it is already a technology. The other side is basic science, which will always go further.

RS: Does surrealism not also undermine technology?

AR-G: To oppose surrealism to these technologies, I would say that surrealism is based on contradictions that are unresolved and unresolvable -- the sewing machine on the operating table. All these surrealistic objects are insoluble contradictions. But the sciences of the mind have rapidly become technologies. The psychoanalysis of Freud, for example, returns to the nineteenth-century belief that everything can be explained. From the perspective of the nineteenth century, it is thought that little by little, the progress of science will eliminate all contradictions and mystery. On the contrary, science now knows that the more it explains, the more it creates new difficulties, which will continue to send it farther and farther forward. If Marxism or psychoanalysis or other descendants of Hegel become pure technologies and therefore lose their human interest, it is because, in fact, they fall into that error. The unconscious is what we do not understand. "Wait," says Freud. "It is perfectly explainable." With that belief, everything is lost. The possibility of insoluble contradictions and the energy they generate no longer exists.

RS: I would like to speak a little about realism in film.

AR-G: Of realism in the traditional sense, realistic cinema?

RS: No, not quite. You speak of a certain kind of realism. You are looking for a certain form of the real.

AR-G: Yes, but which I absolutely avoid calling realism.

RS: Then let us accept the word realism to mean traditional realism. It took more than two centuries for the novel to discover and go beyond realism. It was a slow discovery, from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century.

Should not the "seventh art" be allowed to undergo the same groping towards the "real"

before being able to undergo artistic experiments?

AR-G: We will see, but if it took three centuries for the novel, then in three centuries, film will no longer exist. There will be other technologies because film is absorbed (a) by technology and (b) by money. That is, it costs too much . . .

I would add a more important point. At every moment in the history of mankind there exist several possible paths, and I do not believe that since, let us say, Defoe or Richardson up to the New Novel, there was a continuous progression towards the real. Did erot is much closer to our ideas of the real than Balzac, since, in fact, the absolute contradictions in Jacques le fataliste are constantly put into play to make the narrative move forward. Certain periods of history are periods of energetic progression. That is the case, let us say, for the prerevolutionary period -- Diderot or Sterne in England -- and then periods, on the contrary, of regression. Balzac almost returned to what might be called a literature of universals, to use a term of the Middle Ages. Cinema progressed considerably during the period of the silent film with people like Eisenstein and Cocteau. Then, sound film suddenly produced an enormous effect of regression, announced by Eisenstein in his famous "Statement on the Future of Sound Film." I do not ask too much of cinema. I would only want it not to regress, and yet it does so in a terrible way. Peter Greenaway says that cinema is a finished art. One should not think that it has progressed.

RS: That was said of the novel, too.

AR-G: That was said of the novel, but the inventors of the New Novel have combated that idea, developed by Valéry and by Breton. What is grave with Greenaway is that an inventor of cinematographic forms thinks that he is a dinosaur and that there will no longer be a way of progressing with film. I cannot predict. I am not a fortune teller, but I am among those who say no. We have to create another cinema. But everything is against us, money in particular.

AF: With the coming of sound, with current experiments with realism, in what direction, in your opinion, should film evolve? What should film do to move toward the real?

AR-G: A fundamental direction was indicated in the " Statement on the Future of Sound Film" of Eisenstein, Alexandrov, and Pudovkin. Sound permitted additional contradictions -

- contradictions between sound and image. Who has ever wanted to make those experiments?

RS: You!

AR-G: Well, yes. I remember when I wanted Resnais to introduce these contradictions between sound and image in Marienbad. He did it timidly. I think I have told this story often. I wanted the man's footsteps always to be on gravel, even when he was on carpeting, and the woman's footsteps always to be on carpeting, even when we saw her on gravel, which explains that in the park she twists her foot because the sound does not correspond to the image. Resnais said that the public would not understand.

RS: Is not this audio counterpoint exactly what goes on in La Belle Captive when the policemen are walking on the beach and one hears their boots hitting pavement?

AR-G: Yes, certainly.

AF: Are you sanguine or pessimistic about the future of cinema?

AR-G: I am optimistic by nature. I am able to continue to make films because I spend little money, and there are enough producers who make money with other films that enable them to do a small one. Dauman did not lose a penny with La Belle Captive. It keeps the wheels of his machinery running. If I am pessimistic at all, it is because it seems to me that in its totality the situation is becoming worse. In France, for example, they still let old-timers like Godard or myself continue, whereas there is no producer today who would do L'Immortelle with someone who has not made films before. And the cost of my films is increasing because of the weight of the system, unions, and so forth.

There are a great many similar factors that weigh down filmmaking. A Minister of Culture full of goodwill, like Jack Lang, has a tendency to subsidize commercial films in the hope that it will please a broad audience. He fears those who criticize the spending of public funds. But that does not keep him from subsidizing films that are catastrophes like the latest Resnais, which is neither avant-garde nor attractive to the public at large.

Dominated by capitalist concentration of the machinery of production and the machinery of distribution, the American system is now in the process of invading Europe.

Also, the shrinking movie audience especially contributes to the decline of the cinema.

People did not like Marienbad; they did not like Godard; but they went nevertheless because it was "the cinema" -- it was what one talked about. Now they expect to see the film on television one day or the other. And from year to year, fewer people go to the movies in France; consequently, the French system is doomed one day or another to insolvency because of the public. Previously, the financial backers were ready to provide unusual films to a public that would return the costs of making such films. But if no one comes to see these films, it is frightening.

