Alain Robbe-Grillet

Alain RobbeGrillet was a French writer and filmmaker He was along with Nathalie Sarraute Michel Butor and Claude Simon one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman new novel trend Alain RobbeGrillet was elected a member of the Académie française on March 25 2004 succeeding Maurice Rheims at seat No 32 He was married to Catherine RobbeGrillet née Rstakian RobbeGrillets career as a creator of fiction was not restricted to the writing of novels For him creating fiction in the form of films was of equal importance His film career began when Alain Resnais chose to collaborate with him on his 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad The film was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and won the Golden Lion when it came out in 1961 In the credits it was presented as a film equally coauthored by Alain RobbeGrillet and Alain Resnais RobbeGrillet then went on to launch a career as a writerdirector of a series of cerebral and often sexually provocative feature films which explored similar themes to those in his literary work eg Voyeurism The Body as Text The Double He commenced with LImmortelle The Immortal One 1962 which won the muchcoveted Louis Delluc Prize of 1962 This was followed by his most commercially successful film after Last Year at Marienbad TransEuropExpress 1966 starring JeanLouis Trintignant who continued to work with RobbeGrillet on his next four films his FrenchSlovak film Lhomme qui mentMuž ktorý luže The Man Who Lies 1968 LEden et aprèsEden a potom Eden and After 1970 Glissements progressifs du plaisir Progressive Slidings towards Pleasure 1974 and Le jeu avec le feu Playing with Fire 1975 It was almost a decade before the appearance of his next feature film La belle captive The Beautiful Captive 1983 but Alain RobbeGrillet was fortunate enough to enlist the services of Henri Alekan as cinematographer the visionary master of cinematography for the films of Jean Cocteau Subsequently more than a decade passed before Alain RobbeGrillet got behind the lens again this time filming a mystery thriller on a small Greek island with Fred Ward starring as the confused Frank in Un bruit qui rend fou RobbeGrillet A Maddening Noise aka The Blue Villa 1995 Before his death in 2008 RobbeGrillet was to direct one more film Gradiva Cest Gradiva qui vous appelle 2006 which brought once more to the fore his preoccupation with sadism and bondage in his fiction Perhaps the best introduction to the film works of Alain RobbeGrillet is the volume The Erotic Dream Machine by Professors Roch CSmith and Anthony N Fragola Also of great value is the volume In the Temple of Dreams The Writer on the Screen in which RobbeGrillet himself explains the relationship between his literary fiction and his cinematic fiction ed Edouard dAraille 1996