Alain Robbe-Grillet is dead.  As we trace our current new narrative/non narrative narrative back to its roots, we’ve got to remember Robbe-Grillet, perhaps best remembered for authoring the novel on which the film Last Year at Marienbad (L’annee derniere a Marienbad)” was based, a film directed by French New Wave director Alain Resnais (whose classic Hiroshima Mon Amour, that delivered to us the delicious Anouk Aimee, immediately preceded it).

Remember this movie?  Well, if you’re as old as I am, you definitely do.  It was one of those movies that kinda separated the poseurs from the film buffs, although it was so impenetrable at the time that you were never sure exactly who you were talking to when you got into a discussion about it.  If you were at film school in the late 60s/early 70s, this was one of the films that you wound up looking at more than a few times – a jittery 16mm print almost drowned out by the sound of the projector at the back of the room, or more likely in some French New Wave retrospective at the Fox Venice (remember the Fox Venice?).

OK, you had to really be patient, or stoned, or both.  But even for those of us who had never actually read a word of Robbe-Grillet, there was something strangely beautiful and even satisfying about this maddeningly obscure movie.  It was taking Bergman somewhere else.  We had had fun with the angst ridden elliptical Nordic humor of Seventh Seal or Smiles of a Summer Night, but here was something that was definitely in a class by itself.  To my knowledge (someone please correct me) Resnais never made a film quite like this one again – a film so out of time, so all about black and white and design and composition.  I have no idea what the book read like, but the visual construction of the movie was inseparable from the drama.  The two were intertwined and boldly up front – there was no pretense or attempt at conventional storytelling in this film.  We would all talk about things like production design and the way that German Expressionists would build their sets in a certain way (good old Dr. Caligari, right?) to create certain impressions of light and dark and space, but Marienbad was only about that.  There was nothing else.

The effect was startling and controversial and utterly unique.  So, yeah, OK, chalk it up.  Not very absorbing as experiences go in the movie theater.  I think we all respected it, because we sorta understood what Robbe-Grillet was trying to say, and what Resnais was doing to externalize it and illustrate it, but we didn’t come from the same place, didn’t come from the same strictures of French literature, hadn’t lived through the Nazis or the end of French colonialism.  To us, it was different… interesting.  But The 400 Blows or Breathless were easier to take, had characters we could identify with, and moved in a style that was more in sync with who we were at that time, and in that generation.

But Robbe-Grillet is now dead, and the literal “contre temps” of his work lives on.  All of a sudden, after vaguely seeing the movie flit through my mind at odd intervals, I’m interested to see it again. 

I spend a good part of my day buzzing about the relationship of Design to Content, and here is an early murmer of that dynamic, a movie that used light and dark and visual design to make a naked statement at a time when plot was a universal given, and unconventional narrative was otherwise non-existent.