Alain Robbe-Grillet: “Imagination, if it's vivid enough, is always in the present tense”

Alain Resnais and I have often been asked just how we worked together during the conception, writing and making of Last Year at Marienbad. And if I try to answer this question I may also throw a little light on our attitude to expression in the cinema.

The collaboration between a director and his scriptwriter can take any number of forms – as many different working methods, one might almost say, as there are films. In the traditional commercial cinema, though, the most usual system involves a more or less total separation of scenario and images, story and style, in effect ‘content’ and ‘form’.

For instance: the writer describes a conversation between two people, providing the words that will be spoken and some indications about the setting; he may go into rather more detail and add comments about gestures or facial expression. But it is always the film director who decides at a later stage how the episode should be photographed, whether the characters are to be seen from a distance or in close-up, what movements the camera is going to make, how the scene will be cut, and so on. And of course one knows that the scene, as it appears to the audience, will take on an entirely different feeling according to whether the images show the couple’s faces or their backs, or cut sharply backwards and forwards between the two faces. Or the camera can concentrate on something else while they’re talking – on the walls of a room, the street down which they’re walking, the waves they’re looking at. Take this to its limit, and you can get a sequence in which the words and gestures are so spiritless that they vanish entirely from the spectator’s mind, and what he takes away from the scene will be its shapes and the movement of its images, the only things which seem to give it substance.

This is the thing which makes the cinema an art: it creates a reality through its forms. It is through its form that we must look for its real content. And this holds good of any work of art – of the novel, for instance. The choice of a narrative style, a grammatical tense, a rhythm of phrasing, a vocabulary, carries more weight here than the anecdote itself. One can’t imagine any novelist who would be content to hand over his story to a metteur-en-phrases whose job would be to write out the text for delivery to the reader. The writer’s idea when he begins work on a novel allows both for the story and for the way he’s going to tell it. Often it’s the latter which first takes shape in his mind, in the same way that a painter might think of a canvas composed entirely in vertical lines before deciding that what he’s actually going to paint is a group of skyscrapers.

As far as I’m concerned, at least, it is the same for a film: to think of a screen story, for me, is already to conceive it in images, with all the detail this involves not only of gestures and setting, but of the placing and movement of the camera and the sequence of the shots in editing. Alain Resnais and I were only able to collaborate because, from the outset, we both saw the film in the same way; and not in the same broad outlines, but exactly, in the way it would be built up as well as in the details of its construction. What I wrote might have been something he was already thinking, and what he added during shooting I might have written.

It is necessary to stress this point, since this kind of complete agreement is something rather unusual. But it was just this shared understanding which accounted for our decision to work together; or rather to work on a common project, since, paradoxically, we almost always in practice worked apart from each other.

At the outset, we were brought together as a result of the initiative of the film producers. One day last winter Pierre Courau and Raymond Froment approached me to ask if I would like to meet Resnais, with the eventual idea of writing for him. I already knew his work, admiring in it an extremely firm and studied composition, with something uncompromising about it. I felt that it shared some of my own efforts towards a slightly ritualistic weight, a certain deliberation and a sense of “theatre”, and on occasion those fixed attitudes, that firmness of gesture, word and decor, which make one think at the same time both of a piece of sculpture and of an opera. Finally, I found in it an endeavour to construct space and time in purely mental terms – those of dream, perhaps, or of memory, those of affective life – without over-much concern for the traditional links of cause and effect or for a rigid time-scheme for the narrative.

One knows how the old-fashioned cinema likes to develop its plots along straight lines, never letting us slip a link in an all too predictable chain of events: the telephone rings, the man picks it up, we see the caller at the other end of the wire, the man answers that he’s on his way, he hangs up, opens the door, goes down the stairs, gets into his car, drives along the streets, pulls up in front of a door, climbs the stairs, presses the bell, a maid opens the door… etc., etc. But our temperament in fact moves more quickly – or on occasion more slowly. Its gait is more varied, more rich and less reassuring: it jumps certain passages, it preserves an exact record of trivial details, it repeats and doubles back on itself. And this mental time, with its mysteries, its gaps, its obsessions, its obscure areas, is the one that interests us, since it is the tempo of our emotions, of our life.

These were the things Resnais and I discussed at our first meeting. A week later I put four script projects up to him, and he expressed interest in all four as well as in two of my published novels. After further conversation, we decided to begin with Last Year at Marienbad.

By myself, I then sat down to write not a ‘narrative’ but a direct découpage (shooting script), that is to say a shot by shot description of the film as I saw it in my mind, with dialogue and sound. Resnais came at regular intervals to look at the text and check that everything was going as planned. Once the writing had been finished we had a second series of long discussions, confirming our agreement. Resnais had such a clear idea of what I was after that the few alterations he suggested (at points here and there in the dialogue, for instance) were virtually amplifications of my own meaning and intention.

