Halloween 31 For 31: Eyes Without A Face (1960)

From http://classic-horror.com/files
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Director: Georges Franju

Screenplay: Jean Redon, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, Claude Sautet, Pierre Gascar

Cast: Pierre Brasseur (as Doctor Génessier); Edith Scob (as Christiane Génessier); Alida Valli (as Louise); François Guérin (as Jacques Vernon); Juliette Mayniel (as Edna Grüber)

Synopsis: After a car crash of his own cause that disfigures his daughter Christiane (Scob), Dr. Génessier (Brasseur), under the disguise of a respectable figure at his own clinic, kidnaps young women and intends to surgically remove their faces until one to replace his daughters can be found.

Simplicity is a key trait of Georges Franju. Depicting the fantastique, he nonetheless focuses his attentions on the ordinary and the natural, and turns them into the source of his films' surrealism. His influence from films such as Louis Feuillade's Les Vampires (1915) is clear both in using everyday environments as pockets for the unsuspected and the minimalism of his cinematic style, a camera pan or a close-up only used when entirely necessary, and close-ups only used whenever Edith Scob is on screen. Of course, he would go on with Feuillade's grandson Jacques Champreux to readapt Judex in 1963, but this is important with all the Franju films I've seen because it's the reason for the ethereal air that presides over these simple, easy-to-grasp stories.  This style could take the same plot and narrative structure of any modern day horror film and turn it into a deep work of art because of the careful consideration he as a director placed on the material.

Form http://horrorfilmcentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/eyesfacedogs.jpg

Fifty years on Eyes Without A Face is still unsettling and at points stomach churning in its quietly paced, matter of fact style.  The naturism of Franju's style, like his idol Feuillade, is contradicted by the moments of the unconventional and the fantastical natures of the plots, where Nuits Rouges (1974), his film serial condensed into one feature, can have a narrative about Knights Templar, murder and intrigue but is shot in a grimy, realistic tone on the streets of France, or his drama about a man locked up in a mental institution, Head Against The Wall (1958), still feels dreamlike despite being grounded in reality.

Eyes Without A Face takes a plot that would be found in multiple forms later on in the decades, a plot that may have existed in some form long before it was made, and had at least one direct copy, unintentional or not, in Jess Franco's The Awful Dr. Orlof in 1962. I loved that Franco film regardless of where the plot originally came from, but Eyes Without A Face is nonetheless a special work by itself, treating this material in a sombre, graceful way. Where there is disquieting magic in Christiane, wearing her mask, wandering the rooms in the mansion home she is locked up in, and moments which are still appalling like the one carefully done but nerve shredding scene of facial removal on an operating table.

From http://cinapse.co/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Eyes-Without-A-Face-4.jpg

The contrast between these various sides is continually blurred. The most iconic image is of Christiane's mask, a lifeless skin that blends with Scob's actual face in the beautiful monochrome image, suggesting porcelain but also a death mask, leaving only her eyes to show any emotion. The brief moments of gore and disfigurement still have a power to appal in this decade, despite the gorier films made today, because their briefness matched to the strict use of them adds to their impact. The serene mood of the film makes it more effecting, Franju following a trait of the Surrealists well of melding the beautiful and the horrifying within the same subtle image. That Génessier and Louise are complex human beings, guilt felt by the father for his crimes but willing to sacrifice others for his daughter, encapsulates this further.

From http://d12vb6dvkz909q.cloudfront.net/uploads/galleries/36729/eyes4.jpg

Technical Details:

The cinematography by Eugen Schüfftan is superb. Franju has an obsession with environments that either involve a form of symmetry or a vast depth to them. This particular film has very elaborate settings that give it a different tone to his other work - the prison like mansion with its secret rooms and staircases the one could get lost in, Génessier's clinic, the area where the dogs he uses for his experiments are in cages in a row from one side to another. Even where there is beauty onscreen there is also an ominous nature to the environments, the moments of respite still carrying a wariness for the viewer of what could happen.

Maurice Jarre's music at first feels unbelievable at odds with what is happening in the first scenes, the reputation the film had for me reading of it over countless years never mentioning the sound of a jaunty theme one would be more inclined to find at a carnival. As the film goes along however, it matches the divide between the horrible and the serene perfectly, the apparent joyfulness of it creating a grimness to what takes place.