In Paris now, they sell fifty tickets for the entire run of some films. Fifty tickets! It is unbelievable. People will say that it seemed like an interesting film but they stopped showing it too soon. But why? Because the house was empty. For experimental, venture
cinema, the cinema of creative imagination, to be viable, it would be necessary that as soon as an interesting film is released, people rush to the theater, as they used to rush to see a Godard film, even if they did not like Godard. But that no longer happens.

Intellectual curiosity has disappeared. This trend risks having consequences that are rapidly catastrophic. Very rapidly. The European public will be responsible for this debacle, exactly in the way in which the American public is responsible for the silliness of American film. Yet the American public seems disposed to go to see highly spectacular artistic duds, while the French public does not even bother anymore.

AF: What cinematic genres would you like to see develop in the United States?

AR-G: It seems to me that young generations should develop the idea that several types of cinema are possible. It is very difficult, of course, because the entire system of theaters and distribution in the United States opposes alternative forms of cinema. But it is not normal that the richest country in the world should deprive itself both of Cuban cigars and intellectual film!

Notes

1. Introduction

John

Fletcher,

Alain Robbe-Grillet (London: Methuen, 1983), p. 13.

Alain

Robbe-Grillet,

For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 149.

Organized by Royal S. Brown while Robbe-Grillet was teaching at New York University, the Alain Robbe-Grillet Film Retrospective was held at the Anthology Film Archives in New York from 17 April to 30 April 1989.

Robbe-Grillet,

For a New Novel, p. 153.

Nestor

Almendros,

A Man with a Camera, trans. Rachel Phillips Belash (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984), p. 19.

Robbe-Grillet's wife, Catherine Robbe-Grillet, is an actress who appeared in several of his early films.

Carol J. Murphy, "Robbe-Grillet's L'Homme qui ment: The Lie Belied", French Review 57 (1983): 42.

Alain

Robbe-Grillet,

Glissements progressifs du plaisir (Paris: Minuit, 1974), p. 12, 38, passim.

Robbe-Grillet points out in both the ciné-novel and the interviews that the young woman played by Anicée Alvina is never named in the film. He calls her Alice only in the ciné-novel, Glissments progressifs du plaisir, p. 29.

Fletcher, Robbe-Grillet, p. 64.

William F. Van Wert, The Film Career of Alain Robbe-Grillet (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977), p. 39.

Bruce

Morrissette,

The Novels of Robbe-Grillet, trans. and expanded by Bruce Morrissette (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), p. 300. Despite the title, the book includes a discussion of Robbe-Grillet as a filmmaker.

Van

Wert,

Film Career, p. 39.

Dominique Chateau and Francois Jost, Nouveau Cinéma, nouvelle sémiologie:Essai d'analyse des films d'Alain Robbe-Grillet

Essai d'analyse des films d'Alain Robbe-Grillet ( Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1979), pp. 85-86.

For a
further
discussion
of the
notion of
the "erotic
dream
machine,"

see Roch C.

Smith,

"Generating
the Erotic

Dream

Machine:

Robbe-

Grillet's

L'Eden et
après and

La Belle

Captive",

The French

Review 63

(1990):

492-502.

Alain

Robbe-

Grillet, Last

Year at

Marienbad,
trans.

Richard

Howard

(New York:

Grove

Press,

1986), p.

21.

Morrissette,

Novels, p.

309.

2. The First Films: Last Year at

Marienbad and L'Immortelle

Adnan Menderes (1899-1961), Prime Minister of Turkey from 1950 to 1960, was overthrown by the army and executed in 1961.

Michel Fano, a composer and one of the producers of L'Immortelle, created original sound arrangements for all Robbe-Grillet's subsequent films, except La Belle Captive (1938). Plans originally calling for his participation in RobbeGrillet's latest film project Un Bruit qui rend fou ( A Maddening Noise) were not realized.

Julien Viaud (1850-1923), writing under the pseudonym Pierre Loti, is known for his impressionistic novels set in exotic locations. His first novel, Aziyadé (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1879) recounts a young naval officer's love affair with a harem girl in Istanbul.

A later novel, Les Désenchantées (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1906), dedicated to "Leyla" --
one of the names Robbe-Grillet gives his female protagonist in L'Immortelle --
describes the disillusion faced by three women exposed to Western ideas but destined to live in traditional harem life.

André Breton (1896-1966), one of the founders and leaders of French surrealism and the author of The Manifesto of Surrealism (1924). See André Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor Paperbacks, 1972).

3. Trans-Europ-Express

Diegesis refers to the world of the film's story -- available to the characters within that story -- as distinguished from the narration of the story.

Robbe-Grillet's publisher in France.

4. The Man Who Lies

Michael Riffaterre, structuralist theorist of reader-response criticism. His major works include La Production du texte (Paris: Seuil, 1979) and Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).

Miklos Jancso (born 1920), Hungarian filmmaker whose films include Hopeless (1965) and Hungarian Rhapsody (1978-79).

Wojciech Jerzy Has (born 1925), Polish director and screenwriter known for his metaphysical and esoteric subjects. The Manuscript Found in Saragossa was an award winner at the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 1965.

This interview took place in November 1987, two years before the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe.

The Man

Who Lies is
available on
videotape,
however, as

part of a set
of

RobbeGrillet
films from
the French

Ministry of

External

Relations.

See
filmography.

In The Song
of Roland,

France's
earliest and
best-known
epic poem
or chanson
de geste,
composed in
the late
eleventh
century.

5. A Film and Its Double: Eden and

After and N Took the Dice

Even Woody Allen had difficulty with the labs.

Piet Mondrian (1872-1944), Dutch painter whose works display a rigorous geometric abstraction.

Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), a French Dadaist painter whose Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 was completed in 1912.

Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), Austrian composer who rejected traditional tonality in music and developed a means of composing based on a dodecaphonic (twelve-tone) series. For a discussion of seriality in Eden and After, see Royal S. Brown, "Serialism in Robbe-Grillet's L'Eden et après: The Narrative and Its Doubles", Literature/Film Quarterly 18 (1990): 209-20.

Alban Berg (1885-1935), an Austrian composer who, along with his teacher Arnold Schoenberg, was one of the originators of twelve-tone serial music. His two operas Wozzeck and Lulu are among his best-known works.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose Ali -- Fear Eats the Soul won the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1973, was one of the leading directors of the New German Cinema. Volker Schlöndorff's Young Törless (1966) helped to inaugurate the New German Cinema.

Gaston

Bachelard,

La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Paris: Corti, 1948), see especially pp. 74-133. Bachelard speaks of "the dynamism established between an attractive image and a repulsive image" (77). For an analysis of Bachelard's images of

"hard" and "viscous" matter, see Roch C. Smith, Gaston Bachelard, Twayne World Authors Series (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982), pp. 100-110.

6. The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure

Jules

Michelet's

La Sorcière, translated as The Sorceress in 1904, has been subsequently rendered as Satanism and Witchcraft, a Study in Medieval Superstition, trans. A. R. Allinson (New York: Citadel Press, 1946). See also, Roland Barthes, Michelet par lui-même (Paris: Seuil, 1954).

Angélique ou l'enchantement (Paris: Minuit, 1987). This is the second book of a proposed autobiographical trilogy by Robbe-Grillet. The first, Le Miroir qui revient (Paris: Minuit, 1984), has recently been translated by Jo Levy as Ghosts in the Mirror (New York: Grove Press, 1991). The third volume was announced as La Mort de Corintbe ( The Death of Corinth), but is now titled Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe ( The Last Days of Corinth) (Paris: Minuit, 1994).

Chateau and Jost, Nouveau Cinéma, p. 35 n. 6.

Alain

Robbe-Grillet,

Topology of a Phantom City, trans. J. A. Underwood (New York: Grove Press, 1972), p. 113.

Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a French novelist and essayist whose work centers on eroticism and death as intrusions of the "sacred" into the "profane" workaday world.

Paul

Claudel,

Le Soulier
de satin

(1929).

Claudel's
play was
translated
as The

Satin

Slipper by

John

O'Connor

(London:

Sheed
and

Ward,

1931).

Simone
de

Beauvoir,

La

Femme
rompue

(1968), a
novel
translated
as The

Woman

Destroyed
by Patrick

O'Brien

(London:

Collins,

1969).

7. Playing With Fire

André

Gardies,

Le Cinéma de Robbe-Grillet: Essai sémiocritique, Collection Ça/

Cinéma (Paris: Albatros, 1983), p. 169.

Also known as the Opéra-Comique, the Salle Favart is a smaller opera house built in Paris in 1898 in the same district as the better known Palais Garnier, which until recently housed the Paris Opera.

Hôtels des maréchaux is the name given to residential buildings from the Napoleonic era that are found on the perimeter of the Place de L'Etoile, also called the Place Charles de Gaulle. These buildings form the angle of each of the avenues coming into the Place de L'Etoile around the Arc de Triomphe.

Siegfried is the hero of Richard Wagner's opera cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen ( The Ring of the Nibelung). Robbe-Grillet's fascination with Wagner's Ring is particularly evident in Angélique ou l'enchantement.

A stage and film actor (he had the leading role as a mime in Marcel Carné's 1945 film Children of Paradise), Jean-Louis Barrault is widely acclaimed for his directorial work at the Comédie-Française, the Théâtre de France, and the Théâtre d'Orsay. With his wife, actress Madeleine Renaud, he founded the RenaudBarrault Theatre Company.

Pierre Boulez became music director of the RenaudBarrault Company in 1948 at the age of twenty-three. For a fuller examination of the Tezenas-Boulez connection, see Joan Peyser, Boulez (New York: Macmillan, Schirmer Book, 1976), especially pp. 53-54.

As Robbe-Grillet recounts it, the joke concerns a lady who happens upon a dead horse that had been pulling a coach. The coachman is very distressed, but the lady tells him she will buy the horse from him. When the coachman expresses surprise, she replies that she is prepared to buy it even at the price of the horse when it was alive. When the astonished coachman agrees, the lady adds that she will pay him extra for bringing it to her apartment. With great difficulty, the coachman takes the dead horse up to the third floor, after which she says she would like him to put it in the bathtub.

Having been paid for his efforts, the coachman asks if the lady would be kind enough to tell him why she wanted this horse. She explains that every evening for the past thirty years her husband would come home and ask, "What's new today?" Tonight she will answer, "Go look in the bathtub!"

8. La Belle Captive

Jacques Derrida (born 1930), author of L'Ecriture et la différence (Paris: Seuil, 1967) and numerous other highly original essays on language, is one of the founders of the deconstructivist or poststructuralist school of criticism and theory.

2. An intertextual reference to Robbe-Grillet's novel Topology of a Phantom City, as he himself has pointed out (p. 78). Robbe-Grillet's work impressively incorporates
intertextual reflections of both his novels and his films, as well as intertextual references to the works of others. For a discussion of intertextuality in Robbe-Grillet, see John J.

Michalczyk, "Intertextual Assemblage as Fictional Generator: Topologie d'une cité-fantôme", International Fiction Review 5 (1978): 1-14; Bruce Morrissette, Intertextual Assemblage in Robbe-Grillet: From Topology to the Golden Triangle (Fredericton, N.B.: York Press, 1978); as well as William F. Van Wert, "Intertextuality and Redundant Coherence in Robbe-Grillet", Romanic Review 73 (1982): 249-57.