The actual shooting went in the same way: Resnais, now, worked alone – that is to say, with the actors, with the cameraman, Sacha Vierny, but without me. I never actually set foot on the set, since I was at Brest and later in Turkey while they were shooting in Bavaria and afterwards at the Paris studio. Resnais told me, though, of the strange atmosphere of those weeks, filming in the cold palace of Nymphenburg, in, the park at Schleissheim, and of the way in which Giorgio Albertazzi, Delphine Seyrig and Sacha Pitoëff gradually began to identify with these three characters of ours who had no names, no past, no links between themselves except those created through their own gestures and voices, their presence and their imagination.

When I finally saw the film, after my return to France, it was already at the rough-cut stage, quite close to achieving its final form; and it was very much as I had envisaged it. Resnais had adhered as nearly as possible to the set-ups and camera movements of my shooting script, not as a matter of principle but because we both saw them in the same way; and his necessary modifications were in line with this understanding. Naturally, though, he had done a great deal more than respect my intentions: he had realised them, given the whole thing existence, weight, the power of imposing itself on the imagination of an audience. And I realised then all that he had put in himself (although he repeatedly insisted that he had only “simplified”), everything which had not been mentioned in the script and which he had had to invent, shot by shot, to produce the strongest and most compelling effect.

All that remained was for me to complete some linking passages in the text while Henri Colpi put the finishing touches to the editing. And, now, ought I perhaps to mention one or two moments, out of the whole film, where perhaps… Here a caress which I saw as rather less explicit, there a wild scene which could be a little more spectacular. But these are minute points; and our intention, finally, is to sign the film jointly, without separating scenario and direction in the credits.

But wasn’t the anecdote itself already a sort of mise en scene of the real? Only a brief synopsis is needed to appreciate the impossibility of using this subject as basis for a film in the traditional form, a straightforward story full of developments ‘logically’ linked. The entire film is, in effect, the story of a conviction: it has to do with a reality which its hero creates out of his own words and vision. And if this obstinate, secret conviction finally prevails, it is after a perfect maze of false trails and detours, checks and doubling back.

The setting is a big hotel, a sort of international palace, huge, baroque, opulent but icy in its decor: a world of marble and stucco, columns, mouldings, gilded ceilings, statues; a world of servants frozen stiffly in their places. The guests, anonymous, civilised, unmistakably rich and idle, seriously but dispassionately observe the rules of the games they play (cards, dominoes), of the dances they dance, the chit-chat they engage in, of their pistol-shooting excursions. Within this shuttered and stifling world, men and objects alike seem victims of some kind of spell, as in those dreams which develop such a sense of inevitability that it would be as useless to attempt to change their smallest detail as it would be to try to run away.

A stranger wanders from one room to another – among the formal crowds, across deserted salons – opens doors, bumps up against his reflection in mirrors, traverses interminable corridors. His ear picks up shreds of phrases, chance words from overheard conversations. His eye moves from one anonymous face to another. But it returns continuously to the face of a young woman, a beautiful prisoner who has not yet perhaps been destroyed by this gilded cage. And he offers her the impossible – the thing which seems most impossible in this timeless labyrinth. He offers her a past, a future and freedom. He tells her that they met before, a year ago, that they were in love, that he has now come to a rendezvous arranged by herself, that his purpose is to take her away with him.

Is the stranger a commonplace seducer? Is he a madman? Is he simply confusing the woman’s face with another? The girl, at any event, begins by treating the thing as a game, a game like any other, something intended only to amuse. But the man is not laughing. Stubborn, grave, convinced of this past encounter whose history he gradually develops, he is insistent, he offers proofs. And the girl, gradually, reluctantly, gives ground. Then she becomes frightened; she hardens herself, she does not want to leave this artificial but comforting world of hers, the world she is used to and which is personified for her by another man, tender, distant and disillusioned, who watches over her and who is perhaps her husband. But the story the stranger tells her becomes irresistibly more real, more coherent, more actual, more true. Past and present, besides, have finally become intermingled, whilst the mounting tension between the three protagonists arouses in the mind of the heroine fantasies of tragedy: of rape, murder and suicide.

Then, suddenly, she is ready to yield. She has already, in fact, made her surrender. After a last effort at escape, a final chance offered to her guardian to win her back, she seems to accept the identity the stranger offers her, to agree to go with him towards something – something unnamed, something different. Towards love, poetry, freedom; or maybe towards death.