From http://www.popoptiq.com/wp-content
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Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque/Fantastique

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Medium

Franju can be partially compared to Jean Rollin. Rollin was more openly fantastical and wildly varying in how his film were structured, but they share the same approximation of the fantastical with a grounded reality, their matter-of-factness for events happening as much their style when the unforeseen appears in a normal, ordinary street without need to excuse its appearance. With Franju this means he can find the most surreal things in the more ordinary circumstances. The strangest moment of the film is in fact only a shot of a passenger airliner flying in the sky, above a graveyard Génessier and Louise are hiding evidence of one of their crimes, intruding on them and to be looked up at with fear despite the obvious fact no one high above could see what they are doing, the night-time covering their actions not enough to not feel anyone could stumble on them red-handed. The melding of an ordinary occurrence with the unordinary is a lot harder to achieve in films as you can reduce either or both trying to meld both sides in a film, something Franju succeeds in.

On another day I'd have said Eyes Without A Face would've been a "None" on my chart because it's hooked onto a plot with minimal openly "abstract" content. However one can be deceived by upfront weirdness in other films, expecting the mood to be openly blatant in letting itself be known to a viewer. Franju's work can be argued to be more abstract because of how normalcy is transformed into the imaginary without signposting it, the rating finally chosen reflecting this fact.

Personal Rating:

It took many years to see this film, having heard of its reputation. In that time I fell in love with Judex, for me one of the best films ever made, and have kept an eye out for anything by Franju made available to English speaking viewers like myself. To find Eyes Without A Face was great and left me chilled as it was intended to do to an audience was all I hoped for and that emotion means a lot.

Last Year At Marienbad (1960)

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Director: Alain Resnais

Screenplay: Alain Robbe-Grillet

Actors: Delphine Seyrig; Giorgio Albertazzi; Sacha Pitoëff

94 minutes

Synopsis: In a hotel, a man named X (Giorgio Albertazzi) tells a woman called A (Delphine Seyrig) that they met the year before and have been in an adulterous relationship away from her husband M (Sacha Pitoëff). A denies this as their reality continually distorts and the figures in the hotel's halls occasionally freeze in time.

From https://ktismatics.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/marienbad-pistols.png

Last Year At Marienbad, despite being firmly part of the European art cinema that would be dominant in the sixties, is still very unique besides them. It shows the elliptical nature of many of these films, the experimentation, the existentialism, and for those who despised these films, an absence of surface level "entertainment", but the result is bold in its execution even compared to the more bolder experiments of the era like Jean-Luc Godard's films. Films like ...Marienbad are "entertaining" to me for their experimentation, and melodrama is still there in these films only in bitterer and more post-modern forms. ...Marienbad is one of the few openly puzzle-like entries of the French New Wave, others I've seen even if they were unconventional in structure still retaining a clear narrative guideline or a clear theme. ...Marienbad is inherently disorientation, the meeting of a bold experimental film maker in Resnais meeting a bold author of experimental literature in Robbe-Grillet.

Large portions are a horror film in the robbing of its characters of control. X at times shows the ability to manipulate the film to his desires as the narrator, altering the world in his own image, but when his memory slips or brutality steps in he is powerless. A film of an unbroken, fluctuating dream, it traps its characters in an illusion. The difficulty one can find with such presentation can be lightened when you picture the scenes in the context, to paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, of the characters being unstuck in time. The only clear, tangible thing is the hotel the drama takes place in, set around the 1920s or so, and that there has likely been an act of adultery or unfaithfulness even if nothing has been committed physically or X is merely trying to instigate a fictional one. It's not out-of-place to reference Stanley Kubrick's The Shining (1980) - if Kubrick's story is about a family being haunted by the ghosts in the hotel they are staying in, ...Marienbad be it about ghosts who are already dead or living statues being haunted by their never-ceasing cycles. A stasis is felt with amnesia effecting X eventually as much as for A. A horror film is apt as a description as, while it is depicted in beautiful monochrome by cinematography Sacha Vierny, the bearings of what ever happened if anything, or even if there was a last year, is less and less clear as the film goes along. As the film distorts its timeframe, various events are evoked subtly in the editing and shifts between locations and periods that show the worse scenarios that could happen, including sexual violence, that horrifies X and A equally.