9. Projects and Previews

1. Since this interview, the film, now definitely called Un Bruit qui rend fou (A Maddening Noise), has been completed. It was shot on the Greek island of Hydra (and not, as anticipated, in Vietnam) in March and April 1994. Written by Alain Robbe-Grillet, it is directed by Robbe-Grillet and Dimitri DeClercq. Fano, it turns out, did not participate.

The sound is by François Musi. ( Alain Robbe-Grillet, telephone interview with Roch Smith, 30 September 1994).

10. Technique

1. Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), French writer and critic whose 1938 Theatre and Its Double, translated by Mary Caroline Richards (New York: Grove Press, 1958), saw myths rather than psychological conflict as the basis of drama. His Seashell and the Clergyman (1927) was an early surrealist script that stressed the use of images.

Germaine Dulac directed the script, but Artaud found her interpretation of it so betrayed his intentions that he led a surrealist protest against the film.

2. Michel Rybalka, professor of French, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, is a bibliographer, critic, and archivist of Robbe-Grillet's work.

3. See Christian Metz, "Le Cinéma moderne et la narrativité", Cahiers du Cinéma, no.

185 (1966), pp. 43-68, as well as Chateau and Jost, Nouveau Cinéma, pp. 117-36, and especially pp. 121-22.

11. The World of Film

1. Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Grigory Alexandrov, "Statement on the Future of Sound Film", originally published in the Soviet Union in 1928. For an English translation see in Sergei Eisenstein, Film Forum, ed. and trans. Jay Leda (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), pp. 257-59.

2. Isabelle Huppert, French actress born in 1955. Her role in La Dantellière brought her international recognition. She also stars in Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate and in Claude Chabrol's Madame Bovary. Daniel Toscan Duplantier, producer of such films as Ingmar Bergman's Fanny and Alexander, Federico's

City of Women, and Andrej Wadja's Danton, is currently President of Unifrance Film International. He is a founding member of the French Academy of Television Arts.

4. Viva was one of Andy Warhol's superstars. She starred in his Lonesome Cowboys (1967) and Blue Movie (1968).

5. André Malraux, Esquisse d'une psychologie du cinéma (Paris: Gallimard, 1946).

12. The Art of Film

1. François Jost, ed., "Robbe-Grillet", Obliques, Special Issue, p. 241 (plates 1-8).

2. The preface to Project for a Revolution in New York was adapted from an article that appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur of 26 June 1970.

3. Jacques Lacan (1901-81), French psychiatrist who insisted that psychoanalysis return to Freud and who developed a structuralist approach to the unconscious modeled on linguistics.

4. Jean Ricardou (born 1932), one of the founders of the French critical journal Tel Quel (published from 1960 to 1982). His early works include highly experimental, conceptually generated novels, such as La Prise de Constantinople (Paris: Minuit, 1965), but he is perhaps best known for his theoretical essays, including several books on the New Novel.

5. See Paul Valéry, "Concerning Le Cimetière Marin"," in The Art of Poetry, trans. Denise Folliot (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1961), pp. 140-52. Valéry writes that upon hearing Cohen, "I felt as if I were my own shadow" (p. 142). The poet concludes that " there is no true meaning to a text -- no author's authority. Once published, a text is like an apparatus that anyone may use at will and according to his ability; it is not certain that the one who constructed it can use it better than another"

(p. 152).

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, "Une Idée fondamentale de la phénoménologie de Husserl:

l'intentionalité", in Situations I (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), pp. 31-35; translated by Joseph P. Fell as "Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl's Phenomenology", The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 1 (1970): 4-5.

7. Robbe-Grillet is quoting Breton's 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism. See in Manifestoes, p.

26.

8. A major German daily newspaper.

9. Karl R. Popper, British philosopher of science born in Vienna, Austria, in 1902.

Filmography and Bibliography

The Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet

L'Année dernière U+00EO Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), 1961. Director: Alain Resnais. Franco-Italian coproduction: Précitel, Terrafilm. Distributor: Cocinor. Cast: Delphine Seyrig; Giorgio Albertazzi; Sacha Pitoeff; Françoise Bertin; Luce Garcia-Ville; Héléna Kornel; Françoise Spira; Karin Toeche-Mittler; Pierre Barbaud; Wilhem Von Deek; Jean Lanier; Gérard Lorin; Davide Montemuri; Gilles Quéant; Gabriel Werner.

L'Immortelle, 1963. Franco-Italian coproduction: Tamara Films, Como Films (Paris), Cocinor, Dino de Laurentis. Distributor: Cocinor. Cast: Françoise Brion (L, Lâlle, Leyla, etc); Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (N); Guido Celano (M, the man with the dogs); Catherine Robbe-Grillet (Catherine Sarayan); Belkis Mutlu (the maid); Sezer Sezin (the Turkish woman); Ulvi Uraz (the antique dealer).

Trans-Europ-Express, 1966. Franco-Belgian coproduction: Como Films. Distributor: Lux-C. C. F. Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Elias, himself); MarieFrance Pisier (Eva, herself); Charles Millot (Franck); Christian Barbier (InspectorLorentz); Nadine Verdier (the chambermaid); Clo Vanesco (the caberet singer); Alain Robbe-Grillet (Jean, the director); Catherine Robbe-Grillet (Lucette, the continuity person); Paul Louyet (Marc, the producer); Daniel Emilfork, Henri Lambert (the false policeman); Raoul Guyland (an intermediary); Prima Symphony (the stripper); Rezy Norbert; Gérard Palaprat; Salkin; Ariane Sapriel; Virginie Vignon.

