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Film label 'Mondo Macabro set to unleash Robbe Grillet on DVD!
A truly amazing film by French writer and director Alain Robbe-Grillet is set
to be released on DVD in the US. Grillet's last film (he died in February 2008) Gradiva
is set for release in August 2009: Full details here
Over the next couple of months Mondo Macabro will be announcing DVD releases from two masters of EuroCult - that are maybe so far apart that they meet in the middle... First up they are extremely proud to present......
Alain Robbe-Grillet, one of France’s most celebrated cultural figures, died in February, 2008. So what? you might ask. . . Why should I care? Well, one reason is that we are releasing his final film – Gradiva - on DVD in August.
The second reason is that once you break through the barrier of intellectual bullshit that surrounds the man and his work, you’ll find his books and certainly his films have many things in them to enjoy for the adventurous fan of “Eurocult” films or pulp literature and erotica. While I would have been (probably rightly) castigated for saying so at the Academie Francaise, a film like Michel Lemoine’s Seven Women for Satan has more than a few things in common with some of Robbe-Grillet’s 1960’s and 70’s movies. Interestingly, if you examine the credits, you’ll see that both films share the same editor – the maverick Bob Wade. In fact, Wade worked on all of Robbe-Grillet’s films AND all of Lemoine’s… Hmmm. I leave it to braver souls than me to pursue that connection. But let’s not deny that there is one.
As most people know, Robbe-Grillet began his career as a writer. In
fact, he says: " I have had three careers. When I was twenty I was an
agricultural engineer, when I was thirty I was a writer and then at
forty I became a filmmaker." His first contact with the cinema was
through working with Alain Resnais on the film Last Year at Marienbad,
a quintessential European art movie, as watchable and enigmatic now as
when it was first released in 1961. The film's success gave
Robbe-Grillet the green light for his first solo project, 1963's The
Immortal One. Like Marienbad, this is a complex story of shifting
identities, of games with time and narrative. The story, set in
Istanbul, tells of a man's search for an elusive woman he has fallen in
love with who suddenly seems not to have existed. While the plot has a
lot to do with moody film noirs from the 1940s, such as The Phantom
Lady, the tone is resolutely 1960s. The closest influence would
probably be Robbe-Grillet's much admired mentor Antonioni.
Robbe-Grillet
didn't enjoy working on The Immortal One. He tried to plan everything
beforehand and worked from a very detailed script that the director of
photography, Maurice Barry, disparagingly called "hieroglyphics". For
his next film, Robbe-Grillet decided to adopt a much more freewheeling
and flexible approach. The result, Trans-Europ-Express (1967), gave him
his first taste of notoriety. One of the least remarked features of
both Marienbad and The Immortal One was their sexual undercurrents. In
Marienbad this was toned down by Resnais, but with The Immortal One
Robbe-Grillet had more freedom to explore the territory. The film's
star, the gorgeous Francoise Brion, performs a couple of steamy belly
dancing sequences and later there's a suggestion of kinky goings on
involving chains and bondage, even a hint of murder and necrophilia. In
Trans-Europ-Express all of this suggestion is brought centre stage.
Read more Here
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http://www.mondomacabrodvd.com