From https://ktismatics.files.wordpress.com/2011/10/marienbad-mirror.png

It's redundant and irritating to merely view ...Marienbad as an "arty film", art for art's sake without emotional connection. The drama is varying depending on the viewer but there. Clues of the situation are there. The game played continually that X keeps losing to M suggests an inevitability of fate that will undermine X the same way as will happen to Max Von Sydow playing chess with the Grim Reaper. The duplication of a specific object pulls the film into science fiction and also shows the endlessness of this reality onscreen that X tries to break, though he is as much into question as scenes show him as being as monstrous to his own horror as he is in love with A sincerely. ...Marienbad is different to other films that share these themes and concepts because it doesn't placate to simple little treats for the viewer to indulge in which even terrible movies can replicate, entertaining or not. There is no cheap sentiment, no dumb laughs or anything easy for even a dreadful film to be able to achieve well. With ...Marienbad one has to work, but most of the work is accepting that it has no clear narrative end, left a mystery, and that its use of editing and tone will have to settled with at first.

From https://ishootthepictures.files.wordpress.com/2010/07/
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Technical Detail:

Vital to the success of ...Marienbad is the location, shot with two German castles and French studio sets to make up the one looming environment, with its perfect symmetrical garden and elaborate decor, that becomes as much part of the puzzle of the narrative chunks. It is a literal labyrinth with no sense of true geography, a flux of rooms and corridors that could easily switch places. Corridors blur with other corridors and the scale overwhelms the individuals perpetually in evening suits and gowns. The cinematography by Vierny ground these despondent locations into one single, workable whole. It is exceptional, both in the visuals and the use of long camera pans, the camera as much a visitor inside the hotel lost between the characters. The locations themselves in their decoration, from the statues to floral carvings, bring a viewer to a level of aesthetic joy but there is a stilted decay, obsoleteness, to it all in the extravagance that is choking. As with the figures within these sets, awkward and straight-jacketed in their arch mannerisms and performances, this decor becomes a suffocating environment felt by the viewer too as it follows the camera.

The editing is also absolutely vital for the film's puzzle structure to allow ...Marienbad to work as the elusive film it is. Flashbacks intermingle with flash forwards, and time takes place in various forms at the same time as the character suddenly appear in one place to another in the same spots. Editing alongside the camera is one of the most important tools of cinema, its use and absence, if my amateur education in cinema has taught me anything. Films like this show why, with editors Jasmine Chasney and Henri Colpi perfect in constructive what was needed for Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's cinematic game. Interestingly Robbe-Grillet put many directorial and camera instructions in the script, which would be seen as taboo in any other circumstance like in modern mainstream cinema, but Resnais followed the instructions faithfully only adding his own touches including in areas not considered in the screenplay. The result is the marriage of two strong auteurist voices supported by talented individuals working on their puzzle. Out of both figures, Robbe-Grillet's films when he decided to become a director soon after would run with the same manipulations of time and identity biting at the extremes of this one.

The music, which intermingles classical and modernist compositions, stimulates further intensity to the material. Especially with the organ heard numerous times throughout this is the score of a horror film, its jarring nature against the compositions implicating audibly the trap the participants are in.

From http://images1.laweekly.com/imager/last-year-at-marienbad
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Abstract Spectrum: Abstract / Expressionist

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): High

The ending resounds with an attempt to escape the hotel and the film's structure itself. The issue is, however, whether this escape is at all possible or if the overlaying repetition will start from the beginning again with X and A in their original places, like pieces in an elaborate board game or a toy construction. The results of each previous event has led to tragedy only to start again. It is only because the film itself ends that we don't see if anyone has escaped permanently.

But the film can be interpreted another way, and far from a cop-out, this deliberate lack of a clear meaning is powerful, because the idea is the hotel itself stuck in a time bubble, the outcome depending on the viewer as if they were in it as participants themselves. The conflict in the film is shown poignantly when X and A discuss, as X narrates, a pair of statues in the garden, the male protecting the woman or the woman pointing out a distant object or both. Like these statues its actively encouraged by the editing and chronological distortions to see scenes in multiple ways. My opinion of what ends the plot could be different from yours, and that is not problematic because the film is designed, like for the characters, for all viewers engaged with the film to appear back out of it through different "corridors" and exits. The result has never been replicated from any film I've seen yet and it'd take a one-off like ...Marienbad to be its mirror. The Shining comes off as its more genre based blood sibling with different intentions. Robbe-Grillet's own films from the few I've seen don't reach this level of abstraction but work their own grooves. David Lynch's INLAND EMPIRE (2006) is the closest thing and is a film few will be patient with as with ...Marienbad.