L'Homme qui ment (The Man Who Lies), 1968. Franco-Czechoslovakian coproduction: Como Films, Lux-C. C. F., Ceskoslovensky Film (Bratislava). Distributor: Lux-C. C. F.

Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Boris Varissa); Ivan Mistrik (Jean Robin); Silvie Bréal (Marie); Sylvia Turbova (Sylvia); Zuzana Kocurikova (Laura); Dominique Prado (Lisa); Catherine RobbeGrillet (the pharmacist); Josef Kroner (Frantz); Josev Cierney (the father); Dušan Blaškovic (the innkeeper); Bada, Julius Vasek (members of the Resistance).

L'Eden et après (Eden and After), 1971. Franco-Czechoslovakian coproduction: Como Films, Ceskoslovensky Film. Distributor: Plan Films. Cast: Catherine Jourdan (Violette); Pierre Zimmer (Duchemin/Dutchman); Richard Leduc (Marc-Antoine); Lorraine Rainer (Marie-Eve); Sylvain Corthay (Jean Pierre); Juraj Kukura (Boris); Ludwik Kroner (Frantz); Yarmila Kolenicova (the suicide); Catherine Robbe-Grillet (the professor); Franz Gerva (the new waiter).

N a pris les dés (N Took the Dice), 1971. Same producers as L'Eden et après, coproduced with O. R. T. E for French Television (broadcast in 1975 on channel 3).

Cast: the same cast as L'Eden et après, with Catherine Jourdan as Elle; Richard Leduc as N; Pierre Zimmer as The Stranger.

Glissements progressifs du plaisir (The Progressive Slidings of Pleasure) 1974. French production: Coséfa Films, S. N. E. T. C. Distributor: Fox. Cast: Anicée Alvina (Alice); Olga Georges-Picot (Nora and Maitre David, the lawyer); Jean-Louis Trintignant (the police inspector); Michel Lonsdale (the magistrate); Jean Martin (the priest); Marianne Eggerickx (Claudia); Claude Marcault (Sister Julia); Nathalie Zeiger (Sister Maria); Maxence Mailfort (the client); Bob Wade (the gravedigger); Humbert Niogret (the photographer); Catherine Robbe-Grillet (a nun); Alain Robbe-Grillet (a passerby).

Le Jeu avec le feu (Playing With Fire), 1975. Franco-Italian coproduction: Arcadie Films (Paris); Madeleine Films (Paris); Cine Compagny (Rome). Distributor: U. G. C.

Cast: Anicée Alvina (Caroline de Saxe); Philippe Noiret (Georges de Saxe); Jean-Louis Trintignant (Frantz and Francis); Philippe Ogouz (Pierre Garin); Agostina Belli (Maria, the de Saxe's maid); Sylvia Kristel (Diana van den Berg); Serge Marquand (Mathias); Christine Boisson (the woman in the trunk); Nathalie Zeiger (the woman with dogs); Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (InspectorLaurent); Martine Jouot (Erica); Jacques Seiler (the taxi driver); Charles Millot, Joelle Coeur.

La Belle Captive, 1983. French Production: Argos Films (Paris). Cast: Daniel Mesguich (Walter); Gabrielle Lazure (Marie-Ange); Cyrielle Claire (Sara Zeitgeist); Daniel Emilfork (InspectorFrancis); Roland Dubillard (ProfessorVan de Reeves); François Chaumette (Dr. Morgentodt); Gilles Arbona (the barman); Arielle Dombasle (the mad woman); Jean-Claude Leguay (the cyclist); Nancy Van Slyke (the waitress); Denis Foucray (the valet); Michael Auclair (the narrator).

Alain Robbe-Grillet, Oeuvres Cinématographiques: Edition Vidéographique Critique.

Paris: Ministère des Relations Extérieures, Bureau d'animation culturelle, 1982. (Set includes half-inch videocassettes in PAL or SECAM VHS, without subtitles, of L'Immortelle, Trans-Europ-Express, L'Homme qui ment, L'Eden et après, and

Glissements progressifs du plaisir, followed by interviews of Robbe-Grillet by François Jost. Also includes a booklet containing a transcript of the interviews and an essay by Dominique Chateau entitled "Alain Robbe-Grillet, Persistence d'une oeuvre mobile.") Ciné-novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet

L'Année dernière U+00EO Marienbad. Paris: Minuit, 1961. Translated by Richard Howard as Last Year at Marienbad. New York: Grove Press, 1962.

L'Immortelle. Paris: Minuit, 1963. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith as The Immortal One. London: Calder and Boyars, 1971.

Glissements progressifs du plaisir. Paris: Minuit, 1974.

Other Principal Works of Alain Robbe-Grillet

In French

Un Régicide. A novel written in 1949. Paris: Minuit, 1978.

Les Gommes. A novel written in 1951. Paris: Minuit, 1953. Prix Fénéon, 1954.

Le Voyeur. A novel. Paris: Minuit, 1955. Prix des Critiques, 1955.

La Jalousie. A novel. Paris: Minuit, 1957.

Dans le labyrinthe. A novel. Paris: Minuit, 1959.

Instantanés. Short stories written between 1954 and 1962. Paris: Minuit, 1962.

Pour un noveau roman. Critical essays written between 1953 and 1963. Paris: Minuit, 1963.

La Maison de Rendez-Vous. A novel. Paris: Minuit, 1965.

Projet pour une révolution U+00EO New York. A novel. Paris: Minuit, 1970.

Rêves de jeunes filles. Text by Robbe-Grillet; photographs by David Hamilton. Paris: Laffont, 1971.

Construction d'un temple en ruines U+00EO la déesse Vanadé. Prints by Paul Delvaux; text by Robbe-Grillet. Paris: Le Bateau-Lavoir, 1975.

