Best to avoid the excrutiating, embarrassing "work" he did for the
soft-porn photographer cum filmmaker David Hamilton, which is
shocking not least because it seems (or seemed to me at the time) to
be a complete negation of his extraordinary novels.
Nicky Hamlyn.
On 20 Feb 2008, at 19:35, Duncan Chesney wrote:
> Re: Alain Robbe-Grillet -
>
> I am interested in what film-philosophy people today think about
> ARG, now that he has passed on - that is, what they think about his
> contribution to cinema. Which is to say, not really Marienbad,
> Resnais' movie, but l'Immortelle, Trans-Europ Express, l'homme qui
> ment, and l'eden et apres (things afterwards are admittedly
> increasingly problematic, e.g. Glissements progressifs du plaisir ).
> I remember being really struck by l'eden et apres in grad school,
> and then the others as I worked my way backward through pirated
> copies of the earlier films. The initial a-temporal thematic
> listing (of images), followed by their insertion in time
> (narrative), is very interesting and unusual (like Joyce in the
> Sirens chapter of Ulysses). Should this be forgotten?
>
> I am currently writing (or planning to...) a book chapter on Robbe-
> Grillet, and what seems unfair to me is how much he has fallen out
> of the critical discourse, given my sense that he is among the most
> important novelists of the century. But he is NOT one of the most
> important filmmakers, and I have a bit of trouble really placing
> him, since there is so little substantial criticism, and nothing
> recently.
>
> So what do people think? Are any of these movies worth reviving?
> Curiously Koch Lorber did recently release a dvd of la belle
> captive, surely NOT a major ARG film. Is ARG destined for the soft-
> porn circuit, a sort of overly intellectual, tedious Jesus Franco?
> Or is there something challenging, if not of Resnais quality, about
> the experimentation with narrative in those first four films? I
> personally, living and teaching in Turkey, find l'Immortelle
> fascinating in its shameless use of touristical imagery on the one
> hand (Istanbul doesn't exist for a westerner; it is merely a poster
> of minarets above the bosporus on the wall of a travel agency), all
> the while that it, with real discipline, eschews any real use
> Istanbul to give lie to that thesis. I find this a brilliant
> statement about cultural otherness. Its implication with the
> feminine object of desire may have its glitches, but the movie is
> certainly worth a new viewing (i.e. dvd release).
>
> Likewise l'homme qui ment (and Jean-Louis Trintignant's performance
> in it) is certainly worth mentioning in the context of narrative
> experimentation in late 60s french film, and by its undermining of
> cinema subjectivity and narrative convention (again, Resnais
> insights; not exactly Resnais execution) merits some kind of place
> in a canon of that period. I guess I am revealing the answer I have
> to my own question: in parts interesting, but not Alain Resnais.
> But I wonder if others have something more to add. In memoriam at
> least....
> Duncan Chesney
>
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