70's Foreign Horror Part Twenty-Five - (Alain Robbe-Grillet Edition)

EDEN AND AFTER

(1970)

Overall: MEH

Even by Alain Robbe-Grillet's demanding standards, Eden and After, (L'Eden et après, Eden a potom...), is more impenetrable than usual.  Though it does posses a "story" and even something resembling a "plot", (both deservedly in quotation marks), Robbe-Grillet made it up on the fly during shooting, all as an experiment inspired both by the filmmaker's frustration with his previous, black and white movies failing to make a buck and by composer Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone music.  Themes were chosen at random and none of the performers were savvy to what if anything they were to properly convey, leaving Robbe-Grillet and his cinematographer Igor Luther to construct the finish product from moment to moment.  A truly experimental work then in a literal sense, the results are hit or miss as far as avant-garde cinema is concerned.  Many of the shots are evocative and there are engaging moments where it all seems to be heading to some destination, no matter how obtuse.  A montage of fragmented ideas first and foremost, it is all strictly up to interpretation and to be taken at face value, but it may fairly leave a predominant amount of viewers left scratching their heads in hefty bemusement.

 

N. A PRIS LES DÉS...

(1971)

Overall: MEH

 

The experimenting for experiment's sake continues with N. a pris les dés..., (N. Has Taken the Dice...); a companion piece to the previous year's Eden and After in that it is made up of footage from the exact same shoot.  More aggressively than before, Alain Robbe-Grillet insists on the viewer doing all of the work here, even flat-out proclaiming in the closing moments that none of the images presented have any meaning and that it is up to the viewer to "choose the game" based on coming to any conclusion as to what they have just watched.  One could argue that this is the modus operandi of all of Grillet's cinematic works, but this particular example has an extra layer of redundancy to it, considering that we have already experienced these openly admitted, meaningless images.  Whereas Eden and After had some semblance of a narrative through-line that the audience could put together after considerable straw-grasping, its accomplice comes off more as a series of outtakes, offering up mere variations of the same already arbitrary set pieces.  One could edit the fragments together in absolutely any order, flip through a dictionary and pick out words at random, and then have the characters narrate them over the results and it would be an identical viewing experience.  This may be the point, to make something that forces more interactive participation, but it is unavoidably indulgent and pretentious in its unorthodox process.

 

SUCCESSIVE SLIDINGS OF PLEASURE

(1974)

Overall: MEH

Incoherent throughout every last frame, Alain Robbe-Grillet's Successive Slidings of Pleasure, (Glissements progressifs du plaisir), is a stereotypical art film with macabre sensibilities to go along with its exploration of the perverse.  A young, beautiful, yet above all else hopelessly disturbed woman is accused of murdering her female partner/lover/roommate/employee and we are witness to her repetitive bouts of fantasy where everyone that she meets becomes a pawn in her sadistically fascinated psyche.  There are no moments herein that can be trusted to actually be taking place in the "real world", which is the entire point for Robbe-Grillet who takes the opportunity to explore the deep, flowing recesses of Anicée Alvina's mind.  It casts a hypnotic spell on the audience, with a subdued, sinister sound design accompanying an assortment of surreal images involving a bed sinking into a beach, a nude mannequin, body art, blasphemy, masturbation, a shovel, a pair of blue shoes, eggs, a broken glass bottle, and some other stuff.  The pacing is comatose and overbearing at an hour and forty-five minutes, but it does make for a compelling watch at irregular intervals at least.