La Belle Captive. A "picto-novel" with illustrations by René Magritte. Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1976.

Topologie dune cité fantôme. A novel. Paris: Minuit, 1976.

Souvenirs du triangle d'or. A novel. Paris: Minuit, 1978.

Traces suspectes en surfaces. Original lithographs by Robert Rauschenberg with a text by Robbe-Grillet. West Islip, N.Y: Universal Limited Art Editions, 1972-1978.

Temple aux miroirs. Text by Robbe-Grillet; photographs by Irina Ionesco. Paris: Seghers, 1979.

Le Rendez-vous. Intermediate-level French textbook; text by Robbe-Grillet; grammatical exercises by Yvone Lenard. Same text as Djinn. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1981.

Djinn. Un trou rouge entre les pavés disjoints. A novel. Paris: Minuit, 1981.

Le Miroir qui revient. Fictional autobiography. Paris: Minuit, 1984.

Angélique ou l'enchantement. Fictional autobiography. Paris: Minuit, 1987.

Les Derniers Jours de Corinthe. Fictional autobiography. Paris: Minuit, 1994.

In English

The Voyeur. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1958.

Jealousy. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1959.

In the Labyrinth. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1960.

The Erasers. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1964.

For a New Novel. Essays on Fiction. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet "Jealousy" and "In the Labyrinth" . Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1965.

La Maison de Rendez-Vous. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1966.

In the Labyrinth. Translated by Christine Brooke-Rose. London: Calder and Boyars, 1967.

Snapshots. Translated by Bruce Morrissette. New York: Grove Press, 1968.

Project for a Revolution in New York. Translated by Richard Howard. New York: Grove Press, 1972.

Topology of a Phantom City. Translated by J. A. Underwood. New York: Grove Press, 1972.

Djinn. Translated by Yvone Lenard and Walter Wells. New York: Grove Press, 1982.

Recollections of the Golden Triangle. Translated by J. A. Underwood. New York: Grove Press, 1984.

Ghosts in the Mirror. Translated by Jo Levy. New York: Grove Press, 1991.

La Belle Captive, with René Magritte. Translated with an essay by Ben Stoltzfus. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Selected Readings on Alain Robbe-

Grillet's Films

Alter, Jean. "Alain Robbe-Grillet and the Cinematographic Style." Modern Language Journal 48 (1964): 363-66.

------. "Les Ciné-romans." In his La Vision du monde d'Alain Robbe-Grillet: Structures et Significations, pp. 50-64. Geneva: Droz, 1966.

Armes, Roy. "Alain Robbe-Grillet." In his French Film, pp. 148-51. New York: Dutton, 1970.

------. "Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Reality of Imagination." In his The Ambiguous Image: Narrative Style in Modern European Cinema, pp. 131-40. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976.

------. "Chapter Seven: Film and Literature." In his French Cinema Since 1946, 2d enl.

ed. Vol. 2, The Personal Style, pp. 166-73. London: A. Zwemmer; South Brunswick, N.J.: A. S. Barnes, 1970.

------. Film and the Modern Novel. In his Film and Reality, pp. 209-14. Baltimore: Penguin, 1974.

------. The Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Purdue University Monographs in Romance Languages, vol. 6. Amsterdam: John Benjamin B. V., 1981.

------.

French Cinema. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

------.

In the Labyrinth: L'Année dernière U+00EO Marienbad. In his The Cinema of Alain Resnais, pp. 88-114. London: A. Zwemmer; New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968.

------. "Robbe-Grillet in Africa." On Eden and After. London Magazine 13 (1973): 107-13. ------. "Robbe-Grillet, Ricardou, and Last Year at Marienbad." Quarterly Review of French Studies 5 (1980): 1-17.

Assayas, Olivier. " Robbe-Grillet et le manièrisme." Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 370

(1985): 32-34.

Benayoun, Robert. " Marienbad ou les exorcismes du réel." Positif, no. 44 (1962): 36-44.

Bishop, Tom. " Géographie de Robbe-Grillet." In Robbe-Grillet: Analyse, Théorie, edited by Jean Ricardou. Vol. 2, Cinéma/Roman, pp. 52-67. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976.

Bishop, Tom, and Helen Bishop. "The Man Who Lies: An Interview with Alain RobbeGrillet." In Film Festival, pp. 41-44, 87-89. New York: Grove Press, 1969.

Brown, Royal S. "The Cinema of Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Structure of Myth and the Mythology of Structure." In Alain Robbe-Grillet Film Retrospective. Brochure.

Anthology Film Archives, New York, 1989.

------. "An Interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet." Literature and Film Quarterly 17

(1989): 74-83.

"Serialism in Robbe-Grillet's L'Eden et après: The Narrative and Its Double."

Literature/Film Quarterly 18 (1990): 209-20.

Brunius, Jacques. "Every Year in Marienbad or the Discipline of Uncertainty." Sight and Sound 31 (1962): 122-27, 153.

Burch,

Noël.

Theory and Film Practice. Translated by Helen R. Lane. New York: Praeger, 1973.

Burdick, Dolores M. "Lisa, Lola, and I: The Woman Unknown as the Woman Immortal in Ophuls and Robbe-Grillet." Michigan Academician 12 (1980): 251-59.

Chateau, Dominique. " La Question du sens dans l'oeuvre d'Alain Robbe-Grillet." In Robbe-Grillet: Analyse, Théorie, edited by Jean Ricardou. Vol. 2, Cinéma/Roman, pp.

320-35. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976.

Chateau, Dominique, and François Jost. Nouveau Cinéma, nouvelle sémiologie: Essai d'analyse des films d'Alain Robbe-Grillet. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1979.

