Word: grillet
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...little more than photograph a play heightened in its vividness by close-ups, mob scenes, fast-paced cutting and all the other techniques worked out over the last fifty years. And Almost no one has created a film so uniquely a film as Alain Resnais (director) and Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenwriter...
...each other just the proper complement to their own failings. Resnais gained great fame by directing Hiroshima, Mon Amour. In it, he showed all sorts of technical ability with flashbacks and composition, but he never seemed able to integrate this talent with Marguerite Duras' rather somnolent script. Robbe-Grillet, on the other hand, wrote novels that yearned for visual expression. In La Jalousie, for instance, he spends most of his time painting in the very smallest details of a banana plantation. Amid the minutiae, the author tells an exceedingly ambiguous tale of a husband's jealousy, a tale that never...
...lucky chance, Resnais and Robbe-Grillet collaborated on L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad. The novelist suffered from a geometric sense of detail, and the director had just the flair for composition to give those beautiful but boring paragraphs visual substance. Perhaps more important, the author's penchant for ambiguity lent itself perfectly to the director's much-praised deftness with flashbacks...
...past conjured up by X's words. A almost never breaks her mysterious silence and never tells X that she remembers him even when they flee the hotel together to escape the dire presence of M. Did they meet, or didn't they? Even Resnais and Robbe-Grillet don't agree on that, nor is there any reason why they should. Ambiguity, after all, only presents difficulty to the person who wants to resolve it. Quite clearly, one ought to accept L'Annee Derniere on its own terms, which are patently ambiguous. We have become too used to the "fruitful...
From this point on, the ground rules are established and Resnais and Robbe-Grillet begin breaking them. They move from one level to another with alarming, confusing facility. For example; we watch M playing cards while we hear X tell A of the afternoon last year when they met on the hotel terrace and discussed a near-by statue of a man and woman in classic dress. X describes every gesture, every fold of the toga. Meanwhile, the cardgame goes on before our eyes. For a moment we hear the players' voices, and one of them makes a remark which...