From http://screencrave.com/wp-content/uploads/2013
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Personal Opinion:

Is there entertainment is the film considering how its described? Yes, as a depiction of an endless fluctuating maze. Horror films dabble with mazes and endless cycles, but ...Marienbad has the most dreamlike and effecting. So do fantasy and science fiction movies connect to the film. If a genre is to be attempted haphazardly to be placed on the film, it's at least existential and opulent. A story of beings trapped in a labyrinth of time, a film of a film itself in conflict with itself. Far from navel gazing this is willing to have the film pull itself to pieces and while there is a way to interpret the theme as about cinema, it also works in the context of a person existing in deathless ennui, drifting through corridors not sure where they were the year before. Its only not entertainment if one comes into Last Year At Marienbad expecting a romantic comedy or Steven Seagal to appear amongst the living statues, but the DVD cover at least on my copy should warn you neither of the following appear anyway.

Befittingly, this puzzle has a cameo from the Master on the right.
(From http://scrapheap.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Marienbad-1.jpeg)

Celine And Julie Go Boating (1974)

From https://webtoolfeed.files.wordpress.com/2011
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Dir. Jacques Rivette

It shows how complex one's tastes can be when a lot of my film viewing involves trangressive films, very violent and confrontational films, films likely to shock or cause strong divisive reactions, that one of the few films I've seen multiple times is Celine and Julie Go Boating. This is as far as you can get from those films. It's still a film that challenges, but not in brutality, instead through stretching the medium itself into new directions in the form of an amusing frolic. The fact it's a frolic furthers its goal of going into new directions.  In three and a touch hours of concentrated whimsical magic realism, red haired librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier) meets performing magician Celine (Juliet Berto) by accident, bond and bond further over a mysterious house where a self-perpetuating story takes place involving two women (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier) vying for a widow (film director Barbet Schroeder) while his ill daughter (Nathalie Asnar) is caught in-between, one which continues to repeat on and on the more times Celine and Julie witness it or enter the house. Its evokes Věra Chytilová's Daisies (1966) instantaneously only not as a psychedelic and pyrotechnic rush of visuals, but an elaborate film which mixes cinema vérité with fantasy in a quieter tone, which has an innocence on one hand but on the other reflects that the protagonists are adult women. These women are charming and absurd, but they will gladly castrate any male mentally that tries to antagonise them. The film is as diverse; blood is split in the melodrama and a serious plot takes place even if Celine and Julie mock the theatrics occasionally.

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What the film does differently is emphasise itself as a comedic and light hearted work, which plays everything that takes place as an adventure or of intrigue. Where suddenly a Les vampires (1915) tribute raids a library and involves roller skates. It's a film that involves two exceptionally strong female protagonists when I'm usually watching very male centric films, which is worth reminding myself of in how potentially patronising my thoughts can be, in an accidental retroactive way, when I worry about not viewing enough films that show strong female influences but neglect films I love like this one or Daisies. Women like those in Daisies are in the centre of this film, who can be eccentric, very childish but always in control, possessing a manic energy through Labourier and Berto's performances that is emphasised by the fact that with director Jacques Rivette they had direct involvement in creating the film's story as they did the characters, the result promoting two protagonists who don't shrivel up in any encounter with any patriarchal interaction and trundle through their adventure with abandon and the grace of two mischief makers. As a fully collaborated project between the main actresses and the director/co-writer, the result is both freewheeling and improvised, as if the narrative is still being built before it gets to the next scene, but carefully put together in production to not because pointlessly random. The film's imposing three hour length actually tricks your senses upon actually watching it. Three hours is a lengthy viewing experience even for ravenous cinephiles. Three hours, unless you go into the territory of super long films including a few Rivette works, still have the magnetism to them of being immense viewing experiences; barring Michael Bay films and attempts by blockbusters to undermine their status, they usually evoke historical epics, and mean encompassing and elaborate narratives.

