Director: Alain Resnais
Writer: Alain Robbe-Grillet (scenario and dialogue)
Stars: Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff
A LONG DRESS.
What is the current that makes machinery, that makes it crackle, what is the current that presents a long line and a necessary waist. What is this current.
What is the wind, what is it.
Where is the serene length, it is there and a dark place is not a dark place, only a white and red are black, only a yellow and green are blue, a pink is scarlet, a bow is every color. A line distinguishes it. A line just distinguishes it.
A RED HAT.
A dark grey, a very dark grey, a quite dark grey is monstrous ordinarily, it is so monstrous because there is no red in it. If red is in everything it is not necessary. Is that not an argument for any use of it and even so is there any place that is better, is there any place that has so much stretched out.
A BLUE COAT.
A blue coat is guided guided away, guided and guided away, that is the particular color that is used for that length and not any width not even more than a shadow.
A PIANO.
If the speed is open, if the color is careless, if the selection of a strong scent is not awkward, if the button holder is held by all the waving color and there is no color, not any color. If there is no dirt in a pin and there can be none scarcely, if there is not then the place is the same as up standing.
This is no dark custom and it even is not acted in any such a way that a restraint is not spread. That is spread, it shuts and it lifts and awkwardly not awkwardly the centre is in standing.
from Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein.
A trained statistician and agronomist, Robbe-Grillet claimed to write novels for his time. New novels are attuned “to the ties that exist between objects, gestures, and situations, avoiding all psychological and ideological ‘commentary’ on the actions of the characters” (Pour un nouveau roman, 1963; Toward a New Novel; Essays on Fiction). Robbe-Grillet’s world isn’t merely that of the empirical. It is neither meaningful nor absurd; it merely exists, beyond our capacity to master it as either significant or measurable. “Toward a New Novel” makes the point:
Around us, defying the noisy pack of our animistic or protective adjectives, things are there. Their surfaces are distinct and smooth, intact, neither suspiciously brilliant nor transparent. All our literature has not yet succeeded in eroding their smallest corner, in flattening their slightest curve. (19)
Objects overshadow and eliminate plot and character. A story is composed of recurring images, either actually recorded by an objective eye or drawn from reminiscences and dreams. Words, too, for Robbe-Grillet lose their referentiality, existing only as “visual or descriptive adjectives” measuring, locating, limiting, and defining an object through their deployment in a series. That Robbe-Grillet does not distinguish between adjectives as units of symbolic or visual language is telling. His theory of the novel is predicated on the difference between past literature and film. The new novel must be like a film, where exegesis is diegesis, the natural object is the best “symbol”:
Anyone can perceive the nature of the change that has occurred. In the initial novel, the objects and gestures forming the very fabric of the plot disappeared completely, leaving behind only their significations: the empty chair became only absence or expectation, the hand placed on a shoulder became a sign of friendliness, the bars on the window became only the impossibility of leaving…But in the cinema, one sees the chair, the movement of the hand, the shape of the bars. What they signify remains obvious but instead of monoploizing our attention, it becomes something added, even something in excess, because what affects us, what persists in our memory, what appears as essential and irreducible to vague intellectual concepts are the gestures themselves, the objects, the movements, and the outlines, to which the image has suddenly (and unintentionally) restored their reality. (20)
I will show another clip, identifying the “visual adjectives” of film analysis. The trick with this film is to build a kind of dream-memory of recursiveness. There isn’t so much a plot as there are flows of feeling and momentum. The man claims that he had met the woman the prior year at Marienbad. They had had an affair. They were to meet this year. She insists they’ve never met. Truly, though, the plot is a distraction. We want to lose ourselves in the sumptuary, to partake, to become, even, the very objects upon which our eye’s delight fastens.
