Alain Robbe-Grillet Dead at 85

[papeetepatrick]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/books/19...?ref=obituaries

Not to everybody's taste, but one of the most important artists of the last half of the 20th century for me. Wrote 'Last Year at Marienbad', collaborating with Alain Resnais on one of the great art-films of what could probably be called in hindsight The Golden Age of Art Films (because it's not like that now). These were strange, cinematic novels full of abrupt cutting and skewing of surface incidents all over the place. Especially liked 'La Maison de Rendezvous' and 'La Belle Captive', which is a lavish volume full of prints of Magritte paintings, which are woven into the text, sometimes literally, sometimes obliquely. Was denounced by Saul Bellow when he accepted his Nobel Prize, but it didn't really take, and Robbe-Grillet paid it no attention--it was never going to be possible for this kind of fiction to have a wide audience, and he knew that.

[dirac]

Thank you for posting. I'm sorry that he's gone, but it's good to know that he lived a long and full life. I know his work mainly via ‘Last Year at Marienbad,’ a favorite of mine, and through the cogent explanations of the late Susan Sontag.

Was denounced by Saul Bellow when he accepted his Nobel Prize, but it didn't really take, and Robbe-Grillet paid it no attention--it was never going to be possible for this kind of fiction to have a wide audience, and he knew that.

Not a denunciation, really, I think Bellow just missed the point.

Not a wide audience, but a wide influence, as sometimes happens.

The English-language obits I’ve seen so far are not terribly satisfactory.

[dirac]

Here's a good one.

As did Marguerite Duras, he then devoted his time equally to novel writing and film-making. His first solo directorial feature, L'Immortelle, won the Louis Delluc prize, a much-valued critics award. His last film, Un Bruit Qui Rend Fou, shown in 1995, won the first prize at the San Diego film festival. He was elected a member of the Académie Française in 2004.

In the 1950s he began to give talks on music, while his interest in art led him to become a practising artist.

As a novelist and film-maker, he was always controversial and it was not always easy to understand the full implications of his work. He grew up at a time of simultaneous construction and destruction. He writes of bondage and emancipation, he depicts tradition and subversion. He claimed that the novelist had nothing to say. But in his novels and his films, he shows people in the act of creating themselves. And there is always destruction, disappearance and hallucination.

[papeetepatrick]

Thanks, dirac, will take a look tomorrow. I'm pretty familiar with most of his details. None of the other films is on video or DVD, they are nearly impossible to see without going to enormous trouble, and this would not be worth it for me. He wrote 'cine-romans' for all them after making the films, and I've read the one for 'Les Glissements Progressifs au Plaisir'. I prefer the novels that were just novels first, and have a marvelous book, though, called 'the Film Career of Alain Robbe-Grillet, which includes much criticism of each one when it was current. What is striking is the incredible sophistication and intricacy of the French critics of this kind of thing--you can't fake your way past those types, and that was very much a part of high modernist movements in all the arts. Students criticizing Pierre Boulez's 2nd Sonata, a huge feat of complexity for a young man, were perfectly happy to dismiss all this discipline, for example with a mere 'mais oui! tres decoratif...' We don't have precisely that kind of tradition here. You can see some of what I mean in Rohmer films, where the characters are often discussing Kant and Hegel even when that is not their primary field. (there's no relation between Rohmer's and Robbe-Grillet's work, by the way, at least as far as I can see.)