From https://magnoliaforever.files.wordpress.com/
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An hour suddenly passes by in Celina and Julie Go Boating without me realising it because I was distracted by the impish charm of the leads pratting about. Barring some tangents to do with the titular duo's lives - Julie's cousin from her childhood reappearing and Celine potentially becoming a celebrity magician - the narrative is entirely about the mysterious house, filled in with a great depth for the characters and the general charm of the film because of its length. Neither is this a "difficult" film which requires some mental dissection of the content. Jacques Rivette could be seen as a poster boy for very dense art films because a) his films can be exceptionally long, including thirteen hours for his mythical white whale Out 1 (1971); 2) he usually tackles serious subjects, serious drama and/or plays with the form of his work by way of theatre and pulp genres that do need mental dissection to them; and 3) as someone who has been lucky to see films of his many can't, most of his filmography is impossible to find, which adds a status of an "Art" filmmaker even if the third point is not connected to what is in the films. Celine and Julie Go Boating is a lovable marriage when an art film, comparable to similar films like Le Pont du Nord (1981) and Paris nous appartient (1961) in Rivette's filmography, also happens to be the comedic romp in the director's CV. For one of the more under seen members of the French New Wave compared to a Jean-Luc Godard or a François Truffaut, this is one of his most commercially successful movies, thankfully not having had to sacrifice the director's distinct trademarks in the process but meaning the stars were aligned for once for its success.

From http://www.internationalreview.co.uk/wp-content/
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Obvious film viewing metaphors abound, as every time one of the protagonists leaves from a trip to the mysterious house they have a sweet in their mouth that lets them "watch" the events within when the sweet is sucked, but it's not interesting to view the film just in this light. The film is about the concept of storytelling in general - its title "Go Boating", though it doesn't translate fully from French to English, means to be engrossed in a story being told and the phrase in English immediately brings about going for a lark. Celine tells Julie, from the bathroom to another taking a shower, of a journey through Africa. She tells friends of an American female friend. The protagonists tell each other how the melodrama in the mysterious house will play out. A character in the melodrama tells a macabre fairytale that reveals the divide and conflict between the two women of the house. The stories intertwined with it are those within theatre, within children's fairytales, and much more, willing to make jokes at the expense of them, even have Celine damage a children's book in a library by tracing her hand within it with a felt tip pen, but also celebrate it as the protagonists are in awe of what could happen in the tales told. Magic is interconnected to it, magic in fairytales always allowing for more of the tale to be told by taking it into a new direction. A magic circle drawn in the soil kicks off the film and it is intertwined with the storytelling from there on.

From http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lzaxtexVaA1qegbs4o1_500.jpg

It's far too fun to watch Celine and Julie go between being rapt and mocking of the film-within-a-film that takes place in the mysterious house and in their general adventures, men mostly assigned to a few minor character or an extra with lines of dialogue. It makes no sense to view the film as a ode to "smartness" as Armond White calls it when the tone of the movie makes the entire notion of even bringing that concept up in any context laughably pretentious, pretence the only thing that the protagonists mock with any cruelty in the melodrama when they are mostly rivet(t)ed by it sincerely. The notion, whilst there is an immense intelligence with a meta-commentary within this, that you'd only read the film as an intellectual piece would've be mocked by the characters themselves and rightly so. The only thing that one has to contend with, when its completely breezy for the most part, is that it's not "funny ha-ha", a comedy that doesn't have punch lines. The pleasure is as much found in how it aesthetically weaves together its content, shot in a real urban city where bystanders aren't extras but watch on with curious fascination as the viewer does at what the actors are doing in front of the camera, but in a tale where the ordinary environments of libraries to dressing rooms develop magical properties.

From http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.net/wp-content/
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Lengthy dialogue scenes that are Rivette's trademarks populate the length of the film, with Rivette always feeling like drama which has been allowed to breath, are matched by its irrelevant tone. Its apt that the dialogue heavy melodrama in the mysterious house that engages us and the characters with its more arch yet fascinating tone, visually compelling through the ornate beauty of Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier as well as the frayed emotions seen on their faces, is matched by a more anarchic and spasmodic energy of Labourier and Berto. You can be assured that the more difficult aspects of Rivette the director which you will have to work with is the structures, while the drama in his films is almost always rich and emotionally driven, as much in this irrelevant romp too or you would've wanted to strangle the protagonists for their excitable energy instead of loving them. The dialogue sequences give way to a fantasy tale where the solution to the narrative is through a homemade potion, dinosaur eye rings, and a farcical undermining of a theatrical melodrama. It is an arty film but games are being played by the film itself as well as the characters. Everything I adore about the film is in its complete lack of pretension but without becoming conventional and stolid, having what I would find to be Rivette's trademarks seeing more of his films. I think this was the first films of Jacques Rivette I saw, seeing it at university in the library DVD shelves and renting it out no less, amongst the art books and literature on the above floors, so it does mean a lot as the first impression was as good as on the multiple viewings.