------.

" Robbe-Grillet, le plaisir du glissement." Ça Cinéma 1.3 (1974): 10-19.

Dittmar, Linda. "Structures of Metaphor in Robbe-Grillet's Last Year at Marienbad."

Boundary 2 8 (1980): 215-39.

Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques. "Istanbul nous appartient." Article on L'Immortelle by the lead male actor in that film and an editor at the Cahiers. Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 38

(1963): 54-57.

Dumont, Lillian, and Sandi Silverberg. "An Interview with Alain Robbe-Grillet."

Filmmakers Newsletter, no. 9 (1976): 22-25.

Fano, Michel. "L'Attitude musicale dans Glissements progressifs du plaisir." Ça Cinéma 1.3 (1974): 20-22.

------. "L'Ordre musical chez Alain Robbe-Grillet: Le Discours sonore dans ses films."

In Robbe-Grillet. Analyse, Théorie, edited by Jean Ricardou. Vol. 1, Roman/Cinéma, pp. 173-86. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976.

Fletcher,

John.

Alain Robbe-Grillet. London: Methuen, 1983.

Fragola, Anthony N. "Art as a Source of Imagistic Generator for Narrative." Discussion touches on Marienbad, Eden and After, and La Belle Captive. Journal of Film and Video 42 (1990): 41-50.

------. "Surrealism Revisited: Style and Technique in Robbe-Grillet's La Belle Captive and Eden and After." Symposium 43 (1989-90): 260-73.

Frenkel, Lise. "Lecture psychanalytique du Ju avec le feu." In Robbe-Grillet: Analyse, Théorie, edited by Jean Ricardou. Vol. 2, Cinéma/Roman, pp. 392-99. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976.

Gardies,

André.

Alain Robbe-Grillet. Cinéma d'aujourd'hui. Paris: Seghers, 1972.

------.

Le Cinéma de Robbe-Grillet: Essai sémiocritique. Collection Çal Cinéma. Paris: Albatros, 1983.

------. "Ecriture, image; texte." Etudes Littéraires, no. 6 (1973): 445-55.

------.

" Nouveau Roman et cinéma: une expérience décisive." In Nouveau Roman: Hier, aujourd'hui. Vol. 1. Problèmes généraux, edited by Jean Ricardou and Françoise van Rossum-Guyon, pp. 185-214. From 1971 Colloquium at Cerisy. Includes commentary on the films by RobbeGrillet and others. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1972.

------.

" Récit et matériau filmique." In Robbe-Grillet: Analyse, Théorie, edited by Jean Ricardou. Vol. 2, Cinéma/Roman, pp. 85-110. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976.

Goldmann,

Annie.

" L'Année dernière U+00EO Marienbad et L'Immortelle. " In her Cinéma de 1958 U+00EO 1968: Godard-Antonioni-Resnais-Robbe-Grillet, pp. 227-37.

Paris: Anthropos, 1971.

Jacob, Gilles. "Trans-Europ-Express d'Alain Robbe-Grillet." Cinéma 67, no. 114

(1967): 56-69.

Jost, François. " A propos de Glissements de Robbe-Grillet: Ponctuation et parataxe."

Critique 30 (1974): 326-34.

------. "Notes: Le Film-Opéra." On Playing With Fire. Critique 31 (1975): 544-51.

------. "Le Picto-roman." In Voir Entendre, Special Issue of Revue d'Esthétique 4.

Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976, pp. 58-73.

------.

" Les Téléstructures dans l'oeuvre d'Alain Robbe-Grillet." In RobbeGrillet: Analyse, Théorie, edited by Jean Ricardou. Vol. 2. Cinéma/ Roman, pp. 223-46. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976.

------.

" Variations sur quelques thémes." Ça Cinéma 1.1 (1972): 63-77.

------, ed. "Robbe-Grillet." Obliques, Special Issue, nos. 16-17. Paris: Editions Borderie, 1978.

Kaiser, Grant E. " L'Amour et l'esthéique: L'Année derniére U+00EO Marienbad." South Atlantic Bulletin 39 (1974): 113-20.

McCann, Barry. "Alain Robbe-Grillet." Film, no. 51 (1968): 22-27.

Magny,

Joël.

" De Resnais U+00EO Robbe-Grillet: Instauration d'une écriture." Etudes Cinématographiques, nos. 100-103 (1974): 146-58.

Michalczyk, John J. "Intertextual Assemblage as Fictional Generator: Topologie d'une cité-fantôme." International Fiction Review 5 (1978): 1-14.

------. "Neo-Surrealist Elements in Robbe-Grillet's Glissements progressifs du plaisir."

French Review 56 (1982): 87-92.

------. "Recurrent Imagery of the Labyrinth in Robbe-Grillet's Films." Stanford French Review 2 (1978): 115-28.

------.

" Robbe-Grillet, Michelet, and Barthes: From La Sorcière to Glissements Progressifs du plaisir." French Review 51 (1977): 233-44.

------. "Structural and Thematic Configurations in Robbe-Grillet's Films." American Society Legion of Honor Magazine 48 (1977): 13-44.

Miesch,

Jean.

Robbe-Grillet. Classiques du XXe siècle. Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1965.

Miller, Lynn Christine. "The Subjective Camera and Staging Psychological Fiction." On Marienbad screenplay. Literature in Performance 2 (1982): 35-42.

Morrissette, Bruce. "Aesthetic Response to Novel and Film: Parallels and Differences."

Symposium 27 (1973): 137-51. Reprinted in Morrissette, Novel and Film.

