Mondo Robbe-Grillet

As it hap­pens, Robbe-Grillet’s ulti­mate cine­mat­ic work (the auteur, nov­el­ist, and mem­oir­ist him­self passed away in 2008) has a very apt home with Mondo Macabro. (Some images at the link are NSFW; one of the images below is also mildly so.) The ele­ments of erot­i­cism and viol­ence that are so prom­in­ent in both his prose and cine­mat­ic work have always ten­ded to push those works into genre territory—or is it the oth­er way around, that his ground­break­ing early nov­els The Erasers and The Voyeur are delib­er­ately genre-based works because it’s with­in genre con­ven­tions that the author found the most fer­tile ground for his nar­rat­ive innov­a­tion. In any case, the kinky sex, sur­real­ism, viol­ence and genre tropes such as vam­pir­ism found in such Robbe-Grillet films as La Belle Captive sug­gest to many a kin­ship with such psy­cho­tron­ic fabulists as Jess Franco, a dir­ect­or that Robbe-Grillet has nev­er cited, to the best of my know­ledge. (He does speak appre­ci­at­ively of comic-book artist Guido Crepax in a well-done inter­view on the Gradiva disc.) My point…and I’m start­ing to won­der it I have one, actually…well my point is that the affin­it­ies rightly poin­ted out by the likes of Pete Tombs and Tim Lucas not­with­stand­ing, Robbe-Grillet him­self nev­er even con­sidered his cine­mat­ic iden­tity to have any­thing to do with exploit­a­tion. He was always going to dis­cuss him­self rel­at­ive to the likes of Marguerite Dumas rather than Tinto Brass. (And now I flash on my first expos­ure to R‑G’s 1966 Trans-Europe Express, at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in the mid ’90s, on a Senior-CItizens-Get-In-Free Thursday after­noon, hear­ing in the after­math a couple of old ladies who were no doubt big fans of The Other Side Of Midnight, deplor­ing the sight of a half-naked but stra­tegic­ally naughty-bits-hidden Marie-France Pisier chained to a bed…“She always seemed like such a nice girl,” a crest­fal­len attendee said…)

The pres­ence of naked women being viol­ated and murdered (some­times) and bound and so on and so on not­with­stand­ing, Robbe Grillet’s films are not por­no­graph­ic, he cor­rectly insists, because the actions depic­ted in them have no real­ism, are not real­ist­ic; this is dis­tinct, he points out, from the film/narrative hav­ing its own “real­ity.” The kinky ele­ments are there, he read­ily admits, because of his own predelictions/obsessions; he is attrac­ted to them. (And as a mat­ter of fact the blood’s all fake, rather deplor­ably, laugh­ably fake, as wit­ness the red-pen assault in this film on on Marie Espinosa’s Claudine.) But these ele­ments do not con­sti­tute not the thing itself, rather, they are com­pon­ents of the thing. And that’s where what Robbe-Grillet does breaks most defin­it­ively with con­ven­tion­al exploit­a­tion cinema, with Franco as an argu­able but not con­sist­ent exception. 

In oth­er words, the sub­ject is always the nar­rat­ive, and as Douglas Johnson so aptly and eleg­antly put it in his Guardian obit­u­ary of Robbe-Grillet, “the nar­rat­ive is in search of its own coher­ence.” (And that is, in fact, some­thing that could be said of some of Franco’s most accom­plished films, such as Venus In Furs.)  The prin­ciple is ever at work in each and every one of Robbe-Grillet’s films, and in Gradiva the var­ied nar­rat­ive threads are more com­plex and pecu­li­ar than they’ve ever been. And talk about wheels with­in wheels; the pic­ture is ostens­ibly an adapt­a­tion of a 19^th-century nov­el that was the only work of fic­tion to be sub­jec­ted to a book-length ana­lys­is by Sigmund Freud. To what extent this factor is a feint or a wink or whatever is dif­fi­cult to ascer­tain after only one view­ing. It’s not as if there isn’t a whole lot else to con­sider. The film’s “hero” is an anti­quar­i­an cheekily dubbed “John Locke,” research­ing Delacroix in Morocco with a beau­ti­ful teen­age sex slave as his help­mate.  The movie also has humor of a sort that one does­n’t nor­mally asso­ci­ated with our maes­tro. In par­tic­u­lar there’s one sequence in which Lydia, the con­tem­por­ary per­son­i­fic­a­tion of the Gradiva fig­ure, speaks of her pro­fes­sion as “an act­ress of dreams” and relates a some­what queasy anec­dote involving film­mak­ing and self-censorship that’s also reflex­ive in a way uncom­mon in Robbe-Grillet. Arielle Dombasle (work­ing with R‑G for the third time and allow­ing her­self to embody a par­tic­u­larly fant­ast­ic con­cep­tion, and still more-stunning-than-stunning at age 53 here) deliv­ers the mono­logue with a hil­ari­ous hauteur, the sort of thing you might find in an early Fassbinder heroine. 

The film’s verbal com­pon­ent is hyp­not­ic­ally incan­tory, as in the repeated warn­ings “c’est la mort qui vous appelle” and “c’est la mer qui vous appelle”. The multi-faceted imagery (which even­tu­ally sees John Locke incarn­at­ing his research sub­ject Delacroix) cap­tured by early Gaspar Noe cine­ma­to­graph­er Dominique Colin, is spectacular.

What this pic­ture is, in any con­text, is a trip, and I nod my head in extreme approv­al in the hopes that Mondo Macabro will con­sider bring­ing some of Robbe-Grillet’s oth­er cine­mat­ic work to our tables. For art, for com­merce, for shock value; I won’t care much for the pre­text. The stuff has a near-endless fas­cin­a­tion. Still, A R‑G nev­er developed into a form­al cine­mat­ic mas­ter in the mode of Alain Resnais, with whom he col­lab­or­ated on the still-controversial 1961 Last Year At Marienbad. Which would have made his own films even more dazzling and mind-blowing than they cur­rently are. 

At the time of their col­lab­or­a­tion, Robbe-Grillet and Resnais were care­ful to con­vey the idea that their cre­at­ive meet­ing had been an entirely pla­cid one; inter­est­ing rifts were revealed in later years. For instance, Resnais had insisted on remov­ing a rape scene from Robbe-Grillet’s scen­ario, a com­pon­ent, if you will, that might have altered the char­ac­ter of the film quite a bit. Was the desire for abso­lute con­trol over the work one of the things that made Robbe-Grillet pur­sue dir­ect­ing? One would have to say bien sur. It’s also worth not­ing that Robbe-Grillet treated some of Resnais’ sub­sequent work with faint praise, and insisted that while the oth­er Alain was a mas­ter­ful tech­ni­cian, he was in no way an auteur…

NOTE: An unfin­ished ver­sion of this post was acci­dent­ally pub­lished earli­er. My apologies.