From https://lisathatcher.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/cj-7.png

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

Celine and Julie Go Boating is a very low key in terms of its fantastic nature, the lightness of tone and presentation meaning that it never becomes a completely unconventional film in terms of a dream logic and similar areas. A more likely candidate for a higher rating would be Rivette's Duelle (une quarantaine) (1976), a tale of warring witches in mortal reality which takes the unconventional presentation of scenes to each other and the dynamic of realism with fantasy further than with this film. That's not to say aspects of Celine and Julie Go Boating don't stand out though in this area. The film-within-the-film is set up as fragments, eventually interconnecting and becoming one cohesive narrative, watching it alongside the protagonists as if it is being recollected from memory, including sudden cuts to black for a few seconds comparable to recollecting said memories. One sequence, which I didn't pick up until this viewing, has the protagonists, when they both go into the mysterious house for the first time, interchanging in the role of the daughter's nurse, which both play at various times beforehand. Repetition abounds in the film, from the moment the intertitle "Usually it begins like this" starts the film to how scenes between the protagonist repeat but with them switching places. The film itself, after seemingly breaking the pattern, repeats itself in the final scenes; if the movie had been six hours long, it would've imagined how things might've played out differently or the same if the ending gives any inclination. The result means that, while not the most abstract film I've seen of Rivette's, it still stands out for how its tone matches the fun content.

From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_v27hJrrgr_A/STW9I9UCyaI/
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Personal Opinion:

It's amongst my favourite films and one of the few I've watch a few times. Because its playful. Because its charming. Because it's still an unconventional art film, but never becomes pretentious. Because like Daisies it's proudly feminist but not through a forced artifice which sacrifices being a good movie to promote a good message, but as a good movie which also happens to have a good message inherently within it without having to make a song-and-dance about it, the inherently nature meaning its allowed to be absorbed without distraction. Because it blows raspberries at dour dramas. An Alice In Wonderland vibe is understandably felt, though it feels more inclined to the trait from the story of games and the energy rather than the content, anarchism in the form of coarse language and sexual frankness that occasionally breaks through felt, not to mention frank pride in women. It's a film where the title is a metaphor but the characters do eventually go boating which is a perfect way to encapsulate its qualities.

From https://magnoliaforever.files.wordpress.com/2012/03
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Everything is quaint right down to the real locations themselves, becoming a labyrinth of places where new discoveries can be found, able to suddenly bump into a long missed person or get into brief hijinks, possibilities all over the locations to be tripped over alongside all the cats that seem to populate every frame and even have the final shot of the film in tribute to them. Apparently they were just there in the scenes when Rivette filmed in the locations they are found in. Film critic Jonathan Romney once pondered, in an extra for the film's British DVD release, that the aforementioned cat you see in the final image may have dreamt the entire film that takes place. It doesn't feel that absurd an idea. Cats are interconnected to the history of magic and they are actually good luck charms when kept as pets in theatres, the mysterious house when the finale starts becoming an elaborate theatre production, right down to what is called the "three knocks" found in French theatre to tell the audience when the curtains were about to be raised, a cat standing guard outside its front door almost all the time. It also feels appropriate because the film is so carefree, so drastically contrasting, even against, the stereotypical notion of an art film, usually seen as dour and glum, that the idea a cat has been asleep imagining this scenario is as appropriately silly as the content. 

The Immortal One (1963)

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Dir. Alain Robbe-Grillet

It's always an exciting movement, intentional choice of words, when a film director is resurrected or given their first introduction in this age of DVD and Blu-ray. The potential of a new landscape connected to cinema's vast Chinese puzzle box form. Even if the director has had DVD releases before, a grand scale celebration and restoration could have volcanic impact on film viewers - we await Walerian Borowczyk's day in the sun, not that far from when I'm writing this, in Britain. You come to a film like The Immortal One, the debut cinematic work of an acclaimed author and writer of Last Year In Marienbad (1961), and the already rich symbolism, such as our lost protagonist N (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) finding discarded calendar pages in the woods, no transition between picking them up, just cut to different dates in his hands, and an entirely new room in what cinema means is kicked open for me.