------. "Games and Game Structures in Robbe-Grillet." Yale French Studies, no. 41

(1968): 159-67. Reprinted in Morrissette, Novel and Film.

------.

Intertextual Assemblage in Robbe-Grillet: From Topology to the Golden Triangle (Fredericton, N.B.: York Press, 1978).

------.

Novel and Film: Essays in Two Genres. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985.

------.

The Novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Translated and expanded by the author.

Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975.

------. "Post-Modern Generative Fiction: Novel and Film." Critical Inquiry 2 (1975): 253-62. Reprinted in Morrissette, Novel and Film.

------.

" Problèmes du roman cinématographique." Cahiers de l'Association Internationale des Etudes Françaises 20 (1968): 275-89. Reprinted, in translation, in Morrissette, Novel and Film.

Murphy, Carol J. " Robbe-Grillet's L'Homme qui ment: The Lie Belied." French Review 57 (1983): 37-42.

Ollier, Claude. " Ce soir U+00EO Marienbad." Nouvelle Revue Française 9 (1961): 711-19, 906-12.

Oxenhandler, Neal. "Marienbad Revisited." Film Quarterly 17 (1963): 30-35.

Pechter, William S. "Last Year at Marienbad." Kenyon Review 25 (1963): 337-43.

Perry, Ted. "The Seventh Art as Sixth Sense." Deals with Marienbad. Educational Theatre Journal 21 (1969): 28-35.

Purdy, Strother B. "Gertrude Stein at Marienbad." PMLA 85 (1970): 10961105.

Richardou, Jean, ed. Robbe-Grillet: Analyse, Théorie. Proceedings of 1975 Colloquium at Cerisy on Robbe-Grillet's novels and films. Robbe-Grillet is a frequent contributor to the discussions. See separate entries for articles by Bishop, Chateau, Fano, Frenkel, Gardies, Jost, and Veillon. 2 vols. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976.

Robbe-Grillet, Alain. "Order and Disorder in Film and Fiction." Translated by Bruce Morrissette. Critical Inquiry 4 (1977): 1-20.

Ropars-Wuilleumier,

Marie-Claire.

De la littérature au cinéma. Paris: Armand Colin, 1970.

------.

L'Ecran de la mémoire. Paris: Seuil, 1970. See especially pp. 114-20 and 223-40.

Smith, Roch C. " Generating the Erotic Dream Machine: Robbe-Grillet's L'Eden et après and La Rêve Captive." French Review 63 (1990): 492-502.

Sollers, Philippe. " Le Rêve en plein jour." Comments on L'Immortelle by a founder of the Tel Quel Group. Nouvelle Revue Française 11 (1963): 904-11.

Stoltzfus,

Ben.

Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Body of the Text. Rutherford, N.J.: Farleigh Dickinson University Press; London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1985.

------.

" D'un langage U+00EO l'autre: Les deux Robbe-Grillet." Etudes Cinématographiques, nos. 100-103 (1974): 87-104.

------.

" L'Eden et après: Robbe-Grillet's Twelve Themes." New Orleans Review 10 (1983): 129-35.

------. "Robbe-Grillet, L'Immortelle, and the Novel: Reality, Nothingness, and Imagination." L'Esprit Créateur 7 (1967): 123-34.

Sturdza, Paltin. "The Rebirth Archetype in Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle." French Review 48 (1975): 990-95.

------.

" Répétition er différence dans L'Année dernière U+00EO Marienbad."

Neophilologus 61 (1977): 48-55.

------. "The Structures of Actants in Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle." Language Quarterly 12

(1974): 26-28.

Towarnicky, Frédéric de. " L'Homme qui ment: Procès-verbal." Cinéma 67, no. 121

(1967): 57-64.

Trebbi,

Fernando.

La Trasparenza cinematografica: Saggio su Alain RobbeGrillet. Bologna: Patron, 1973.

Van Wert, Willam E "Intertextuality and Redundant Coherence in RobbeGrillet." Romanic Review 73 (1982): 249-57.

------. "Structures of Mobility and Immobility in the Cinema of Alain RobbeGrillet." Substance, no. 9 (1974): 79-85.

Veillon, Olivier-René " Le Jeu avec le feu critique de L'Année dernière U+00EO Marienbad -

- de l'épure aux faseiements de l'idéologique." In RobbeGrillet: Analyse, Théorie, edited by Jean Ricardou. Vol. 2, Cinémal Roman, pp. 139-57. Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1976.

Ward, John. "Alain Robbe-Grillet: The Novelist as Director." Sight and Sound 37 (1968): 86-90.

Westerbeck, C. L. "Infrastructures: The Films of Alain Robbe-Grillet." Artforum, no. 14

(March 1976): 54-57.

Williams, Linda. "Hiroshima and Marienbad: Metaphor and Metonymy." Screen 17 (1976): 34-39.

Wuilleumier, Marie-Claire. " Marienbad: une voie pour le cinéma futur? " Esprit 30 (1962): 135-42.

Bibliographies Treating Robbe-Grillet
as Filmmaker

Chadwick, A. R., V. Harger-Grinling, and J. Ritcey. Alain Robbe-Grillet: Une Bibliographie.

St. Johns: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1987. Rybalka, Michel. "Alain RobbeGrillet." Vol. 6, part 3 of Critical Bibliography of French Literature, edited by Douglas W.

Alden and Richard A. Brooks, pp. 1500-1509. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1980.

------. "Bibliographie." In Obliques, Special Robbe-Grillet Issue, nos. 16-17, pp. 263-83.

Paris: Editions Borderie, 1978.

Van Wert, Willam E. The Film Career of Alain Robbe-Grillet. Annotated bibliography that includes critical introduction and synopses of Robbe-Grillet's films. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977.