Each of these characters is nameless and they were identified in the script by single initials, used simply for convenience. The man who may be the husband (Sacha Pitoeff) was designated by an M, the heroine (Delphine Seyrig) by an A, and the unknown, naturally, by an X. We know absolutely nothing about them or about their lives. They are nothing beyond what we see them to be: guests in a big hotel, cut off from the outside world and in its own way a prison. What do they do when they’re somewhere else? One is tempted to answer – nothing. Elsewhere, they have no existence. As for the past which the hero forcibly introduces into this closed vacuum of a world, one has the impression that he is making it up here and now, as he goes along. There was no last year and Marienbad is no longer to be found on any map. This past, too, has no reality outside the moment when it is evoked with sufficient force; and when it finally triumphs it has quite simply become the present, as if it had always been so.

Certainly the cinema is a pre-ordained medium for this kind of narrative. The essential characteristic of the screen image is its actuality. While literature has at its disposal a whole range of tenses, making it possible to situate one event in relation to another, one can say that on the screen the verb is always in the present tense. (This accounts for the weird artificiality of those ‘narrated films’, told for publication, which have been put back into the past tense so dear to the classical novel.) By its very nature, what we see on the screen is in the act of happening: we are given the action itself, not an account of it.

All the same, the most slow-witted among the audience easily makes allowance for the flashback. A few seconds of action a little out of focus are signal enough that the film is moving towards memory: he understands that from now on he’ll be watching some past action, and the clear, sharp focus can then be resumed for the rest of the sequence, without anyone feeling worried by images which are really indistinguishable from the present action, images which are in fact of the present.

Having admitted memory, it’s equally simple to allow in the merely imaginary. No one complains, for instance, when in the courtroom scene in a thriller we see a hypothetical version of the circumstances of the crime (a false hypothesis, too) made mentally or verbally by the magistrate; and then, in exactly the same way, the film shows us the testimony given by the different witnesses, fragments of scenes, all more or less contradictory and more or less true, but all presented on the screen in images of identical clarity, realism, actuality and objectivity…

What do all these images amount to? They are bits of imagination; and imagination, if it’s vivid enough, is always in the present tense. The memories one ‘re-sees’, the distant places, the future meetings, the episodes from the past which everyone carries in his head, re-arranging their development as time passes – these make up a kind of film which keeps running continually in our minds, whenever we stop paying attention to what is actually happening around us. At other times, we’re recording through all our senses an external world by which we’re fairly and squarely surrounded. So the complete film as it runs through our minds allows simultaneously for fragments of actual experience, things seen and heard at the moment, and for fragments belonging to the past, the future, the remote distance, or entirely to fantasy.

What happens when two people meet and exchange ideas? Take this little dialogue…

“What if we both went to the beach? A wide, empty beach where we could be warm in the sun…”

“With the weather the way it is! We’d spend the whole day indoors, waiting for the rain to stop.”

“Then we could make a wood fire in the big fireplace…” etc.

The actual room or street where they ‘re talking will have gone from their minds, replaced by the images they’re suggesting to each other. It really is an exchange of views between them: the long stretch of sand, the rain trickling down the windows, the glancing flames. And the spectator in the cinema would undoubtedly be prepared to see neither street nor room, but in its place, and while listening to the dialogue, to see the couple stretched out in the sun on a beach, then as the rain begins to see them taking shelter in a house, then to see one of them beginning to stack the logs in a big country fireplace…

In this context, one can get an idea of what the images in Last Year at Marienbad might be, since this is essentially the record of a communication between two people, a man and a woman, one of them putting suggestions and the other resisting, until they end in agreement, as if this was how it had always been.

The cinema audience, then, seemed to us largely prepared for this kind of film, through its acceptance of such devices as the flashback. It might be said, though, that the spectator is likely to lose his footing if he isn’t from time to time given ‘explanations’ which will let him place each scene chronologically and according to its degree of objective reality. But we’ve decided to trust the spectator and to leave him from start to finish with subjective images only. Two attitudes then become possible. He can try to reconstruct some ‘Cartesian’ scheme of things, as rational and straightforward as he can make it; and he will undoubtedly find the film difficult, and quite possibly incomprehensible. Or he can let himself be carried along by the remarkable images in front of him, by the actors’ voices, by the sounds, the music, the rhythm of the cutting, by the hero ‘s passion… and if he does this the film will seem as easy as anything he has seen: a film which addresses itself directly to his sensibility, to his faculties of looking, listening, responding and allowing himself to be moved. The story it tells will seem to him more realistic, more true, will correspond more closely to his ordinary life as he feels it, from the moment he agrees to get rid of all those preconceived ideas, psychological analyses, more or less vulgar schemes of interpretation, which bad novels and bad films repeat to him ad nauseam, and which are themselves the worst of abstractions.