From http://filmint.nu/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Two.jpg

N, a foreigner to Istanbul, encountering the beautiful woman L (Françoise Brion), sparking an intimate relationship. When she seemingly vanishes however, everything is up to question, he knowing little about her. Her name she gives him may be fake, she may be married, may be part of a white slavery practice, a total mystery woman elusive to him. The recent release of six of Robbe-Grillet's films for the first time in Britain, including The Immortal One, allows not only for the films to be viewable, but also as a box set for the UK releases, for the themes and ideas to intertwine, an introduction to the director. A person who the greater concern is for the enigmatic nature of his films, the truths held by his characters vaguer and questionable as they go further along. His characters travel in worlds that multiply and distort themselves as they go. When it doesn't, as in the case of Successive Slidings of Pleasure (1974), the last film in the set, it's because the protagonist is the one undermining the truth to every other character with their words. N in Robbe-Grillet's first film is left wandering the city of Istanbul, viewed by the mystery woman as a fake city of his dreams, eventually the fabric of reality against dreams being pierced. To those who have never seen one of Robbe-Grillet's films, this one is comparable to David Lynch. In a paradox worthy of his ideals, the director's work can be compared to various other films - Jean-Luc Godard with Trans-Europ-Express (1966), Czeck cinema (shot in Czechoslovakia) with The Man Who Lies (1968), pop art and the French New Wave with Eden and After (1970), and Jess Franco and softcore with Successive Slidings of Pleasure. Yet he is uniquely his own voice in that what undercuts the realities - lies, conspiracies, himself and a producer and a continuity girl scrapping plot points in favour of others film-within-a-film for Trans-Europ-Express - between intellectual deconstruction and a obsession with the fetishishtic that connects to his well know proclivities for bondage and S&M.

From http://i59.fastpic.ru/big/2014/0330/06/f132002ac8b2954cc8ee477944ef0b06.png

In his debut its clearly established where he would go and that, having gone backwards in viewing the released box set chronologically, this film and Successive Slidings Of Pleasure inherit the same mind behind them even if their tones are different. Bold use of cinematography from a man known for his letters and words in novels, rich black-and-white cinematography depicting the Turkish environments. Time is disrupted continually, scenes in the past, future or never having happened spliced between a moment taking place. The disorientating ability of dreams to be able to look at all these sides, inwards and outwards, of a reality, interlocking scenes taking place. A funeral procession is on a white stone courtyard, at the bottom of the screen going upwards, and not an edit later, creating an almost empty space baring one vague figure at the top. Human statues, like Last Year of  Marienbad, of people, stuck in time, strangely reminiscent of the graveyard, frequented onscreen, of the pillar shaped gravestones, a place long gone from practical use, as the supernatural nature of the film's title is emphasised from a car accident that takes place onward.

From http://theleastpictureshow.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/alain-robbe-grillet-16.jpg

A conspiracy is seemingly taking place around N as he becomes more and more at a loss as he moves along. A fisherman outside his hotel is continually nearby, maybe the mystery woman's husband. Maybe it's the blind man with two Doberman pinchers who develop into nocturnal creatures of fate. Are they involved in a conspiracy in another way or is it mere illusion? More so as the film keeps cutting back to a woman lying on a beach, waking up and saying to someone stood over her she has been dreaming. Like Last Year At Marienbad, the sense of reality is suspect, the chique aesthetics of exotic Turkey, of glamorous women in states of undress and suave men in suits, is undercut as more people look at N suspiciously and the facts are for question. The desire for the mystery woman leads to him even having a scene of self reflection as time seemingly stands still, as he can reflect on his own reflection in front of an antique store window in that moment. By the end, the film repeats itself, sending him into a fate beyond him.

From http://i59.fastpic.ru/big/2014/0330/43/9b9e3ff23227765122b9bbdc40840143.png

Aesthetically bold - ancient Byzantium ruins against modern ruins of a ship in the harbour, carpets hanging everywhere and bustle of city streets rife - it doesn't feel like Robbe-Grillet made any amateur mistakes here with his debut, but already knew where to go. The use of environments, as Robbe-Grillet would continue five movies on, adds to the layers that multiply as you watch along. Underground tunnels, mosques but also ordinary places fleshed out into new dimensions, such as the metaphor for the isolation of a hotel room being ran with as N is complete alien within it to the rest of the world, something returned to for The Man Who Lies. It would continue further from this with the other films - Trans-Europ-Express with the titular train and cityscapes, The Man Who Lies with its rooms and woodland, Eden And After with its mazes of industrial land, Tunisian village squares and a cafe crossed with a pop art installation, and Successive Slidings of Pleasure with its extremely restriction aesthetic and its fetishisation of bare walls and cramped underpass stairs, literal with the former with body paint printed onto it. Again this can be compared to other directors, but this is from the perspective of a cerebral writer who likes mysteries, and realises the power of  using the environments for this with the assistances of the cinematographers, camera operators and set designers who worked with him.

From http://i2.imageban.ru/out/2014/03/27/c3de446df0d9660b9427c7a8711fe791.png

And it's a mystery that entices. His more abstract work onwards from this has a playful, even lurid, quality to them that can help a viewer not used to going through meta and self commentating deconstructions. This is why, interestingly, Robbe-Grillet can be placed with the aforementioned Jess Franco, and got y DVD/Blu-Ray combo releases in the United States from the same company that did the same for Franco's work. Robbe-Grillet, the man of letters who is clearly obsessed with pulp as you get to films like Trans-Europ-Express, would've been pleased to  be housed with both such a genre luminary unfairly dismissed and also be released by the British Film Institute alongside Akira Kurosawa and Carl Theodor Dreyer in a different country. The protagonist is sent through a mystery as seen in many films, the same question asked - who is this woman? - but Robbe-Grillet is much more precise in the telling of the question than others. The film, no matter how further it reaches the abstract, is always going to an event or moment that has a reason to be included, just to displace the viewer to a momentous shift in tone. Utterances about people, individuals going silent and cautious, brief glimpses if someone out in the corner of the eye, all is precise even if the first viewing for me is a dream that baffled trying to absorb it all in. And it turns into a displacement of the scenario as it wraps up. The protagonist N who, bearing in mind Robbe-Grillet's continual obsession with archetypes, is vague himself, a little weak and displaced as a figure. His mystery woman, made of smoke, a belly dancer to only his (and our gaze) at one point, first scene in snap shots divided by blinds of his hotel window, as  if he's made her up, has more complexity than him. The scenario that Istanbul is a place of seedy conspiracy, common in pulp about foreign countries, the exotic as the other, is also undercut by how much it's mentioned N's view of the city is a mere illusion. The locals could be staring at him because he's weird to them, continually asking odd questions about a woman to the shopkeepers and maids he had never even learnt to name of. From there - his own delusions, real conspiracy, or a siren beckoning him to doom - a tiny Möbius strip takes places in the film, time repeating but with significant changes. A Doberman, black fur, peering out in the illuminated darkness of a car lights on a road. It's what one would wish debut to be, more so when learning how difficult it was to get this film made, Robbe-Grillet able to work much, much (for emphasis) quicker as he went on. The obvious questions to ask now is how his novels as an acclaimed writer in French literature, out there for me to find and read, set this film up and was a continuation of it, and how he went on after the last disc of my acquired box set as the filmmaker, almost all of which needing its own box set some day. It is a cinema that can link to others I can recognise already, but is clearly its own, unique one. Vibrant while being very intellectual, possibly in dangers of pretensions in the later works, which become more sexually explicit and divisive in their deconstructive games, but with so much to provide still. Apparently The Immortal One is a weak Robbe-Grillet film, at least according to the booklet in the DVD set; directors would kill for this as a debut considering how colourless, forgive the pun on the film's monochrome look, or compromised some can be.

From https://celluloidwickerman.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/imm_banner02.jpg

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None) - Medium

It would be Low if Robbe-Grillet never made another film or went on to be more conventional. It's a mystery with leanings towards rearranging your protagonist's perceptions encountered in many films of the sixties. It's a Medium having fed myself on five other films by him, and how noticeably more unconventional it is having seen what came after. He was one step away from Jorge Luis Borges' The Garden of Forking Paths, a character dying in one chapter, alive in the next, as what happens in The Man Who Lies. For all I know, that does happen in The Immortal One too.

Personal Opinion

It's a great moment when films, or any work, are finally allowed to be seen by the general public, not as a retrospective, but on a purchasable material, even data file. True, this is likely a niche only people like me knew of being made available, but it's now possible to have six films, one a reinterpretation of Eden and After called N. Took The Dice (1971), a fitting connection, in circulation. It's adding a new colour to the spectrum when it's films by an idiosyncratic voice, no matter how divisive they are. New games to use what Robbe-Grillet was playing watching these films. An entire new wing of my cinema, with five films that can be added to the blog later down the line, and others just out of reach.